Am I Killing? Am I Dying?
Weaponless Athena is a pretty sad sight. She vainly kicks with her stumpy little leg until something better comes along, which oftentimes ends up being not much better at all. Many of the weapons (foot, club, hammer, sword) have a pathetic reach and require fairly strict timing to hit anything before it hits you. To make matters worse, its not very clear that you've hit something, or that you've been hit. Instead of a hit flash or animation, the sprites are nudged around as your life force rapidly drains. Mitigation: none.

Relentless Damage
One of the nicer features of most any platformer is that once you take damage, you are afforded a bit of invincibility, just to keep you from getting instantly obliterated by a projectile or a swarm of enemies. SNK neglected to include this. What this means is that you can be robbed of most of your armor and a good chunk of your life by a single well placed arrow or spell. If you're armor is less than excellent, well, you're probably dead then. Mitigation: none.

Oh, You Didn't Know That?
Obscurity in a game can be quite cool. That random side quest that leads to a totally unnecessary but snappy-none-the-less item. The alternate way of clearing a stage that can really only be found by accident. However, nonsensically requiring that you must have a seemingly-unrelated item in order to pass an area or beat a boss is just not cool. Especially if they'll let you try and pass that area or fight that boss anyway, resulting in certain death. If you do happen to proceed correctly, chances are that you were just plain lucky and are none the wiser. Such is the case with the boss of World of Hell, which cannot be beaten without Pandora's Box in your inventory, and to a lesser extent, needing the right Harp to get out of World of Labyrinth. Mitigation: none. Oh wait, blind luck helps.

Nope, Can't Do That
Imagine if Mario required a helmet to break blocks in SMB. If you died, you lost that helmet and needed to find another one before you could break blocks again. Perhaps, instead of a helmet, you find a nice painters cap, which looks mighty stylish, but doesn't allow you to break blocks. It could be a tad frustrating. Such is the case in Athena. Breaking blocks is fundamental, but a good percentage of the available weapons can't do that. So goodbye power ups you so desperately need. Some weapons break blocks below you when you duck, others pass right through them. Run along, Athena, you will never know what treasures they hide. Mitigation: get the right weapons and keep them.

We'll Take That Armor Too
One of the aforementioned relentlessly-damaging arrows hits your ass and you start taking damage. Good thing you have that fancy golden armor. Oh… but the armor gets worse as you get hit, so the damage actually accelerates. This "feature" can also inexplicably reduce the power of your weapon as well. If you managed to stay alive, you now have 2 life blocks, no armor and a blue hammer. Mitigation: don't get hit.

When We Say Game Over, We Mean It
More a relic of the days when arcade game developers hadn't honed maximizing profits to a fine art, you can't continue after running out of lives. This wouldn't hurt too much if this were say… Pac-Man. But if we were to imagine playing this game as originally designed (dropping coins into it at the local arcade) then it can only be described as brutal. Assuming you are well-off and have a lot of free time, your first 10 bucks or so goes to getting to the first boss (the Mean Tree). Every dollar after propels you forward at a glacial pace as each new level pummels you with its nonsensical design. Eventually you've spent enough to buy a good NES game. Mitigation: 30 hours and a trust fund.

I like to imagine that Athena is the antagonist in this game, invading wildlife preserves and ransacking caves with delicate ecosystems. The unicorns and Grimaces are just defending their families. That way, every time she dies it's a victory for richeousness and freedom. In the end, however, I think it's clear that the only bad guys here are the former SNK employees who foisted this mess upon us.