For starters, I found this game to be incredibly fun in the beginning, and the hand drawn artwork is amazing. It also has great humor, which made me chuckle a few times, and still does. What started shifting my fun experience, to a boring experience, is that it doesn't take long at all for this game to make you start doing relentless amounts of backtracking, just to open up the next new level of the game. I don't have an issue with backtracking itself, its just when i have to do tons of it just to unlock the next level (none of which are long, btw), it makes the game very tedious. I love getting all the new transformations, but i don't love having to later acquire new abilities for each transformation, because (you guessed it) that creates even MORE backtracking in the same whopping 3 levels you have kind of from the start. It got to the point that when i play, i have my head tilted to the side sarcastically saying to myself "oh yay, it's yet again mermaid falls, it's yet again main street, etc." I guess they thought adding one new type of enemy on each "new" run through made it unique. No...it doesn't. I'm gonna keep pushing through and eventually beat it because i hate starting things and not finishing. The reason that i refer to it as "half-made" in my title, is because that's how i look at relentless backtracking. It basically creates the illusion of a long game by recycling the same things we've already done an asinine amount of times. Hopefully, this is just an insanely long intro, and it'll go back to being fun again soon, but i'm really sick of seeing and hearing the same levels over and over and over again.
*UPDATE*
I have now beat the game, and my opinion hasn't changed. I wish i liked it more, and i wish the reward for beating the game was something that made this snooze fest worth sitting through. All i got was artwork, and a "hero mode." whoopty f*cking do! My reward was "play it again, but harder!" It still won't be difficult. The reward should've been "Stay awake mode." I know this game was delayed a million times before release, but this game should be used as an example as to why a game shouldn't be released until it's ACTUALLY complete. I mean, come on, there was already DLC revealed by the time (or before, idc) it hit shelves. That alone is always a dead giveaway the game wasn't finished. Releasing a completed, not being stuffed with backtracking, game would've been the smarter option, rather than worrying about a release date. I hate today's game industry with a firey passion. QUALITY OVER QUANTITY! This game is definitely my next trade-in. I haven't even put it on my games shelf, because i knew it wasn't gonna stick around.
P.S. people, stop comparing this to Mega Man X. MMX is fun, and the backtracking it has is to 3 levels at most (for armor and other things), and only 1 time for each. MMX doesn't make you repeat the same previously played levels 800 times to unlock the new map.