Very charming and appealing adventure with some of the best sprite art of the 16 bit era but it suffers from having generally average gameplay and every dungeon past the first one has pretty significant problems. The fire dungeon's really slow, the water dungeon has too much backtracking, the ice dungeon is torture without a guide, and the sky dungeon is an insane difficulty spike that demands a lot of trial and error. It can still be a great time though, thanks to pepelegoo and the ways he fits into the game's sequential narrative, as well as probably the best boss fights of the monster world games. But it's frustrating how so many journalists neglect to acknowledge its low points to preserve its status as a 'retro hidden gem'

As time's gone on I've gotten more pessimistic about this one. Ever after patches it doesn't control that great. And overall while I do think it's a fairly well-detailed game for the Switch and doesn't really look 'bad', it butchers the source material pretty badly. It's too detailed to capture the minimalist vastness of the saturn version, and not detailed enough to have the life-like spectacle of AAA modern games.

Not terrible overall but I have no desire to go back to this one. Here's hoping the Zwei remake (if it happens) addresses those criticisms.

I'll be the first to admit this game's for masochists with its extremely difficult platforming and confusing dungeon design, but man it has such a lovable spirit. It captures this adventurous vibe that puts me in the best mood, in part from its creative mix of vertically-focused dungeon exploration, playful writing and the stellar Takenouchi OST. It's a shame that its spiritual successors didn't carry the same atmosphere, and that the 3D remake on PSP never made it past testing - being able to rotate your view would automatically bump this up a half-star.