Beat. I made it through 3 stages before I looked up how to use magic. Until then I was only using the shuriken, which was fine except that it took multiple hits to kill the flying guys. It turned out I had to hold down B button and 1 of the D pad directions, but I was using the turbo button. The game was perfectly playable without magic. The only spell that was really good was invisibility, and missile was like a charged up shuriken. The shadow spell, which made a clone on top of you, was the way to beat the giant first boss, but I figured out how to get enough height by crouching before jumping. That was the hardest boss for me because of that. I did like how the final boss was not a badass and was only challenging because he had a hostage, so you had to use trickery to win. Figuring out the correct order of spells to use was not apparent though, so I looked it up.

I did like the core shooter platformer gameplay, and the concept of getting into melee to capture and interrogate bad guys. I was meh on the almost rail shooter elevator parts in the final stage. Where the game mostly lost out was the sheer blandness and repetition of the stages. The dialogue was so simple that it seemed only fit for small children, and there was no game mechanic effect from interrogation. Almost completely wasted concept. Same for rescuing kids. They and notes kept talking about secret doors but I never found a single one, and the walkthrough said they were equally pointless. It was very easy to stay healed by going into side doors to kill enemies, but every single room was exactly the same with the same 3 enemies who attacked in the same pattern. The final stage mixed it up a little though. This game needed more engaging level design, tactical limitations on spells, worthwhile exploration, worthwhile side quests (the interrogation and rescues), harder difficulty options, and improve the dialogue to not be so lame.

6.0/10