[rant]
After I finally got past that damned final stage on my first playthrough of Curse Of The Moon, I put the game on hiatus for a while because that final level infuriated me so much. I finally decided to go for the alternate "evil" ending whereby I kill everyone around me. Or did I keep my wizard? I forgot. Whatever. Anyway, my point is, stage 2 was pissing me off royally to the point I almost threw my 3DS because I kept dying over stupid shit -- instead of jumping left or right, I always kept jumping straight up. And that's when I realized Inti Creates royally fucked up the controls for this game. And before you go and say, "They wanted to make it look and feel like Castlevania III," I'm going to put my foot down and say, "No. No. No. NO!" The controls in CV3 were a lot better than they are Curse of the Moon! Sure, Trevor couldn't jump onto stairs, but he still had a lot more control than Zangetsu does. It's so much harder to jump horizontally in this game than it was in CV3. The only jumping issues I ever had in CV3 were in the last clocktower when the screen auto-scrolls down -- I used to (keyword: used to) miss the jumps on that final gear. Nowhere else in the game did I ever have issues with jumping. But Curse Of The Moon? I game-overed on stage 2 just from jumps! It's not because they had great platforming level design (which, to be fair, the game does have some good platforming level design), but simply because Inti Creates fucked up the controls so badly! Yeah, I know CV3 only gives you 1 frame to correct your controls, but that 1 frame is significant! There is no window of opportunity in Curse of the Moon, so if you're not already walking left or right, you can't jump left or right -- that was not an issue in CV3!
[/rant]