Just can't live up to the original.
Zoda's Revenge is no different: No matter how much it tries, it just cannot live up to the original Star Tropics. For one thing, the story seems to be hastily slapped together, a series of weird, pseudo-historical vignettes that don't fit together, but only serve to send you into another dungeon in the search of the Tetrads. The humor of the first game returns as well, but seems more forced than the original. The first used humor to entertain and surprise, but this game seems stuck in a cycle of, "Here's what the gamers expect out of the sequel, so we must provide it." The weapons are all standard weapons (axes, swords), which fail to capture the charm of starting out the original Star Tropics with only a yo-yo to use to battle the exploits of Zoda. The first Star Tropics also had periods of difficulty, areas where you would actually struggle the first times you played the area, whereas this game seems fairly easy to run through without having more than just minor problems.
By no means is this game an utter failure, however...it is still fun to play, and the humor does manage to occasionally succeed, although not as often as in the first game. Anyone who enjoyed the original will probably find something to enjoy about this game, and I would probably consider it a much better game was it not the sequel to a game that I absolutely loved. Sometimes sequels work, because they draw older games in who want to see how the story continues...sometimes sequels don't work, because high expectations based on the previous games in a series can cloud opinions of an otherwise good game. This game seems to fall in between, simultaneously giving us a way to continue the Star Tropics experience, but at the same time not meeting the lofty expectations.