Shantae: Risky's Revenge - Director's Cut - 15/52

  I don’t think there’s a subject gamers love more than the subject of underrated video games.  With so many video games out there, it’s inevitable that some great games fly the under the radar in favor of something more popular or more advanced, only to resurface later with a massive community that’s basically been hiding underground this entire time.  Some of these games can even swing back around and go from a hidden gem to one of the most universally loved games of all time, like EarthBound.  Today’s subject is kind of a little bit hidden gem and a little universally loved.  It’s a series I’ve been following for years now and is very likely one of my favorite video game series of all time.  So please let us welcome back WayForward (seen here, for reference), as we talk about Shantae: Risky’s Revenge.

  

     Shantae: Risky’s Revenge puts you in the sandals of the titular heroine as she deals with her chosen profession, superheroing.  Shantae, you see, is half-genie, granting her a plethora of magic powers as well as the apparent responsibility that all genies have in this world, being the protectors of the various cities and towns.  Shantae, unfortunately, has the awful luck of protecting the one town that is attacked on basically a daily basis by pirates, zombies, and armies of sentient scarecrows.  In particular, Shantae is frequently antagonized by her arch-enemy, the villainous pirate Risky Boots, who in this particular adventure has decided to steal an ancient oil lamp from Shantae’s uncle and now Shantae must travel the world to stop Risky from unleashing the oil lamp’s hidden powers.  Along the way, she will meet a variety of colorful characters, go to a wide variety of interesting and appealing locales and fight weird and wacky bosses with her various magical genie powers.  So basically it’s Aladdin if Princess Jasmine was the protagonist and wore her slave outfit the entire time and was also Robin Williams.

    
At first glance, Shantae is very traditional platformer fare, with some vague Metroidvania elements thrown in for good measure.  You'll be doing the standard running, jumping and attacking you've grown to expect from the genre at this point and while Shantae doesn't offer anything especially new in these aspects, it's one of the best examples of the genre in my opinion.  Shantae has really well-defined movements that are easy to learn and master, and before long you'll be charging your way through all the game's various locales with relative ease.  What does make Shantae unique among her platforming colleagues is her belly dancing.  She's a very rhythmic person, constantly bopping and shaking to the beat, and through this innate sense of rhythm, she concentrates her magical genie powers to allow her to transform.  In other Shantae games there's a wider variety of transformations to utilize, but in Risky’s Revenge they narrow it down to the three best and most iconic.  There's the monkey, a smaller, more nimble form that allows you to run faster, jump higher, cling to walls and, by extension, wall kick.  The elephant, Shantae’s second transformation, limits your mobility greatly but in exchange greatly increases your power and gives you both a charge attack and a stomp attack.  And finally, there's the mermaid, which gives you worse mobility on land than even the elephant in exchange for flawless mobility underwater.  All these transformations are very fun to play and keeping it at three was a wise decision as at no point do any of them feel redundant, an issue we might dive into in future Shantae games.

     Shantae: Risky’s Revenge is a sequel.  Normally I try not to do sequels if I can help it, preferring to start a series at it’s beginning and work my way through the rest of it, either at later points of the year or in future 52s.  There are two exceptions to this rule, those being either I have already completed the previous game or games in the series in the past or the game I’m talking about can be talked about without knowledge of the previous game being a requirement.  And for Shantae’s second journey, all you need to know is that there is a crime-fighting, belly dancing half-djinn named Shantae who has has a previous encounter with a pirate named Risky Boots.  Risky’s Revenge also marks a major tonal and thematic shift between the obscure Gameboy Color original.  Namely, Shantae is now unabashedly a comedy because that’s basically where all platformer series go when they live long enough.

     Comedy is, indeed, one of the main selling points of the Shantae series.  It's gotten a reputation among its player base for being one of the funniest game series to ever exist and I cannot dispute this claim.  I was laughing throughout my playthrough of Risky’s Revenge.  The writing in this game is top-notch and never misses a beat, helped in large part by the fact that Shantae’s world is full of eccentric and larger than life characters.  If you're going to be playing this game for any reason, I'd say definitely do it for the humor.

     The pixel art in Risky’s Revenge is spectacular, which is very fitting given it’s Gameboy Color roots.  I'll admit, after the stream of games I've been playing recently, I've been hankering for some great pixel art and boy does Shantae deliver.  I've briefly talked about what kind of gamer I used to be in my post on Frederic: Resurrection of Music and I guess to expand on that, I also used to be the kind of gamer who asserted that retro games were just better than whatever I was seeing in the present.  Don't exactly know where that came from as by the time I was old enough to comprehend what was going on in a video game, it was the late 90s and the era of 3D gaming had long since arrived.  But that period of being elitist and nostalgic for games that came out before I was born left me with a deep love of sprite art and pixel art.  In particular, I love the environmental art in this game.  All the locales you adventure through are just so gorgeous and so lively and just makes the entire game pop.

     In a game where the protagonist’s main power is dancing, you would not be wrong in expecting the game to have a killer soundtrack.  And, much like everything else about this game I've discussed so far because this game is great and I love it, the soundtrack is fantastic.  Shantae utilizes its Arabian-mythology base to great effect in its soundtrack, combining the low strings and high brass of Arabic folk music with some great techno beats and it's just so good.  As with all game soundtracks I feel are important enough to specifically talk about, the link will be down below so you can check it out yourself.

     So at this point, you may be wondering, is there anything I don't like about this one?  Well, if I had to nitpick, the boss fights are pretty terrible.  The bosses in this game come in two flavors and both of them are pretty bad.  The first, less common type of boss is a boss with a very noticeable pattern, making for a very easy boss fight, but these fights tend to have a lot of invincibility periods involved causing what should be a very short boss to be unnecessarily long and tedious.  But that's nothing compared to the more common type of boss fight, the boss that has no consistency at all and just kind of expects you to tank damage.  I understand boss fights are pretty hard to balance, as it's very easy to lean into one or the other, but it's very unfortunate when an otherwise great game just has really bad boss fights.

     As well, the Director’s Cut version of the game is, in my opinion, the inferior version.  There's not a ton different between the original DSiWare release and the Director’s Cut version, and I'd honestly say you're better off with the Director’s Cut as it's way more available if you're going to play the game.  But the Director's Cut doesn't especially add anything to the game other than these weird HD portraits during character interactions that only serve to cover the gorgeous pixel art in the game and just don't mesh with the rest of the game at all.  The Director's Cut also locks certain things behind progression walls that weren't there in the original release and, while it's better for structuring, it still feels like you’re getting less game.  If you are able to snag the original, I'd recommend that over the Director’s Cut, though these are really minor nitpicks in the grand scheme of things and the game is still great in either version.

     Shantae: Risky’s Revenge is the best experience I've had with a traditional side-scrolling platformer since the first time I played through Mario World.  It's an incredibly charming and incredibly fun game that I would recommend to pretty much everyone.  I absolutely can't wait to get back to Shantae in the future, I love both the character and the world so much.  I hope you enjoyed this look at Shantae, and I'll be back next time with a game I probably should've beaten long before now, the Legend of Zelda.

Shantae: Risky's Revenge OST: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLy7z_XfPei9plHNc5VURedoi7NtUie3vS

Ethan's Backlog: https://www.backloggery.com/edzoologist