aw hell nah tahlemmeme really turned dat pig into a cake

But seriously though, I unironically like this a lot more than OG Bubble Bobble (which people unfortunately usually draw unfavorable comparisons to, even though this came out a year before that), so much so I'd say it's one of my favorite video games, and is one of the games that made me look into Taito so much deeper beyond their surface level classics such as Space Invaders and Bubble Bobble. It's the bloody source of my profile picture and username for crying out loud. Extremely underrated.

It's a very nearly perfect blend of puzzles, platforming, enemy-killing, and risk-taking all wrapped up in a very cute package. Also surprisingly has a lot of attention to detail for an 1985 arcade game, particularly in the graphics and sound design. While there are some weird blips in difficulty here and there, and feels almost unapproachable at first for a game like this, I still love it for what it sets out to do, especially for the time, and succeeding in most of it. Also, you can't go wrong with a funny witch, and Ptolemy is very much one of those.

I'd also advise at least playing the Arcade Archives version, or even better, the Sharp X68000 port since those allow you to save your progress when playing it through like a normal game, without as much of the weirdness of early arcade game design the arcade version has. It feels a lot better that way.