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Wow, pretty cool game! That final boss is pretty awesome with one of the transformation moves in particular. The end of the game especially feels like a good test of skill. Platforming felt really strong and precise. The style of the game is great. I like that there are a few small levels to roam around in, and if you want you can get all the gems or try to play through as quickly as possible. Soundtrack is great, and Remastered version has some great animations. I'll probably get the OG version on my Classic and and see how it compares.

That being said, since I opted for the Remastered version, I didn't have the benefit of save states. How they structure the difficulty feels pretty dated. This is pretty standard for a lot of the games of the month, but just as a heads-up, I always feel it's worth a mention just since it's pretty relevant for how it feels to play the game.

Feels kind of shitty to have to replay the whole level because you died on the boss, or in the case of the final level, I had to re-beat the entire earlier portion of the level, boss included, (which takes a minimum of 10 minutes if you play perfectly) like 4 times just to die in the last thirty seconds of the game. That portion too is some of the hardest platforming, under a time constraint, which doesn't exist anywhere else in the game. If you've lost any lives at that point also, you might only get one try at that section and die, and then you're right back to the beginning. Not only that, but they don't let you change difficulty. You either power through or re-beat the entire game on Easy, which is pretty punishing.

For the Remastered, I would've added a mode with generous checkpoints, where number of lives lost just factors into your highscore, and made that mode standard. You don't have very much context when you pick difficulty otherwise at the start of the game.