The Wing of Madoola (1986)

Beat in slow motion mode but the game was too fast even at 40 frames per second. The game was kind of a mix between Metroid and Zelda 2 only with discrete stages rather than open world. The sword started off so weak that it was not worth fighting until after getting an upgrade. Each stage had obvious doors that led to hp or mp, a permanent upgrade, nothing or the boss. The goal each time was to navigate the stages to find upgrades, boss and exit while not getting killed by the relentlessly spawning enemies. Most bosses returned as regular enemies and all but 1 enemy type was reasonable to deal with. That 1 type though got me killed many times. The god damn purple slime things that flew around. Every other enemy had a simple pattern but these things homed in and sat on my face like metroids. The way that respawns worked had them spawn at the edge of the screen immediately after being killed which often led to worse situations than ignoring them. They often appeared during the more difficult platforming and I learned to dread the little blip noise they made. The platforming was actually very good with no instant deaths and forgiving controls. The max boot upgrade gave great jump height too. The basic sword was ok for weaker enemies but could easily lead to taking contact damage, especially how only 1 enemy could be hurt even when many were on top of each other. Flame sword had a little more range and was overall the best attack due to low mp cost and high damage. The bomb did a purely vertical attack up and down, the bounce shot horizontal across the screen and shield rotated around the character like Mega Man leaf shield. Smasher did an area effect and flash did massive damage to the entire screen. The spells were well designed with the angles and areas they could hit but I mostly stuck to the simple and effective flame sword and occasionally the shield. I had them all maxed by the end though hp and mp were not. I assume you would have to farm enemies for random drops to max them. During a later stage the boss was several respawning frogs and I looked up the walkthrough to confirm that was indeed the boss. Talk about lame. The stages got larger and more complicated but were still manageable without a map. The final stage 16 was terrible with those slimes and I had to look up where to go. Turns out there was a wing pickup that I had missed at first, since it was not behind a door. Then use that to fly up to the final boss. Took several attempts to figure out the pattern and I saw no ending after that. I had over 900 mp left and it would not let me fly. So you can't actually beat the game unless you save enough mp to fly up to the exit? There were no enemies to farm either. Seems like poor design. The boss should have restored mp upon defeat or allow flight without mp.

Not a bad game but could have been a lot better. The formulaic stage design was a little boring and the enemy spawns really needed to be changed so that killing all enemies to create safety could be a thing.

6.2/10