ActRaiser 2SNES

I just tried this game on emulator. it's hard. it's really really really hard.

At first, you pick a level, and it feels impossible. Just enemies swarming you everywhere, and a miniboss that makes swift work of you. Over and over again. That was my only experience with this game for an entire hour.

Then you finally try enough times so you can kill the miniboss, and you soon realise that there isn't a checkpoint. You have to keep going. You need to make it to the end-of-stage boss before you're allowed to die at a checkpoint.

It takes an insane amount of trying and trying again before you get decent enough at the janky controls to get there. And it doesn't help that the game is a huge fan of pixel-precise jumps too, just for the heck of it, I guess? So even when you do manage to trudge your way through the enemy spam, and manage to kill the midboss with a decent amount of health remaining... you'll just fail the pixel-perfect jump and will be back at square one anyway.

And pretty much every stage is like this??? Maybe some of them have more checkpoints here and there, but... This is one of the most infuriatingly annoying SNES platformers I've played. Maybe only Ghouls n Ghosts can rival it.

So anyway. I played this game for two days straight, and I managed to beat the first 12 levels. There are only 14 levels in the game...

I got up to the semi-final level, Tower of Souls, before I gave up on the game completely. Because this level additionally has a boss rush at the end of it, and I just... didn't have it in me to manage to get through. I looked up a speedrun, and saw that level 14 afterwards is also a boss rush, PLUS the final boss, all in a row. and.............No. not doing that.

Honestly I'm happy to have managed to beat the 12 levels I did. I got decently into this game. But it is asking just way way too much of the average player. I was willing to meet it halfway, but having the boss rushes at the end was going too far.

Normally I like difficulty in my platformers but this game is just plain ruthless.