I can definitely see the Iji influence, but you do it justice. I had fun and it made me stick around til the end (end here being Excelsior!). Great work!

I also worked out the jump timing for killing the blue guys with claws. But seeing as there is no bonus for guys killed, it was just better to walk past them to get to the end.

I had trouble with the green guys – I think the AI I came up with them is kind of neat, but didn't end up working out. Their interaction with the swipe attack is just boring – either you win, or they win, and there's not a lot either of you can do about it besides pray.

I did consider showing items that you had left, but my meager artistic skills were already stretched past the limit. Maybe in some future game I'll do that.

I *think* I've fixed the crash bugs (finally). Thanks to everyone who submitted reports, those are very useful. 1.2 is available now if you want to play it with less crashing ;)

It helped when I noticed the green guys rarely hurt you if you kept jumping while passing them. Felt a bit wrong in a way, like I was exploiting a bug, but I just had to get the best ending :)

The hardest part of the most difficult method was figuring out the proper route. I even went back to playing with max upgrades just to figure that out. Then I realised the bottom boss (which I hadn't even encountered before trying the game without upgrades), was impossible to get past without the jump upgrades. So I went back a bit, and noticed that the only conceivable way of getting to the end was through I couple of jumps I originally thought were impossible without upgrades. After some practice they turned out to be possible after all and I could complete the game.

So what's the next game? Nanok, Defender of the Moon? ;)

Oh, btw, the game crashed a couple of times. Clicked 'OK' in the crash dialog, so you should've gotten the reports.

The concept would work better if you could see the items you saved at the end. Without that reward (although caviar and steak is a nice reward), there is little incentive not to max out your powers.

The ninja enemy is imaginative. I didn't expect space aliens to have magical ninjas in their invading army, but why not?

Non-gameplay bug: The program freezes after pressing "assault the mothership' on the third runthrough.

"Tell me how hard it is" — Hard mode is impossible until you figure out the right path and then it's easy. The green guys can be beaten by just holding down C, the red guys can be avoided (although they do a great job of blocking off a passage unless you are powerful), and the blue guys can be avoided at your slowest. Upgrades, of course, make it easier.

Takarii > me for clawing a boss to death. I just went around them.