Doing that thing with Umihara Kawase DS (Jun SE Kanzenban or some such jibber-jabber).  I’m a fiend for wire action games, and the PSX Umihara is probably the best of them.  The straightforward take on that is the mode I’m playing on the DS port, which also has the SNES original and a remix mode of Shun.

It is not trivial to describe progress in the game, if you haven’t played before.  Winning the game is nothing worth mentioning.  You’ll probably do it within your first hour of play, and you’ll only see a few fields in the process.  Less than 10 of them, out of the almost 50 in the game.

Most fields have multiple exits.  And roughly speaking, the harder the exit is to reach, the harder the stage it takes you to.  The numbering of the fields is a poor indicator of difficulty, and the various paths to clear the game don’t follow anything like a sane order. This map should give some sense.

What all of this means is that you decide how hard you want the game to be.  The easiest clear takes just a few minutes and you’ll never break a sweat.  Clearing via F55?  Beyond mortal ken.

It also means that you have to be fairly familiar with the game to interpret any accomplishment.  To know, for example, that reaching F42 is quite a feat.  I haven’t, by the way.

If you duck into practice mode from the DS menu, it shows all the stages you’ve reached so far, and the paths linking those stages.  There’s also a counter, XX/128 in the Shun SE mode, which I’m guessing is the number of different paths you can unlock.  It’s not the number of fields, because there are only 50-ish of those.  (EDIT: It’s not counting paths either.  See first comment.)

Once you’ve got some mojo working, reaching the deeper stages becomes the real goal, so raising that counter in the Practice menu is probably as good an indicator of progress as any, even if it’s nothing like linear.    And assuming I’m understanding it correctly.  In any case, I’m at 64/128 right now.  I’ve forged a fair bit further on the PSX disc, so I’m still in the scraping off rust phase.

I game-overed on F36, so that’s probably what I’ll work on next.  You can reach it via the alternate exit on either F0 or F7, and then the second exit on F35.  7->14->15 is easier than 0->11->23->14->15, if you’re looking to try it.