A few more hours in and I’m starting to feel pretty stuck. I still haven’t figured out the endless corridor puzzle - I’m now thinking I need to find a number that ends in nine, since the room layout means I have to walk past a nine to get to where the puzzle ends - and I’m also stuck in the tower of the goddess. I’ve super Mario’d the pot in the mausoleum that flooded the tower in the original, but I’ve only been able to flood a small section of the tower. There’s a second seal in the spring that I think I need to break to flood the rest, but none of my weapons are working on it through the wall and I can’t find a way to get in direct contact with it. Flooding the small section also made the gun platforms appear in the tower, killing which opened the chest containing the item that unlocked the exits from the tower in the original, but the chest isn’t there in the remake and taking out the platforms doesn’t seem to have done anything.
I have figured out how to choose which fairy I get. I’m sure there is a software combination to do it, but I haven’t found that so instead I’ve learned which summon animation leads to which fairy. If you go offscreen before the fairy appears you can reset it, so I duck offscreen until the one I want comes up. It’s inelegant, but it works, and I’ve been able to unlock various hidden things now, including power-ups for both defence and offence. I still can’t beat the time freezing enemy in the labyrinths, though.
One big difference in this version is the way the drops from pots work. In the original pots would have set drops of cash, ammo, weights, or nothing, and they’d reset each time you loaded the game. It meant there was always enough cash and ammo available. In this version those things only seem to drop once and then you get random drops of one or two coins or spears or whatever, so there’s never enough. Actually there are a decent number of large one-off cash drops, so for most of the game I’ve had enough, but I’ve also had to spend a lot on weights (they added a whole pile of doors that require a weight each time you pass through that serve no obvious purpose beyond wasting resources) and subweapons, so at the moment I’ve got 400 coins worth of stuff I want to buy but no obvious way to get the cash beyond grinding. There is a fairy which increases drops which would speed it up, but that also means grinding the summon point until the right fairy comes up.
The change to how health works I think is also for the worse. In the original when you reloaded you got your VIT fully restored. In the remake it stays the same. They added the hot spring in the village which refills it whenever you want, but in effect all that happens is you wind up warping back to the village and hiking to the spring all the time. Experience is now a random drop you have to collect instead of something you get automatically from every enemy, so it seems to fill up and trigger a refill way less often now, and even when it does quite often I’ve just been back to the hot spring and filled up anyway. It’s getting to be less of an issue now that I have more health, the defence boost, and access to fairies, at least.
I feel like I’m complaining a lot, probably because I’m stuck on so many things and getting frustrated. It remains an excellent game that I’ve been playing whenever I get the chance and thinking about potential puzzle solutions for whenever I don’t.