It's been many, many years since a game has made me rage like this. Specially a metroidvana. This game has beautiful art and decent music and the saint seiya influence is great too. But the gameplay has to be one of the worst I've seen in any metroidvana game.

- You have a combined HP/mana bar. Shooting takes away from this bar. You can heal by hugging the floating teddy bear but it takes *forever*. If you get hit with this bar depleted, you will lose a life. Lose 2 or 3 (depending on upgrades) and it's game over. This wouldn't be so terrible if it wasn't for bosses that require you to shoot them. It's very easy to miss and end up with an empty bar, only to get hammered.
- You think upgrading and getting a bigger bar will help? Almost everything that touches you takes the *entire* bar away in one hit.
- There's barely any increase in strength or defenses as you progress through the game. Low level enemies keep taking multiple hits, and you keep losing all your health in one hit from most.
- Enemies respawn every time you re-enter a screen. All of them. Even if you get knocked back into a previous screen, you will have to deal with all of them.
- DId I mention there's about a dozen different enemies, and what you in every area are recolorings? The ones that shoot, shoot slightly different things but that's it.
- There's no quick travel system. Yup, a metroidvana without a fast travel. SOTN had this 30 years ago!! You have to walk back through the entire map to get from one place to another. I can only imagine they decided not to have one so the game would feel longer since the map is somewhat small.
- There's no way to skip dialogs/presentations on bosses. So you end up getting hit by some random projectile while you were trying to heal, and now you have to walk several screens, defeating the same enemies again (some which take many, many hits) and then see the entire boss intro again. Only to make some other stupid mistake and do the same thing over and over again

I'm uninstalling and hiding this game. I'm not wasting any more valuable free time trying to find the fun in it.
I wish I had played this in the 2 week window so I could at least get my money back.

Great game, great animation, great story. It brings me back to my childhood when I played on my Gameboy. Very recommended!

A very good metroidvania with a top notch color scheme. A few confusing points of where to go next but solid combat animations. The light mechanic is interesting as a way to mitigate armor but also used for abilities.