>>14689123
First played it myself via Leifthrasir. Was pretty enjoyable, though admittedly I was playing on the new mode. Does wind up with a fair bit of content and boss reuse between characters though (admittedly some bosses are much more of a pain for certain characters than others; I remember that double Frost Ben being hell for Oswald), and in retrospect, being able to choose who you wanted to play as, rather than unlocking the characters in a particular order, would have been nice. Might try the original style some day, but I suppose that might involve a fair bit of unlearning how it felt.
Is it bad that I felt surprised (in a good way, I mean) to find Leifthrasir had no DLC of any sort made for it, shipping with all the content it was to come with, and even played straight off the disc if I remember correctly? I mean, we've been in an era where it seems every publisher tries to force some amount of DLC for extra shekels, and many games being too big to play as is without copying and unpacking the data to the system's HDD, that one kind of expects both.
>>14689141
>>14689139
Leifthrasir also includes both the original and redone modes, effectively making it both expanded HD rerelease and an HD gameplay remake all in the same package, helping satisfy both camps of people that liked how it handled prior, and those that thought it needed improvement.
I not sure I'd call the original an alpha, other than it taking until the PAL PS2 release to apparently iron out the slowdown the NTSC PS2 versions were noted as suffering from. I recall back when Leifthrasir was cleared for release, I saw a fair amount of anons that were fans of the original playstyle consider the refinements for the remade version to make the game too easy, or something like that (it's been a while now). Again though, Leifthrasir satisfies both camps in including both modes, and choosable from the start at that (no having to play some portion of the remake to unlock the original), something not every remake bothers to do.