Generally a fun game. I played this in 2023, and I have no nostalgia for it or the PS1.

Exploring the castle is fun when you have some idea of where you haven't explored yet. The map is very basic, showing you rooms you've explored, non-secret doors in those rooms, and save rooms. Once I uncovered a lot of it, I kept getting stuck not knowing where to go next. Some sort of map marker system like in Hollow Knight would have been welcome here. It doesn't need to hold your hand, but could give a bit of direction.

Only being able to save at save rooms worked to prevent the player from brute forcing victory. It was at times frustrating, but generally ok. What wasn't ok was having to watch a (relatively) long game over screen, then go back to the menu, then load your save, just to get back to playing after each death.

The game is cryptic and obtuse at times, and I needed to look up hints on a few occasions.

The difficulty was pretty good in the first quarter of the game, but it got too easy in the second quarter once you leveled.

There is a point in the game where you have to play the game again, with some changes, to proceed. This is where I dropped it. I know there are differences to the first half of the game, but this really killed my motivation. If it were just the first half, I'd give it 3.5/5.

Excellent game. Some mostly unsorted thoughts:

- You move so fast and perform actions so quickly, but it feels intuitive to do so.
- Switching back and forth between cards and using different abilities feels great.
- Getting the top rank in levels is challenging, but achievable with practice. I got the top rank in every level, which I don't typically feel motivated to do. It's easy to restart a run, the levels are short, and the level design is intuitive. It's rarely frustrating to keep attempting a level to complete it perfectly.
- The levels are very well designed and surprisingly easy to read for how much is going on
- The soundtrack is great and unique
- The environmental art is great and does a good job at not distracting from important routes/enemies/cards/etc.
- The character art, dialog background art, etc is all very good.
- I expected the story and characters to be awful based on a comment I heard about the game, but they were both very enjoyable. There was a good amount of humor
- Switching between fast paced gameplay and visual novel dialog works well to prevent burn out. You can collect gifts which are hidden in most levels after completing it once, then you can give those gifts to specific characters to unlock more story. I was motivated to collect every gift even though they were technically optional because they unlocked something that felt meaningful.

My only minor complaint is related to the gifts.
- All of the gifts require interesting movement and level traversal to get to, which is great. Most gifts are easy to locate, but challenging to collect. Some gifts are difficult to locate and challenging to collect. I didn't enjoy locating some particularly hidden gifts, and had to look up hints for probably 3 of them.