ninja girl step on me

SPOILER ALERT: I will mention some parts and enemies of the game.

After finishing this game and even playing a bit in coop, I have come to one conclusion: This Remake of a side-scroll beat em' up is good, but flawed. Honestly it kind of feels like the developers didn't really know how to balance the game. There are some hits and some clear and definitie misses.
Some bosses have moves that you can barely react to, to block them and they can even do those moves when standing up from getting beaten down. (like literally after getting up, with no windup or anything) The first boss is especially guilty of this and one boss that they changed pretty significantly. In the first game you could throw him and he was maybe half the size that he is here, resulting in him being kind of a joke. But what the developers maybe forgot, is that he doesn't need to be super difficult, because he is the first boss to get you into the groove. Secondly he has an attack that hits from way too far and has no wind up or anything like that, in the first game he didn't have that and he didn't need it. Furthermore, he later appears as a normal enemy, which doesn't help this problem.
The other clear miss in my opinion is the boss Jubei, he is way too fast and thats really unnecessary, the bosses already have the upper hand, they don't need buffs, they should have just executed him similarly to the first game. He is faster than in the original, you aren't, doesn't sound like fun? Yeah it really isn't and it fells kind of unplayable with some characters.
Another issue, is that they raised the damage that enemies do pretty tremendously, you can get one combo from the first boss and you are almost at half of your HP. This is still on normal mode, mind you.
The Robot enemies in the game are kind of random for when they grab you, they made them faster and I understand why, but this results in them being kind of a coin flip, if you manage to grab them, or if the grab you, This is a big fun killer for me, since it feels like its random chance if I manage to conserve some Armor or not.

Those were a lot of negatives, however, I still like this version of the game, its definitely superior from a gameplay point of view. As others have pointed out, the atmosphere of the arcade is still superior, but this is good too. The new characters are fun, if maybe a bit hard to actually play in the game, especially with the increased difficulty this game has over the original. I still enjoyed this, but I don't know if I want to do more playthroughs.

Very solid classic beat em up, but it takes some time to warm up to.