Pyroclastica

Another one which genuinely feels like a big achievement. Beating this takes a ton of work, but the payoff feels so good.
When it came to the final boss gauntlet, I did get smart and choose NOT to walk in until I could get there with a Spin Slash equipped, but for my first try, this didn’t help at all. The first phase of the boss went down easily, then I proceeded to get annihilated on the second phase. This booted me back to 6-1, where I was extremely mad about having to fight all the way back.
After a while though, you do kinda get into a ‘rhythm’. I would bet that despite some of the levels in stage 6 being the hardest ones in the game, I am better at getting through there than I would be at some of the earlier levels. You just kinda memorize it and get used to it.
Since I always play these games as closely as possible to original hardware as I can get, I did not attempt to reset or walk back any progress after losing to one of the 3 final bosses. I just fought all the way through 6-1 through 6-3 every time I failed. This did not feel good, but maybe it’s character building.
I really like the controls of this game and they feel amazing once you get used to them. Movement and jumping and combat are really fluid.
Obviously the music is some of the greatest ever made for a video game; nothing else really needs to be written about this, everyone knows it’s great because everyone who has beat this game has spent A LOT of time with it.
I absolutely now want to play the sequels to this game, and maybe even come back to this one in the future. The difficulty does NOT make it un-fun.

Ninja Gaiden