The Stone of Wisdom

I have played the original Stone of Wisdom on MSX. I enjoyed it, and I was very curious about what looks like a spiritual sequel, but it actually does not improve on the 1986 version. The graphics are nice, but it's just not very interesting to play. There doesn't seem to be any structure. You get a list of levels, and you can play any of them, without any indication about difficulty or anything. This nullifies the impression of progress and gives you the sense you're just wandering around aimlessly. You know how it's fun blasting open secret passages in Zelda? You notice a crack in a wall, you place a bomb there, and boom, you're in? In this, you have to hold down a button at random spots for several seconds and fail several times until you find it. This is tedious and uninteresting. Every time you die, and you will quite often, you have to wait for the Game Over screen to play its little tune, then you're allowed to hit a button. Then you have to wait for the Main Menu to do its little animation (no, you can't skip it), before finally being allowed to load your game. And on that menu, the cursor is placed by default on New Game, so if you don't remember to move it first, maybe…