One of the greatest adventure games of the 8-bit era, Zoda's Revenge is a fun, humorous overheadly-viewed action-adventure featuring progressive weapon collecting and upgrading, a sense of exploration on each time-traveled-into level, surprising appearances from various historical dudes (often depicted in large cutscene-style art), a feeling of puzzle-solving and maze navigation in its monster-filled dungeons and challenging boss fights. 

Zoda's Revenge is a 1st-party Nintendo-title (like Zelda, Mario etc) and is the sequel to Star Tropics.  Like its predecessor, the game is primarily a Zelda-styled action-adventure with a narrower focus on battling through Zelda-style dungeons and an omission of the open-world explorational stuff.  These dungeons are tied together with an RPG-styled overhead map view that emphasizes rpg-gameplay staples such as talking to everyone in the town and keeping an eye open for helpful secrets and things. 

The idea of the game is that the main character is sent on a time-travel adventure to recover tetrads and defeat the evil Zoda.  The time travel angle allows a good variety of locations and characters to meet and monsters to fight which are in the theme of the era they are found (dinosaur in the caveman era, evil scorpion in the wild west, etc.). 

Graphics =  8

The main character is tall and well animated, he fights similarly high quality monster spirtes, the levels are rendered well and in such a way that it is very easy to see how you're supposed to jump to navigate the levels and platform properly.  Also in addition to the action portions, the beautiful cutscenes that introduce the scenes and historical dudes really set the mood and move the story along.  Also, the game is packed with homages to other franchises, for example the health bar and file system is lifted directly from the legend of Zelda, and the map level seems inspired by Dragon Warrior or something, so even the graphical style of the menus help to remind the player that the game was invented in a light and fun mood, as though it is made by nintendo-game-lovers for nintendo-game-lovers. 

On the negative side, one thing that bothers me about the graphical presentation of Startropics games is the weapons.  In the first Startropics game it felt like less of an issue off the bat because you start with a Yo-yo, but in Zoda's Revenge every single weapon I can think of travels out and disappears as though it is a slow moving, disintegrating frisbee with infinite ammo even though the weapon may be a finite or singular item.  For example, when you get the knife from the bronze or iron age or whatever, instead of holding it in your hand and stabbing or cutting monsters, he rapidly throws spinny knives that disappear inexplicably after a couple feet.  The only weapons this sort of makes sense for are the sling shots or the psychic mind bullets.  While the weapons work from a gameplay perspective and seem to give the player a good balance of powerfulness (without too much powerfulness), I believe the game accomplishes this balancing at the expense of the graphical presentation of the weapons, at the expense of the realism, and also it comes across as cutting a corner presentation wise because its a lot easier to animate a dude throwing something and use that same animation for every weapon than it would be to animate differently weapons that function differently.  That is really my only graphical gripe. 

Sound = 9

The sound effects are great in this game, but the 9 is mostly earned by the catchy music.  I really love some of these tunes!  It is sometimes a little obvious that the tracks are on an infinite loop, but a lot of the time there is some attempt at diversity and throwing in different verses to the tracks, but mostly the music rises above the infinite looping problem with good sound design and catchy hooks that you dont mind hearing repeatedly while you progress through the game. 

Addictiveness 7 Difficulty 8

This game's difficulty curve goes a long way to keep players playing till the end in spite of some frustrations.  The game starts out challenging but in a way that welcomes beginners and is by no means impossible so long as you pay attention and make smart gameplay choices.  The game somewhat quickly but gradually becomes more challenging until the gamer feels very invested in the game by the time it starts to really get quite challenging.  This helps to compensate for the lack of replay value really and also the Zelda progress-by-getting items approach that doesn't really addict gamers by making them grind for experience or level up or gain new party members.  Things that may frustrate some gamers include a harsh hit-detection system that sometimes makes the player die rapidly when the bad guy is inside of him, if that makes sense.  Enemies don't exactly knock the player to safety and give em temporary invincibility, enemies feel no shame about getting some additional hits in at the expense of the gamer's peace of mind. 

Depth 7

I awarded this game a respectable 7 score, not so much in that it rewards repeat playthroughs, but the game is deep in the variety of locations and characters and monsters and weapons, and also that the game rewards a thorough examination of the map and also the dungeons to find hidden goodies. 

story 8

the game is packed with humor, historical dudes, and little surprises in the dialogue and things... i dont want to spoil anything, just enjoy the light-hearted adventure!  I didn't give it a 10/10 or anything since it's not hugely memorable like Final Fantasy 7 or anything, drama-wise.  Though you may feel bad for the little characters who send you on quests to attack the monsters. 

I recommend this game to fans of the Legend of Zelda games.  You will definitely enjoy this one.  Fans of the original Star Tropics probably don't need to be told about this one, because the Star Tropics series is unique and memorable enough that you would not play it and then not remember it and feel compelled to track down the sequels.  Speaking of which, let's start sending some psychic vibes out into the universe... "STARTROPICS 3 !  please make it for us!"  Now that I think about it it's a little strange there arent more sequels.  But I digress!  Enjoy this fun title if you haven't already. 

Awesome review, your review does everything right.

I'm not a big fan of these kind of games, but I might try it out someday.