When I was done I started searching around for something I had never played and saw Demon Sword. I was recently going through an old VG&CE issue I had had when I was a kid and spotted an advertisement for it. I remembered the name from the ad and decided to try it out. I immediately recognized the gameplay style from Taito's Legend of Kage and it turns out that this was it's spiritual successor. I really dig the look of the game too, you have these tiny but clean sprites and nicely detailed environments for an 1988 NES game. The graphics remind me of Super Mario Land in the way that they are minimalistic and seem efficiently designed.
Then I realized how solid of a gameplay system you had going on here and how balls hard the difficulty was. Like Legend of Kage, you have blisteringly fast, high flying movement that plays like you would expect a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon license would on the NES. Of course, you're being pelted with enemies. The enemies drop items, including keys which you can use to enter these demon doors to fight sub-bosses. Exploration appears to be a large and welcome part of the level design.
I've only made it to the second stage so far but I'm really liking the game so I get online to look up the dirt. Turns out the US release I was playing got raped of half the game. They removed six stages, half the special items/attacks, and covered up it's Eastern-ness with Iron Sword level shitty boxart that shows a barbarian & medieval castle
Lucky for me a fan translation patch for the Japanese original is available online and isn't difficult to find. The game is steeped in Buddhist mythology with a pretty detailed backstory as well. I'm pretty excited about playing through the rest of this. 
Does anyone know if Retro Gamer has ever covered it? I'd love to read what they had to say.
