Yet another game I have had in my library for nearly a decade now, but never played. And I'm glad I did! The adventure is short (around five hours the first go), fun, and pretty challenging (I played on Normal Difficulty). If you aren't a Completionist and want a simple and fun story to play through, I can recommend this. However if you are a Completionist like myself, you might share some of my pretty substantial complaints I have with this title.

Just playing through the game normally, you are likely to get the Neutral Ending. There are three endings, a Bad, Neutral, and Good. Completing the game in Normal Difficulty and getting the Neutral Ending is easy enough. Some fights are a little tricky, but you can manage easily enough.

But that's where my biggest complaint lies... I really, REALLY hate when games put you back to where you last saved when you die. And you're probably going to die a lot.

The Save/Heal Blocks are NOT conveniently placed near most of the areas where you encounter a boss fight. And SOME don't even have one before-hand. Meaning you are going to be doing a ton of walking to the same boss fight, over, and over again, just to die, and spend twice as long as an attempt takes, just WALKING back to the fight.

Not to mention a lot of the bosses that do this, you have to go through a gauntlet of enemies and platforming before you reach the boss. So you are likely to have sustained some damage with no way to heal it off, outside a one time use item you get only TWO of in the story.

This is incredibly frustrating, but didn't completely ruin my first playthrough. But it DOES ruin the game's replay value for me.

I am a Completionist, and I wanted to go for all of the Achievements, as I tend to do.

However... to get the "Best" Ending, you need to go through a TERRIBLE gauntlet of enemies, and fight a boss, just to get an ATTEMPT at the True Final Boss. No heal block. No save block. Nothing. You die, and you repeat the terrible gauntlet all over again. And that to me is just NOT fun whatsoever. I'm not even going to try, I reached the True Final Boss one time, and upon seeing there was no place to save, I just don't have time for that. I'm not interested.

So I can recommend this game for a fun adventure, but if you like to complete games and do everything they have to offer, you are going to find this title extremely frustrating.

It took me eleven years to beat the final boss.

♥