Beat, though I almost gave up several times due to some of the worst platforming ever. The mechanics and controls were not fun at all. One button for regular jump, another to tap for a horizontal leap or hold down to charge up a high jump, and a third button to fly straight up followed by flying straight horizontal. The game was more of a puzzle to figure out which type of jump to use. The regular jump was the best but did not have the best height or distance. The tap leap was only good to avoid bumping your head in narrow confines. The high jump and whirlwind came with annoying penalties though. Who wants to stand still charging up a jump for a few seconds, and even worse have the guy fall down exhausted for a few more seconds if you overcharge? And the landing from doing the whirlwind was the opposite of graceful, as the guy bounced and skid across the ground before being dazed for a few more seconds. Falling from a moderate height caused him to take a second to recover, while falling from too high caused that few seconds of daze, and dive attacking the ground got his pitchfork stuck for a few seconds. So there were a lot of ways to lose control of the character, and combine that with instant death pits, 1 hit kill enemies, and some autoscrolling... this game was excessively frustrating and I cannot imagine putting up with it without save states. Some of the parts that almost made me quit could not properly be save state scummed without keeping backups or slowing the game speed.

The first time was 2 robot platforms where only the 1 you were not on went up. I had to jump back and forth between them, but they sped up later to the point where I had to perform a flawless jump every second for quite some time. That took like a dozen tries, though it would have been easier had I slowed the game speed. Then there was an autoscrolling stage where I had to run from a flood. That took several attempts and slowing the speed to 20 frames per second. The worst part was another autoscrolling stage which was like a maze in that you had to choose the correct path before seeing how it would end up, as well as flawlessly pull off every type of jump within extremely strict time limits. I managed to save state scum my way through it, but even that was frustrating. So much of the game was designed to be cheap to make you memorize and use those continues. A stage near the end had eggs that hatched into ghosts. It was almost autoscrolling because you did not want those enemies to catch up, but there was a point where the jumps became so difficult that I needed more time, so I was faced with killing several tough flying enemies. That took some hardcore scumming. The platforming at the end with platforms that turn on and off depending on color, and later the invisible ones that you had to use falling stars to locate, were mechanically interesting but went on for way too long. The combat was not very good. I often found turning around to attack in the other direction to be unresponsive, and there was way too much risk. It was good how the basic attack could easily stunlock, even for the final boss.

The story and characters were good for such a simple game. Well except for Whirlo. What kind of name is that? And why does he look like a green humanoid blob? He looks like Gumby's chubby older brother, and is a stark contrast to the sensible looking human like characters, who also seemed to have more personality and more interesting stories. I did like how you could get game over from bad dialogue choices and that there were a couple minor branching choices. Though in the end he lost anyway and I was left wondering if I did something wrong, but that was part of the ending. The story art and music were impressive; far too good for the gameplay.

5.5/10