As one of the people behind the LADX disassembly, I'm very curious about this.
I launched the game (it runs under macOS + Wine), and indeed it looks exactly like the original… until the improvements start showing up: large view over many screens, subtle shadows and light effects, some fog in the Forest, smooth camera, auto-save…
The feeling of the controls almost perfectly match the original. Even mini-games are here (fishing, trendy game). The soundtrack also matches the original.
So the end result feels very modern: enjoyable to play, with nice 2D+ graphics. It feels a bit like the official Switch HD remake in terms of quality-of-life improvements – except with pixel art instead of 3D.
But I'm also blown-off by the technical side of things. This is an *entire* reimplementation of a massive game; a massive amount of work. A quick count gives around 100 000 lines of code. Every object, entity, mechanics, physics behavior, every quirk and effect is re-implemented from scratch. It even has a built-in world editor, and a scripting engine.
In short: this is amazing. Grab it.
And @linksawakeningdxhd, if you're around, come hanging out in the LADX disassembly Discord! I have a ton of questions on how you achieved this.