After whining for years about Tengai Makyou 2 ManjiMaru I have a terrible reveal @HOBO .
It’s pretty good. At least the first 40 minutes. There are no jokes and it is actually pretty serious? You have to go to the local big town for a Festival and then there is a giant earthquake and a tentacle rose bud monster rises up and all the people in town (and your mom are teleported away.) some evil guys you defeated in Game Number 1 (I am guessing) are very mad at you! So now you are off to do a Dragon Quest.
After that slight railroading you have a lot of freedom of where you can try to go. The battles and movement is really fast. Like feels like an emulator on two times speed fast. I got to the first town grinded a bit, died woke up in my home village walked back to the first town. A guy had a rumor about down south and I walked around a lake unable to tell if the rumor would be obvious or this is 8bit design and just some random tile has a secret.
All the items have furigana but that does little to help parse their obtuse medieval Japanese names. Feel like I need to open a guide (and be 13) to playthrough this just for the items. The items have descriptions! Just I could figure out what in the store was shoes (all the equipment is just marked as equipment).
Also that pixels as animation intro is incredible. Maybe it is a shame we never have gotten a fan translation of it. I tried looking up on J-internet and some are clocking it at a 50 hour game yeeessh.
Super Darius feels like an unbeatable tech demo with all the homing enemies.
Aldynes gets way too fucking hard in the later stages. The weapon pick up are far and few and even abusing save states you can get stuck with The Wrong Weapon frequently. Those spiders in stage 3 made me cry before they added little homing enemies that ignore walls.
Feel like turning to the Chew Man Fu developers and asking when the game starts.
And JJ and Jeff sucks to play but also rules.