Magical Pop'n (1995)

Beat. I had a reasonably challenging time until the purple wizard, when I had to look up how to hurt him. Some of the platforming and timed door puzzles gave me a hard time. Often times I felt it was better to take a hit and bull through using the invincibility frames. I had the most trouble with grappling up to a higher grapple point and needed some serious save state scumming to make it up. The final boss was easy, until he started shooting those homing fire balls; I got hit every single time. I was down to a single hit, but so was the boss and more homing fire balls were coming. I finished him with an ultimate magic attack.

This is a very cute gem of a game that borders on being a metroidvania.

Magical girl action platformer with some extremely nice looking visuals.

Now this is pixel art

There's some surprising levels of details. The protagonist has several voice samplings which sound cute and her animations have a lot of character. In addition to the normal jump and stab you have several subweapons you can switch between to at anytime most of which have a regular usage that uses only a little ammo and a larger spell that uses more. There's a mild exploration element, she can go down optional or hidden paths and find more max health, extra lives, more subweapon ammo, or new spells. A few of them enhance her new movement like a grappling hook.

Decent level design but kind of low on challenge compared to other SNES era games.

JP only but there's a translated ROM..

Very tight controls and a good soundtrack make a nice platformer here. There are some rough parts where I didn't find the solution right away, but overall I'm quite impressed how the balancing is quite fair in comparison with other SNES games. The game looks very overlooked to me since the candy cute art style can turn off a lot of gamers.

There are no reasons to come back though (collectables/secrets) and without password function you need to finish it in one session, what I miss to give it a forth star.

Rating: 3,5 stars