Preliminary: I love how you knock on the doors to enter lol. I like that there are shops so you could grind for gold as desired, tho I was playing it as a straightforward run forward always type action game. Tho I always like to upgrade my speed/boots :-p Speaking of, it felt very clunky at first but I noticed with the first Boots upgrade (Leather), things got a bit better, maybe the same will be true of the Sword. There are supposedly only 11 rounds in this arcade version so this seems doable. The Round 1 boss (Death) felt a lot like an NES boss, surprised this is an arcade release, and the enemy mechanics of Round 2 similarly feel NES-y.

Pro-tip: be sure to move away from the center after defeating a boss or else you will insta-tele with the Key. Collect all that Gold first! Kinda tacky they programmed it that way. Same with the way text sometimes pops up, you eventually can move again and the text box will block enemies lol. Woopsie.

(Welp, end of my first night and already through Round 5 and having fun. It's got some definite action-adventure and ARPG influence with the stores, but is also just a straightforward fun action game too. Nice. I wish the Sound or Look were more striking tho)

Look: 7/10 Cute enough. Nothing spectacular, though.

Sound: 7/10 Same as Sound ha.

Play: 7/10 Good thing I didn't buy a shield at the store, I got one from an enemy in the next Round!

On my 2nd play session, I noticed so many faults like the squid enemies in the later Rounds have a terrible hitbox.

Feel: 7/10 Sign of a good game that I said I was wrapping up my first night at Round 6, but then finished the Round heh. The Sphinx aspect was neat. I at first wasn't clicking with it because of the clunky feel to the controls, but now I know that's just to make the upgrades feel more impacting. Even my Broad Sword is slicing faster. Nice. (Unfortunately, this good Feel and Joy was lost as the game's difficulty got too high and the clunkiness and quirky features became more and more central to the game's challenge.)

Attachment: 7/10 The 2nd play session wasn't going as well. It was feeling clunky again, largely because the difficulty was increasing to match the new weapons, so it was time to earn new weapons (e.g. Excalibur). Started noticing the lame features again like only being able to attack one enemy at a time (even if they overlap).

I did a little more digging on the StrategyWiki and I liked the subquest aspect. (collect a series of hidden items with no function except at the very end of the game, reminds me of working toward an Ultimate Weapon in a Final Fantasy heh). Regardless, more and more during Round 7 and on I needed to refer to the StrategyWiki maps. And turns out because I was originally just playing it as a straightforward action game, I didn't do the Link's Awakening esquer "get the letter, bring the letter to the lady, get the flute, etc." so I can't even do the subquest. Boo.

I was reallllly considering stopping on the last couple rounds. The difficulty was getting too high, riddled with tacky moments and frustrating tedium. At least the Death type miniboss before the Snow Kong boss provides a Revival Potion... Yeaaaa on Round 10 (2nd to last round haha) I called it quits. It wasn't fun anymore. It has a great mid game tho!

Completion: Round 10 (arcade version, SMS version has an extra stage) Playtime: ~1h 10m