Just turning the bed in Marx's house into an HP refill spot (you know, the way the beds in Cave Story work?) would make it a lot easier to bear with, since a few unlucky hits wouldn't necessarily mean repeating the entire bloody section from the beginning. Picking up my first weapon, only to venture outside and almost immediately die due to having 1 HP and rather irksomely placed monsters that I couldn't kill in the process of falling upon (because they were directly beneath platform holes) was, I admit, enough to make me exclaim "This hack sucks!" (But apparently not enough to stop playing it. Yet.)
I don't know if the drop rate was tweaked, but I kept exiting and entering the area and killing the bat by the door, and not once did it drop anything, so I had no choice but to progress with minimum facilities -- and die, all to go through that long cutscreen all over again (assuming I made it through the monsters to return to it in the first place).
GUESS-how-much-I ... LOVE-randomly-EMPHASIZED-words ..... with-STACCATO-delays-in-TEXT-SPEED-now?