It's kind of like battletoads where it's one of those games that will kick your fucking ass if you don't know what you're doing after the first stage, and even might fuck your shit up if you hit stuff wrong when you know what you're doing. There's a lot more games like that but in terms of weird difficulty and being built pretty well mechanically that's one of the comparisons that comes to mind.
Also agree ont he tails adventure thing, but I just realized I never got around to completing that game back in the day when it was released on the various game collections on shit like gamecube.