Power Blade: Power Blade - R2RKMF Edition

At last, Power Blade joins the ranks of its fellow hardcore NES action platformers from Natsume, such as Shatterhand or Shadow of the Ninja.
Though it had potential to be one of the top games of its genre thanks to the improvements originally made in the western localization, Power Blade generally suffers from the main character being too overpowered, making it a lot easier than you would expect from this type of game.

This hack increases both the intensity and the pace of the game by making the stages more dangerous, increasing the consequences of taking a hit, but also decreasing that of losing a life.
Instead of upgrading your boomerang blades, you'll be stuck with a single one constantly at maximum power. Enemies will do increased damage and knock you back on impact, but don't get frustrated - instead of returning to the start of a level, you will always respawn at the most recent room entrance.

A few other changes are added to ensure a tighter gameplay experience - the healing inventory item has been replaced by extra lives, and dropping from a ladder into the next room will no longer kill you. Some of the easily exploitable bosses have been beefed up a little, too.

Changes in v1.1:

- Increased damage scale. 4 hits from anything will kill you.
- "E-tank" rations are all gone. You'll find a new 1UP item instead where they were (the original game didn't have any)
- It only takes one hit to lose a power armor
- However, picking up a second power armor when you already have one adds another hit point
- Boomerang is always at max damage (red)
- Can't increase the number of simultaneous boomerangs at all
- You can only power up range twice
- Knockback always occurs on damage from any object, even while jumping or climbing stairs, and in "normal mode" (so expert only affects the time limit)
- Dying will respawn you at the last screen transition, instead of at the beginning of the stage, or the last informant
- Final Boss no longer sets a checkpoint at the beginning of that stage (respawn at the ladder before his door)
- Dropping from an ladder no longer kills you as long as you fall through the floor where a ladder is located making it faster to traverse certain areas, and avoids unintuitive cheap deaths
- Since it's now safe, you can now also drop down from ladders no matter how far down you are on the screen
- Fixed the grenade instakill bug on certain bosses from the vanilla game

Additional changes in v1.2:

- Lightning boss has improved aim and a less predictable shooting pattern
- Bee boss will spawn bees faster after losing some of its parts
- Giant robot boss has twice as much HP
- Sector 5 and 7 bosses reappear a lot faster when teleporting
- Much faster text speed in message boxes
- No difficulty selection in the menu

Database match: Power Blade (USA)
Database: No-Intro: Nintendo Entertainment System (v. 20180803-121122)
File SHA-1: 5D2AB4AF581D6B81B9A97A505798AE3B2F494D8A
File CRC32: 76663E66
ROM SHA-1: 293FB5EEC8DA879960E2C86FD612028394E965E9
ROM CRC32: 5CF536F4