What cracks me up about Time Stopper is that there are probably just as many effective uses of it as there are uses that you think will be effective but actually aren’t.

I actually like that: every tool should have its good and bad aspects, so that there are different ways to do it and not one which is obviously far superior to all the others. Do you play safe through the beams and rely on your skill, Air shooter or Crash bombs to deal with Quick Man, or do you take the risk getting through the beams unprotected and then cheese away the boss?

I hate it in RPGs when there is some sort of über-weapon at the end with which every boss is a walk in the park, and far prefer the solution provided in Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow (the only newer Castlevania I’ve played where the hero is not a Belmont-style character): in that game, every weapon is a trade-off between speed, range and power, meaning that there are several ways of approaching it. This is for me a characteristic which is important for good games. That the Metal Blade fails this aspect completely and I still love MM II to bits is testimony to the greatness of the game.