Fundamentally, there's really nothing separating NG from other sidescrolling action games of its particular bent. Of course there's that particularly harsh knockback that all but mandates a mastery of Act VI to avoid a lot of struggle while mastering its boss rush. But I guarantee if you mastered a number of similarly intense or harder sidescrollers and returned to NG, you'd look at it differently (and would beat it). I certainly wouldn't assume doing so was beyond you, anyway! I've neither 2-ALLed Daimakaimura nor 1CCd Ninja Spirit, but I've come pretty close and both had a lot more to digest than any of the three NES NGs.
As you correctly surmised, I'm stubborn as all hell, so the raging brute force approach your commentaries seemed to suggest you were using did eventually work for me, when I was new to the game (after like a year, on/off)...
me, last year wrote:I practically sweated blood to finish it as a kid even with the unlimited continues. NGII's later stages practically turned me blue with rage back then, and it's probably a good thing I never got my hands on NGIII, particularly as it would've been the infamously hard US version. Says a lot about my gaming history that the first thing I thought of when I saw a clip of an eagle knocking a goat off a mountain recently was NG1!
me, last year again wrote:Can't recall it happening to me in my NES days (I would've remembered, I got the proverbial "brick wall demolished with forehead" clear).
...but it's a bad idea. Much less painful to keep questioning your own methods and improving them wherever you can, putting failures along the way down to experience. That's all that goes into these games, really. That and some bloody-mindedness / stubbornness. Well, a lot of that.
Anyway, you're welcome in the NG thread any time! The System11 Ryukenden Task Force is always recruiting...
Back to regularly scheduled annoying little things.
sandflies :[