This little gem has a delightful atmosphere with a perfect NES-era world design of Samurai castles. There are so many cool details to the enemies (like the ninjas who have a little bamboo snorkel when they go underwater). And the music is absolutely incredible, one of the best soundtracks on the NES.

The combat is hard-as-nails, with some great challenging enemy encounters and a lot more bullshit ambushes with so many projectiles and sprites on the screen that it lags. Although it resembles the first Zelda game, this is more of a bullet hell. I don't think I could ever have gotten through this without the Switch's rewind feature.