Cyber Shadow - Playthrough Part 11 (Ending)

After a couple of fights against Progenitor I reached his 2nd form - a demonic entity which again spams you with projectiles. It took some time since you have to fight the previous 2 bosses again and again to learn the patterns, but eventually I developed a successful strategy. First you need to free the elementals from the pods. Each will give you a boost - the blue one gives a temporary shield, the green one builds platforms, which you shouldn't use and the red one gives you 3 projectile hits, which you should conserve for when he spawns spikes on the ground to clear both the left and right one. Once he starts going upwards use the charge flame to damage him, but only when you have the opportunity to do so. Don't use the green platforms since his sword attacks appear near the top and you won't have time to dodge them. After defeating him Shadow gains the power of the elementals and frees the Master from her prison. Both of their spirits fly away and the game ends.

The game was decent enough, but there were some really bizarre design decisions. Half of it is fighting against the controls and the other half the purposefully cheap levels. For example you don't press down and hit to do the downward strike, but rather down-pause-hit. Also no idea why this move drains your much needed mana. Another example is the charge hit - you constantly need to keep it pressed down in order to execute the upgraded moves, which become a necessity later on (with the kunai being the most useful one), so for 75% of the stage you have the attacked button pressed down, which eventually becomes tiring.

The counter requires pixel perfect precision, which means you have to stand there waiting for the enemy to spam their projectile to return it, which breaks the flow of the game. It's also nigh impossible to do it in the air.

Some enemies are damage sponges and others have off-screen tracking, which can get rather annoying considering the game has the classic jump back animation when you are hit. Checkpoints can be pretty far apart, which I think is an artificial way to make the game more difficult. This is a problem considering health drops are extremely rare, so the level can simply grind you down.

I get that the game was trying to emulate Ninja Gaiden difficulty, but it was more frustrating than fun due to the obtuse level design. At the end of some levels I thought I got lucky rather than actually being better at the game. It's hard to recommend since there are better 2D ninja platformers out there.