Arkista's Ring (USA) ROM

A fantastic game and one of the few I've actually beaten.

Controls are simple but flawed. You can not change direction without taking a step and the monsters take advantage of this to put you in a position where you can't hit them as they stay directly underfoot but they can endlessly wail on you. In the earlier levels it's easy to out-maneuver them but as you get to the 3rd set it becomes frustratingly difficult.

The sound is great except for one track which can become grating. I somehow always managed to pause during this mostly-high-pitch music each time I had to get up and kept having to mute the game. Sound effects were a bit grating at times.

Graphics were good enough but nothing really stood out as great or interesting. Probably the best was watching Christine's ear flop about. Most backgrounds were typical clusters of pixels that barely resembled anything but a mess. Forest levels were clean and cute.

The story is that Christine, the main character, travels through the land fighting monsters to get to the Ninja King and retrieve 'Arkista's Ring' to save...something...or something.

Gameplay works in levels wherein you must kill enough, or the right, monsters for a key to spawn and then use that to open the door to the next level. The game makes use of hidden passageways, fake doors/stairs, RNG, and a neat system that pumps up the difficulty with each consecutive playthrough up to level 124. There are 31 levels which repeat for a total of 4 playthroughs of the 31 levels. Monsters get faster and stronger with each set and I fully understand people's fears of ninjas now.

Overall, I would say this game has a very low difficulty, due to the frequency of drops, their usefulness, and the large range of character upgrades, compared to most of the adventure games on this console making it an excellent beginner game.

A personal favorite for sure.