I 'd like to add my voice here to those asking for an easy mode or an easier save system. More checkpoints and restart from checkpoint!!!!
The game is otherwise lots of fun, but what happens is that I will give up after an hour of trying the same area over and over and over and switch to more rewarding games.
I have a lot of other great games to play so the time I can give to Volgarr is not the same as I would have had when I was a kid & Ghosts n Goblins was the only game worth playing in my local arcade.
I hate buying games that place ridiculous demands for completion. The arcade way of doing this was NOT about fair challenges , it was about making the most money out of players pouring coins into the machines to try again.... Some "traditional" things are best left behind.... People are confused about classic game design if they think it was about challenge. It was about either sucking more money out of the player in arcades- or keeping the kids occupied for as long as poss in the consoles, to justify the games' high prices to the parents.
The people here and elsehwere who turn to mockery and personal attacks and call "blasphemy" or similar when they hear of any requests for an easy mode are just as bad as the "casuals" they are always denouncing, if not worse. They need to feel like they have achieved something at beating a really hard game that others can't beat.... it's beyond petty, it is juvenile. Both groups ruin video games!
Zauron: Let's also touch on the psychology of frequent checkpoints. Legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto talked about how having a checkpoint just before a difficult spot can be much more frustrating to players than having them spaced out more. Having spaced out checkpoints allows the player to learn and master an earlier section, and re-gain their confidence and calm their nerves as they go back through familiar territory before they tackle the difficult part again. Being stuck right at the difficult spot, hammering against it over and over again, can make for a much more frustrating experience.
Wrong. This design is about artificially padding out the playing time of the game. It has nothing to do with lessening player frustration and Miyamoto doe not care about that. It is much more frustrating hammering away at entire sections or levels over and over again, just to get to the boss so you can try out a diffrerent approach. Learning the boss's patterns also takes much longer this way, since you have to fight other tricky enemies every time before re-trying the boss. In my case, and for many others , the frustration is not about being killed by the boss, BUT HAVING TO REPEAT THE SAME SECTION OVER AND OVER AGAIN JUST TO GET TO THE BOSS.
We are happy to fight the boss over and over again, if it's not a cheap boss, but repeating enitre sections of the game just to have another go is just desperate grinding.