Hooray! We've finally defeated Kashiwagi and can continue. I'm so pleased! There's a brilliant bit fighting whilst on the back of a huge dragon! It's really cool and the dragon can then be used to travel to places we've already visited which is fantastic. Next, we meet up with green-haired ninja girl, Yae. She's a great character to play, quite fast with a brilliant weapon which slices enemies in two but she's a bit slow to react. There's a fun bit of fish-catching to complete and a guard to defeat to enable us to leave the town and get Sasuke, the Mechanical Ninja! Unfortunately he has no batteries as yet. We then need Ebisumaru's magic power to shrink and enter the next castle. This is one of the funniest bits as he has to collect 8 sweets in the time limit without letting the giant see him or he gets blasted! The castle is brilliant with ghosts and a huge crane game to collect Ebisumaru's next weapon, the wind-up camera. This helps to see invisible stuff and solidifies the ghosts so they can be smacked! My favourite bit was hitting the giant billiard balls - madness! After another fairly easy boss battle, a new region opens up and Sasuke's batteries can be found in the dunes and on top of a tree, using the camera to reveal it. Sasuke can now be played and he is my favourite character. His weapon also slices up enemies but he's a lot faster and has a brilliant somersault jump. He also throws bombs and is so cute! Using Sasuke, we can bomb the entrance to the next castle stage...

This castle is quite large and maze-like with lots of nasty beasties ambushing us at every turn. We get Sasuke's next weapon which fires ice at enemies freezing them into ice blocks and then blowing them to pieces! Cool! The road to the boss features tricky jumps onto giant moving fish but again the actual boss battle is pretty quick and simple. A mysterious woman appears and reveals herself to be Kitty Lily. The Peach Mountain gang then retreat to Kyushu, allowing progress to the next level. We reach the bridge to Kyushu and the beautiful Omitsu for Oedo Town passes us and crosses the bridge. Suddenly, the sky goes all weird and Kyushu rises into the air and vanishes! Oh no! We're now forced to return to Oedo Town to get Goemon's magic power at the muscle training gym. This is very difficult and takes me ages to work out a strategy to stop the balloons being burst! Super-strong Goemon then pushes the metal block away so we can get to Festival Village and Mt. Fear. These places have the best music in the game - mmmmm... Mt. Fear is all snowy and the route up to the witch is blocked by a large stone. We have to reclimb Mt. Fuji for our second-level weapons - smart! Returning to Mt. Fear, Goemon aims a weedy thwack at the rock with his pipe and the whole thing rises in the air and splits into two! We climb up to visit the witch who asks us for 300 ryo(!) so we can speak to Sasuke's Wise Man. We don't have enough so have to go back to Oedo Town to get more money. Phew, we're tired of all this travelling back and forth! Finally scrape the money together and the capitalist witch conjures up the Wise Man for a very touching scene with Sasuke. He tells us to take the four miracle items to the stone circle - we already have three, yay!

Yae now takes her mermaid training and completes it first time - hurrah! Going swimming now! Find the other doors beside Mt. Fear leading to the stone circle and a lake. Yae dives into the lake and presses a red switch to open the gate. We swim through to the iced-over Japan Sea and find a metal submarine which we swim into. This is the next castle stage. It's quite tricky with lots of jumping to avoid burning lava but pretty short and straightforward. The boss stage is another robot so we're beamed into Impact to take on the mermaid robot, Thaisamba. All the practice it took to defeat Kashiwagi now pays off as we beat Thiasamba on our second attempt - yay!

The last miracle item is in Zazen Town. The collector Kihachi has it and will only swap it for his favourite food, cucumbers. The priest of the Golden Temple tells us to speak to his son and gives us the key to the training gym in Bizen. It's now Sasuke's turn to receive his magic power - JUMPING NIGHTMARE!! This is frustratingly difficult 'cos I find jumping onto little moving platforms very tricky - I hate it! After many many failed attempts, Sasuke reaches the top and has cool temporary jet propulsion! We can now reach the priest's son but he will only sell us the cucumber for 800(!!!) ryo. This is very bad and it is an extremely tedious affair to collect money in Oedo Town until we have a brainwave and go to the castle. The first room contains 6 pots, each with 4 ryo which regenerate when we leave and re-enter. Soon have tons of money and purchase our vegetable. Hooray! We have all 4 miracle items! We take them to the stone circle and are blasted into outer space.

The next castle has some nasty jumping bits like these blocks which roll over in the air. This keeps us busy for a while! There's a lot of searching and puzzles to overcome and most of us have to resort to our magic powers for some stages. The final key in this stage brings us to a very strange place. It's Kyushu, which is now at Peach Mountain and has horrid creatures which throw roses at us. If they touch us they stick and keep hurting - ow! We find Omitsu in a shop and she tells us to there's someone in the restaurant who can help us get to the next part of the Gorgeous Musical castle. We go in and see Sasuke's Wise Man! He is so annoyed at the loss of his car magazines(?) that he upgrades our weapons to level 3. We now enter the last stage of the game... It's obvious that this is the Peach Mountain gang's lair when we enter it to find pairs of legs dancing about in formation. The main puzzle here are walls of translucent blue which prevent us from getting to certain parts of a room and cause us to have to look for other routes. We reach the main castle area where Lily and Dancin' (that's the best name for an enemy ever!) are waiting for us to put on a magical show of singing and dancing. At the end they leave, reactivating the time bomb. We call up Impact for another robot stage...