I love this game, or I love what I've played of this game.
It's the best experience I've had in demistifying über polished graphics as a gaming necessity -- my first major playing experience was Final Fantasy IX, with all it's wonderful pre-rendered backgrounds and their agonizing mismatch with any other graphical element in the game; it's got a competent-to-great soundtrack; it sets up a large world while entirely avoiding epic fantasy/sci fi clichés; it has a special way of feeling shoddy and hastily put together and clunky to control and at the same time elegantly designed and organic and just good to play, just plain good-feeling to play and to get to know as a game. I have no problem with the abundance of power-ups and hearts; it makes the game feel generous and steers it away from masochore clichés that dominate a lot of harder games' mindsets.
It lacks in variation towards the later parts of the game -- which is why I've never gone all the way through. But overall it feels like a playground and it reminds me of the first moments I was excited by games, and it reminds me of trying to draw super-heroes in paint when I was ten years old, and I appreciate that a lot.