After playing through Shantae on GBC, I decided to push on to the sequel. Unfortunately the game doesn't match up to the original. First of all, casually playing through it, I clocked in just under 4 hours to beat the games which felt pretty short in comparison to it's predecessor, and in terms of design, it felt the same. Less use of the transformations (and less of them in general), and I wasn't particularly interested in collecting the magic jam, with only 3 additional hearts to be found. For the most part, dungeons were less interesting to boot. After all this it didn't help when the final boss battle glitched at the ending, leading to the boss not dying and transitioning to the final ending cutscene with the boss music and sfx still playing, leading me to question whether I had got a bad ending.

The game is a decent platformer but I highly recommend playing the original to get a feel for what the franchise can be.

A step-up AND down of the original.
The game looks a lot better than the GBC version, obviously. I really like the sprite art for the game and it looks really alive and vibrant.
The story is about, well, Risky's revenge. She steals a magic lamp and after Shantae is fired from the job as Scuttle Town's guardian, she sets out to stop Risky from conquering Sequin Land. I like to keep all my little "reviews" spoiler-free but I really like how they go with the story and the ending I thought was really interesting.
For gameplay, I think it's a bit weird how shorter this game is compared to the original. Maybe it's just me, but I feel like there was more to do in the original. I liked the connected world a lot, and to ditch it for the weird grid and going through the foreground and background was a bit weird to me. I basically 100% the original, except for the fireflies, but in this game I didn't bother going for all the jelly and only got all the heart holders because there was only, like, 3. However, the GREATEST change this game had was when you fall down a pit, (which it tells you where one is, useful!) YOU ONLY LOSE HALF A HEART! This was easily the greatest pleasure. Going back to negatives, It feels a bit sad that they cut out all the others towns from the original besides Scuttle. Also there was only 3 dungeons compared to 4, technically 5. But what annoyed be the most was the lack of a bathhouse. It was annoying not having a place to refill my hearts when I needed it. Overall the gameplay and aspects of the world feel a bit slimed down compared to the original, but I can mostly excuse it because it was the first game and it's fine if they want to change some things.
The music is very good. The GBC original was already good for a gameboy game, but hearing this is next level. Especially with hearing new versions of songs like the boss theme was very enjoyable to me.
Overall, I like this game but I think I would rather replay the original than play this again. I'm excited to see how future games improve!

The concept of this game - Metroidvania where you play as a magical genie that attacks with her hair and can transform into animals - is really solid. Too bad the actual game is a fairly slow, plodding pile of nothing with weak combat and weak level design that spins its wheels in the mud for 90% of the runtime until all of the cool plot twists happen in the last room in the map and then the game just ends.

I've been told that Pirate's Curse is The Good Shantae Game so I'm definitely giving that one a chance. I've also been told that this game had a very troubled dev cycle, to which I replied "Yeah, I can tell".

On the trains and planes and automobiles (I did ride a bus and a car or two) I had to take for my vacation to America, I decided to bring my 3DS and try and clear through some of my backlog on it. I brought some really good stuff: The 3rd Chibi-Robo game I was so excited about, Shovel Knight: King of Cards, plenty to keep me occupied. And instead I decided to play through this game I've owned more or less since it came out, and it was a good choice thematically for a year I've given second chances to so many games. Not sure it was such a good choice as far as having fun goes though XD. It took me a little over 4 hours to beat, but just because this was a little "longer" than Metroid Fusion, assuming it was in anyway close to better is a pretty generous assumption XP

This is a metroidvania and was the first in the last decade's series of Shantae revivals (coming out in 2010). All I'd known about it back then was that Shantae was a well-thought of but very rare GBC game, so a new entry in it sounded fun. I picked it up and played it and eventually just got stuck because I couldn't find where to go next. I did manage to get through the rest of the game this time, but the problems I identified ten years ago are all still certainly here.

First, in regards to my getting lost, the game has a map that is at best, functional, at worst, confusing. It's a very general overview of the entire world map, but the myriad of caverns and shortcuts between areas aren't on it, and you can't mark anything on it. A lot of knowing where you are is just as much down to your own memory as it is to that map, and if you aren't gonna play through this game in one sitting, you're gonna spend a LOT of time wandering around and backtracking to try and find that one cave that has a necessary power up in it.

Of course the game already has a TON of backtracking. The game's map design is really uninspired, at least the overworld. The caverns and three dungeons are mixes of platforming challenges and combat challenges, but the overworld is largely just flat/somewhat flat horizontal side-scrolling levels you'll need to trudge through over and over because the warp spots in this game seem like they go out of their way to be as inconvenient as possible. This game has a lot of padding for its content, and the bad overworld is one of the prime sources of that.

The combat and gameplay themselves are alright. I'm glad this game got sequels, because the way spells and your hair-whip attack function are really solid. It's mostly just that they have very little interesting to act in tandem with because the enemies have pretty poor variety despite the few bosses being alright fun. You gain the power to transform into a monkey, an elephant, and a mermaid in order to access new areas and do platforming challenges. They're a pretty good diversion from the tedium of the overworld and they control well too. Even the monkey's wall climbing is more generous and fun to play than it very easily could've been.

The story isn't too complex. Shantae, the half-genie hero of Scuttletown, goes to a show where her relic-hunting uncle is unavailing his newest discovery. Risky comes in to steal it, and you need to find the three magic seals (but not the fun, barky kind TwT) in order to get it back. It's nothing special or memorable in and of itself, but the NPC dialogue is really something odd. There are a lot of genuinely good, quick jokes, I got a chuckle out of, and a lot of them are of a nature that makes me wonder how this game got an E10+ instead of a T rating XD

The presentation is good for the most part. Animations are pretty and fluid, and it's probably one of the things the game does better than most other things. Music is alright, and the character portraits don't look amazing (and I'm not a huge fan of how sexualized the female character design is in the first place, but that's just me).

Verdict: Not Recommended. Maybe this was a serviceable experience for the money back in 2010, but these days there is really no reason to hunt this game down on the couple re-releases it's had since the DSi days. It is a painfully below-average game with TONS of padding that is barely memorable beyond the novelty of being another Shantae game after so so long. There are piles of better Metroidvanias you can get for as much or less money, so there is no reason to waste your time with this unless you just have to see EVERYTHING the Shantae series has been.

The Shantae series is one that defines itself by its aesthetics. The first game is not particularly unique in how it portrays itself outside its own scope: it's colorful and impressive, sure, but it doesn't make much of a name for itself. It feels very standard in the stable of 2D platformers, as it goes for a style that most were doing at the time. It sticks out only because it's on the Game Boy Color. Risky's Revenge continues this trend. It's very impressive for a DSi title with its detailed spritework and how many frames each animation has, but this time it's even more apparent since it gets lost on a console with other great looking platformers - often other WayForward affairs, such as Adventure Time! Hey Ice King, Why'd You Steal Our Garbage? (which is a game I cite more often than you might think.)

However, since I've already gone into detail about Shantae's presentation on its own, I'd like to discuss a different aspect of it: how the gameplay doesn't reflect the ideas presented here very well at all. Shantae is supposed to be bubbly and charming and "sexy", right? Well, how does the game actually achieve making you feel like you are Shantae?

It simply doesn't. Movement is stiff and rigid, and so is attacking. You have to commit to your hair whip, and it's remarkably easy to get hit. Running takes time to stop from, transforming takes going through a long animation. It's a much more methodical playstyle than the game would have you believe. This isn't inherently a bad thing, but again, it doesn't gel at all with what the game wants you to think it is. Scouring the map for items and memorizing where everything is (which is not particularly difficult due to how claustrophobically small the map is) is not fun. It all ends up feeling like busywork with a restrictive moveset in a barren and charmless world.

For a point of comparison, let's look at the classic Sonic games. This is an incredibly simple example: Sonic is meant to be fast and cool. So, he has levels full of ramps and different things for him to interact with that emphasize his speed. Shantae is supposed to be fun and sporadic, but she's instead monotonous and calculated in her playstyle. Her different animal transformations - the monkey comes to mind the most here with how agile it is - make up for this a bit, but only under specific circumstances, and end up being useless in every other situation due to their lack of reliable attacks.

Shantae's presentation screams "I'm fun and mechanically spunky," but her gameplay doesn't reflect that at all. It's jarring for a game that's trying to convince you of how bouncy and light it is to be so mechanically plodding.