Difficulty principle comes from enemies bum rushing you in deliberately obtuse directions where <--> with no up whip cannot hit. In some cases there is no ability to avoid them without learning the pattern of a level, the cheese them by knowing exactly what they will do before hand.
This is compounded by endless, instant respawning enemies. Kill an enemy and drop an inch? Congratulations, it's back. Congratulations, they are all back.
The timer is quite stingy as well, the game tries to be more open encouraging exploration, but in the end it's just not worth the effort.
The same castle level over and over gets boring as well, it lacks of the variation of something like Master Of Darkness on the Master System and spams the same enemies continually for the vast majority of the game.
Bosses difficulty vary widely from rock hard to laughably easy.
The music is great, and at the time playing as a female protagonist was something new for the series.
Overall, not great, even cheesing the game with save-scumming the constant attempts at cheapness got irritating.
