Far away from mucky muck
This remake feels like it should be the template for retro remakes. The core game has problems, sure, owed to the obtuse nature of open world action/adventure games of its era (think of it as a far less impenetrable cousin to Castlevania II: Simon's Quest), but the care that developer Lizardcube put into this game's audio/visual makeover and the work they did to preserve the original release's look and sound should be the benchmark for how these sorts of things are handled.
The newly drawn art style is a sight to behold, lovingly detailed and beautifully animated (seriously, look at all those wonderful frames in every one of Lion-Man's animations), all while preserving the original game's size ratio. The backgrounds explode with color and each character model is completely reimagined, resulting in one of the prettiest hand drawn games I've seen. And all with the push of a button (it's mapped to the R-trigger on the Switch), you can switch over to the original game's visuals on the fly. The same goes for the soundtrack. With a quick click of the right stick, you can turn the game's newly composed full band soundtrack into the 8-bit beeps and chimes that you remember (though with the new soundtrack available, I'm not sure why you'd want to. It's pretty fucking good). I played almost the entire game with Lizardcube's new coat of paint, but I found myself constantly pulling that R-trigger just to see how certain scenes from the original game looked. Mapping that quick palate swap to a button proved to be a stroke of genius that made me love the game even more.
One of the traps of remaining faithful in retro remakes will always be lifting decades old warts and all gameplay wholesale and trying to fit it into a modern context. While the controls feel mostly pretty smooth and tight, certain mechanics have aged poorly. The game's backtracking, form-changing mechanic, and overall difficulty are pretty firmly stuck in 1989. I wouldn't accuse the game's difficulty as being "cheap," but it can get "FUCK THIS SHIT" frustrating at times. I'd say that overall, the gameplay nets a positive rating, but it is not without its problems.
Even if the game was an unplayable heaping helping of dogshit, it would be of the most lovely looking and pleasant sounding heaping helpings of dogshit I've come across in recent years. I will be very interested in what Lizardcube have cooked up for the next go-round. If it's something this pretty but with a more modern approach to gameplay, I'm sure I will be quite thrilled with the result.