i adore absolutely EVERYTHING about this game's aesthetics and surreal world with weird fishes that'd be fucking terrifying without the jolly music AND the whole fishing rod mechanic is sick as hell and an incredibly interesting way to move and platform. this could have very well been my favorite snes game ever but dear scott is it demanding. the further you go, the things the game expects you to manouver through get more and more absurd and the fact all this is under a time and lives limit makes it so much crazier. give me the will to train speedrunning this daily and it'd be an easy 9/10.

the whole randomly appearing enemies thing is not as big of a deal to me as it is to others. it's pretty easy to tell where they'll show up and the game prevents them from spawning right where you are, so i've had few moments of running into them right as they spawn. the one big issue i have with it is that the game will spawn like 3 or 4 enemies at the same spot while you're trying to get past them and they're spitting stun-fish at you and it is Not Very Fun. the bosses are kinda lame too. really cool and/or funny looking (i love the idea of a giant tadpole birthing frogs) but too many of them are essentially just "wait 5 cycles until you can proceed".

i'd still recommend trying this one. maybe not beating it, but the core gameplay idea mixed with the sweet and dreamy art is plenty of fun for a little while

stylish as hell, incredible soundtrack, simple yet gripping mechanics and a wildly intense challenge. everything i love about a modern indie game like this. brutal difficulty spike towards the end, but otherwise i love how gradually this game introduces new mechanics and mixes them up with old ones.

however,

ow my fucking fingers

in a world where art is being referred to as "content" and is constantly overflowing us, it's no surprise that getting over it is remembered as a dumb twitch-bait game that got really popular and then sorta fell off over time, probably because something new appeared and grabbed everyone's attention until that too died off. nowadays, art is disposable, and seemingly only consumed because everyone else is consuming it so it can be a topic of discussion for at least a short while. the tiny nooks and crannies of it go unnoticed, no one bothers with exploring and appreciating a piece of art's delicate intricacies, because, who the hell has the time for that now? what fool is going to go through a game like getting over it in its entirety, hell, who's gonna bother getting halfway through, when there's so many better ways to use up your time? i think this game understands that, interestingly. it acknowledges your freedom to do whatever you want with your time, and that if you stop caring about finishing this game, that's valid, but at the same time, you're not gonna get rewarded if you give up. the willingness to give your effort to art will result in the art giving back, and it's so, so worth it if you do.

(endings finished so far: all of them including the secret one)

yyyeah this goes really fucking hard lol. i kinda prefer the simplicity of the nes ones but i also absolutely adore the direction they went with, the whole multiple endings shtick is awesome and everything is just loads of fun to play through.
i do recommend getting a patched american version that brings back the 10 lives and 3 hitpoints from the japanese version if ur gonna play this tho. might make it almost too easy at points but also this IS a game where you die a lot. i would say its harder than the two nes ones but definitely easier than contra 3 if played the way i did at least

i am still not into the gameplay of turn-based rpgs, and i'm particularly critical of the way this one does it. no health bars or real explanations for whatever your actions are going to do, so it kind of feels like all the numbers showing up don't mean a whole lot to me and that i'm just bashing enemies blindly. you eventually develop a sense for what you're doing, but at first this really puzzled me and made me put off continuing the game for a long while. and while the whole game has much better QOL than i initially expected, there's still a lot of reasons to complain: you're slow, the movement through the menus can drag, saving the game's a bit of a chore, all around there's many tedious bits about this game that push me away.

it, then, says a lot that even in spite of all those setbacks i loved this experience. the world this game creates is absolutely brimming with creativity, fueled by its own absurdist logic and goofy kookiness that i find impossible not to love. the story is so fun to follow, even if at times it feels like it's being held together by duct tape. the emotional punches hit hard, and so do the horror elements filling up the later parts of the game. what a time.

also any game that makes me give stuff names is going to be subjected to losing a slight bit of emotional impact because i just had to name the main characters shit like "DUDE" and "BROOO" and that i'm attacking enemies with "PSI BALLS α"

i honestly think this game is incredibly flawed, with a lot of the puzzles being sort of bad due to their crypticness and the fact that a big part of these dungeons was really tedious to complete. however, the story, the music and the world this game creates is absolutely beautiful and absolutely won be over by the end. i'm definitely gonna remember the first time i entered hyrule fields and got filled with wonder for the world ahead of me. the combat is also really damn fun and the bosses especially stood out as awesome, so i guess in the end this is a pretty alright game