Man I used to love the originals of these. Somehow I gravitated to all the more niche and hardcore games as well as stuff like this which translates pretty well. Even my cynical friend who doesn't buy platform games brought this up to me the other day.
The village mechanic seems very very similar to the Kirby & The Forgotten Land one, are the devs from this game (the original i mean) somehow connected with the Kirby ones?