[haze]

I finally got around to playing this game. It's very fun at first, thinking of all the things to discover, getting all excited. then the fun level starts going down...

I beat the snake boss on my own, then started skimming through the pages of this thread. Now I'm just filled with dread, that sooner or later it's going to aggravate and frustrate me to the point of giving up.

[haze]

I'm kind of proud of how far I've gotten by myself. Only part I was lost on was where to find the Helmet, which someone helped in this thread.

now I have access to three more bosses, in the giant, water, and pyramid areas. should I continue attempting to fight them now, when the only weapons I have are the whip and shuriken? should I instead keep exploring that place where the Helmet was, whatever it's called?

it's kind of strange how the progress is made here. getting new items is hard and rare. I can go into an area and mess around, solve one or two puzzles, and feel like I accomplished something.... then I realize all I did was find the map and open one door, maybe. then later on I find an ankh jewel, allowing me to fight a boss that I'm not even ready for, so that feels like a dead end to the exploration.

I'm still enjoying it though. It hasn't defeated me yet!
I haven't found a single ROM combination, though. I was expecting hundreds of weird minor secrets from collecting them, and that got me all excited when reading the manual, but so far they all seem worthless!

[haze]

current progress: beat the Inferno Cavern boss. explored a bunch of new areas. the Confusion Gate was actually kinda fun, ironically the puzzles made more sense to me than the rest of the game. I think I did everything in the Endless Corridor, and I explored most of the Twin Labyrinths. 3 weeks of playing this and I'm guessing I'm only halfway through.

is there any way to light up that pitch-dark area? none of the items in the manual seem to do it, so am I supposed to blindly stumble around for some light switch?


man this game is amazing. more of certain people here should play it, they'd love it. it's like playing Castlevania 2, only with the confusing puzzles and items done right. it's that kind of Metroid 1 confusion, where you reach a dead end and wonder, am I supposed to be here? do I come back later with a new item? or maybe I haven't been looking hard enough? or maybe it's nothing more than a dead end!

the items in this game are such teases, it's like that Owata Jinsei game done on a longer scale. I get the grapple claw and YES I CAN FINALLY CLIMB WALLS, THIS'LL BE USEFUL, but it's only slightly useful for certain jumps. I get the feather, which the manual says lets me double jump and WOO THIS SHOULD OPEN UP A LOT OF PATHS, but the double jump is barely more useful than the normal jump. it's infuriating at the time, but I can look back and laugh each time at the joke. The feelings of achievement mixed with all the feelings of disappointment, I love it.

[haze]

you mean the bit in the Endless Corridor right at the beginning? the glowy staircases appear after talking with the sages


right now I'm at the final boss. it kicked my ass on the second form. I admit I had been cheating A LITTLE to figure out where to find items near the end. maybe I can finally end this.

[haze]

finished the game! a little over a month after I started. whew.... I feel like I deserve a T-shirt or something for that.

final time: 30 hours

come on, get more people playing this! fans of oldschool Zelda/Metroid/Castlevania don't know what they're missing!

[haze]

well I kinda mean in general. this could be a little bit more popular.

they want to delete its wikipedia page for not being notable enough :(

[haze]

well...... I guess you're right. only the most serious of retro fans would want to endure it. there's no way it'd get similar acclaim as Cave Story, that isn't what I meant at all.

still, I can't believe how many people I met out there trying to play through Cave Story with 3 HP and things like that. obsessive completionists/masochists like those are the perfect audience for this, ha ha. I know, I did it myself...

emphasis on "a little bit more popular"

[haze]

I've only finished the first boss, and I gotta say the remake is REALLY nice. stuff has been added and stuff has been taken out, but if you have any confidence in the original creators you can believe that they were all careful deliberate decisions.
the graphics surprised me, it's much sharper than the blurry youtube videos led me to believe.
the game uses sound cues nicely as well. I'm playing with headphones on, and it made me smile when I pushed a switch and heard the grinding of stones far off to the right. one common complaint about the original was that it was hard to figure out what changed in the dungeon when you did something right, but now the feedback is much more intuitive.
controls are a lot smoother, even the delay before jumping is removed, but some enemies have been made stronger to adjust for that. I still have to get used to not pressing Up to jump.
I can't complain too much about the constant emails from Xelpud, because it's a lot of great advice for beginners who are totally new (e.g. DON'T JUMP IN THE WATERFALL). I assume there'll be less of these hints as I go on. sometimes the emails are just used for little bits of humor.

so yeah, if you know someone who tried out La-Mulana but gave up after 5 minutes, get them to play this version.

also: on Win7 64-bit there's some bug if you installed it to the default Program Files directory, and you won't be able to save! just move the game to any other folder and it'll be fine.

[haze]

I've beaten the original game 3 times, but now in the remake... I'm actually stumped!

-- I think I see the bronze mirror, but I have no idea how to get to it --

-- also I can't figure out where Isis is supposed to be --

spamming shuriken at the bosses is not quite as effective as it used to be

[haze]

I think I slightly prefer the original fake-MSX version, not only because of the style, but the boss and miniboss fights. I feel like the increased difficulty in the remake stalls the pacing a little too much at times. Instead of feeling like an unexpected test of skill, breaking up the cerebral parts of the game, I more often feel like "ehh, I'll come back later when I have better weapons and more life points" so it just becomes another puzzle.

[haze]

hrmm, I think I found it because of how the screen is laid out. in the entire Gate of Illusion, there's almost no empty space anywhere, because everything is taken up by floors and hallways. so this one inaccessible block of wall seemed suspicious to me, and I tried everything I could around its edges. also, you had to do something similar in the original game, climbing an invisible ladder, twice.

MORE REMAKE COMPARISONS: I like how most of the Chamber of Birth was changed to be given more of a unique identity, instead of looking like a repeat of Gate of Confusion. and the Tower of the Goddess being so much easer to climb. and Eden being blocked off at first does wonders for the game's pacing at that point.