#rpshantae

It was an alright game. I don’t feel bad about not having gotten a physical copy back in 2002. It wasn’t a great game. The flow of most exploration-based games (I really dislike the term “Metroidvania,” but I don’t have a better one than “exploration”) is that, as you go, you unlock new abilities and features to open up new areas and new gameplay. Like in Metroid, you get a morph ball, and now you can squeeze through small spaces. In Shantae, this is done in two ways: you unlock new transformations during dungeons, and unlock new dungeons by completing other dungeons.

In theory, this should mean that, by the end of the game, you have an impressive repertoire of transformations and abilities to tackle the endgame. In Metroid, this would mean having a superpowered suit and gun with a lot of health and missiles.

The problem with Shantae is that each time you want to transform, you gotta actually do the dance. And then transform back to her half-genie form before you can transform again. This is very cumbersome, and while it never feels like it takes very long at first, by the end of the game I was so sick of having to enter the commands for the dances that I was going out of my way to try to get through areas using the wrong form instead of switching.

Of course, once you have the harpy form, which can fly, you pretty much don’t need any other forms if you want to go backtracking through areas for heart containers or fireflies that you missed. And you’ll need to backtrack anyway since like a third of all items require the harpy.

But the final area and boss fight are terrible. The most frustrating areas of the game for all the wrong reasons. Areas you have to climb through small spaces to proceed, areas where you have to smash down obstacles, and areas with a shitload of spikes on the ground and nothing else. Meaning you gotta switch forms constantly. Then you fight the actual bosses, and one can be defeated using only monkey form and the other can be defeated using only spider form, both super easily.

I do like the appearance of Shantae’s monkey form. It’s super cute and I like how she leaps through the air with her arms and legs wide open, like she’s enjoying feeling the breeze on her groin.

Not that I should probably be writing about her groin, or any other part of her body, since official word from her creator puts her at 16 years old. Which blew my mind, considering how often they stick her in revealing outfits or no outfit at all. But then I remember the Senran Kagura series, and, as much as I hate the concept of moral relativism, I have to admit that Shantae isn’t that bad when you compare her portrayal to that.

I guess next up is Risky’s Revenge, which I played a bit on Steam when it first came out and then put aside. I think I got as far as murdering the girl’s puppy in front of her just to get extra money. I don’t remember getting further than that.

It’s surprisingly fun! It raises more questions than it answers, but it’s a good time. It’s also a little weird that they’ve decided to go all in on making Risky into a fanservice character? Like, did somebody on the staff feel like they were being held back with Shantae since she’s only like 16 years old, so they jumped at the chance to show Risky Boots nude between each and every stage? She’s in a bathtub, I mean, you don’t actually see nipples or anything like that, but she’s almost certainly naked in there.

It took me about 2:40 to 100% it my first time, when I was getting the hang of it, and 1:40 to 100% it the second time to get all the bonus images unlocked. The rewards were... unsurprising, but somehow disappointing.

But yeah. It’s a good time. I don’t want to spoil anything, because the Kickstarter message I got specifically asked me not to, and, I mean, hell, why not be nice about it, but if you liked the main game, pick it up. It plays quite a bit differently from Shantae, so it’s not just a boring retread, and is as reminiscent of Pirate’s Curse as you’d expect. No dash, though. Risky Boots never unlocks Risky’s Boots. She gets the hat and cannon jump, though. And special ammo for her pistol, and a goddamn grappling hook for some reason.

I have to say that a few of my plot-related problems with Pirate’s Curse were addressed by the good ending, which is good. They weren’t addressed to my satisfaction, but very little ever is. I suppose that they wanted to keep things short and simple, so just saying “yes, Risky Boots really somehow miraculously planned everything and it all worked out great for her and you basically got conned but don’t sweat it because it worked out okay for you, too” was good enough for them. I don’t buy some of the finer details, but I suppose I just have to assume that Risky Boots is a mastermind on the scale of Batman for this game. And only for this game.

Half-Genie Hero is probably my favorite of the four, which is good. I’m glad that the games got better as they went. I think WayForward has done a good job of getting better at making platforming games.

A lot of the Metroidvania stuff has been tightened up, and it’s easier to zip from map to map thanks to the world map screen and warp dance than ever before. Part of me misses the larger dungeons from Pirate’s Curse, but I don’t miss the way those dungeons would have easily-missed secret items and passageways in them. I’m the first to admit that Half-Genie Hero is a simpler and easier game than Pirate’s Curse is, but I’m okay with that.

One thing about both of those games is that, after finishing them, you unlock a new mode that lets you start the game with all of the items you get for completing areas. In Pirate’s Curse, this basically means that you shouldn’t need to backtrack to previous areas to get the heart squids or the dark magic at all. In Half-Genie Hero, it doesn’t mean that at all. I prefer how it was handled in Half-Genie Hero, because you still need to find a lot of the stuff that lets you explore the world.

As a quick aside, I haven’t played Pirate’s Curse using the unlocked Pirate Mode yet. I did play Half-Genie Hero in Hero Mode. Twice, actually. So I know Hero Mode and its changes a lot better.

In Half-Genie Hero, the maps open up to you as you unlock new forms for Shantae and get items to enhance those forms. She has a total of fifteen dances she can use, though she can only actually hold twelve at a time. One of those twelve can be upgraded, and two can be swapped out for transformations. There are eleven total transformations, but not all of them open up new areas, and not all of them get additional items that unlock abilities for those forms, and not all additional items that unlock abilities open up new areas. Let me just give some examples to clarify what I mean.

The first form Shantae gets is monkey form, which was also the first form from Shantae (the first game) and Risky’s Revenge. This lets her fit into smaller spaces, jump higher, run faster, and climb walls. It opens up a lot of new areas all by itself, though you get it so early that you don’t need to backtrack much to get the stuff you missed when you didn’t have it. It is further upgraded when you find the Monkey Bullet, an ability that lets monkey form fire off of walls in a straight line. There aren’t a lot of places where you need it, but there are a few. The Monkey Bullet can be gotten as soon as you have the monkey form, though.

A better example might be mermaid form. You have to walk right past it the first time you see it, since you need, um, I think elephant form? To get it. Once you have it, you can immediately go back and find a lot of new stuff you couldn’t before. But it’s really useful when you get the Mermaid Bubble at the very end of the game, which allows you to blow up underwater obstacles and find the last of the game’s hidden items. You also need it to finish the game.

Then there’s spider form, which I’m not sure you even need to finish the game. It’s only required to get a few things, and a lot of what it lets you get to can be gotten to using other forms. It has an upgrade item called Spider Venom which lets you fire a ranged attack, and it kinda sucks. I think it was only included because it was in the first game, which also had a spider form. That spider form looked more like a regular spider, though, and also spider venom in that game made the final battle against Risky Boots super easy. In Half-Genie Hero, spider form is a large human-spider monster that is not useful for combat at all.

There are three forms you can buy from a snake lady merchant who shows up in three stages, and none of them can be upgraded with additional items, and none of them unlock new areas. They’re totally optional. I’m pretty sure that the blobfish form is just a joke. The other two, dryad form and gem jug form, are pretty neat, but not necessary at all. I’ll be mentioning gem jug form again. You get blobfish form by trading away your obliterate dance, which just does damage to enemies on the screen, and you get gem jug form by trading away your warp dance, which lets you fast travel to different areas of the current stage and is incredibly useful.

But anyway, Hero Mode starts you off with five of the fifteen dances, and no items. The five you get are monkey form, crab form, elephant form, mouse form, and harpy form. This lets you get things a little faster than normal because you don’t have to backtrack as much, but it’s not a free pass to everything right away. You still need to get the Elephant Stomp, for example, and return to the first stage with it to get a piece of scrap metal that is required for the best ending. That’s just one example. You actually need to go back to the first stage twice in Hero Mode.

But, if you do it right, you don’t need to go back to the fourth stage at all in Hero Mode. You can grab everything there your first time through it. You gotta do a little bit of prep work for that, but it’s doable.

I played through the first time and took my time. I didn’t use a guide and finished with 100℅ of the items in 7:45. That’s pretty slow, but, to be fair to me, I literally fell asleep once while grinding for gems, and that cost me some time. See, there are places where enemies infinitely respawn, and you can stand Shantae in those areas with a spell on that will kill anything that gets close to her, and then with the Attract ability she’ll pick up everything they drop. So you can just do that and get a lot of money.

Actually, if I’m being honest, I missed a heart and a gallery key the first time I finished the game. This let me unlock the first hidden gallery image. I went back and found the missing items and then finished again, getting the second gallery image.

Then I played Hero Mode, and, after racking up a time of 1:45 before the final area, checked online to see what time I was trying to beat. What I found said two hours, so I said “fuck it,” got the last of the hearts and gallery keys, and used those gallery keys to get the Magic Tiara. The Tiara gives Shantae infinite magic, so I swapped my warp dance for the gem jug dance and gathered up about a thousand gems to buy the rest of the items from the town’s item shop. Then I gathered another thousand and bought what I could from the snake lady, then another hundred to buy the last of her stuff. Swapped the gem jug dance for the warp dance, and finished the game with 100% of the items in 2:45 (fun trick: if you have the Magic Tiara and the fully upgraded fire or lightning spell, just jump and cast one of them during the final sliding section and Shantae will hover over every obstacle). This unlocked two new gallery images. I figured one of them was just for finishing Hero Mode, so I immediately started a new game on the second save slot and finished with 65% of the items in 1:43. I could have done a lot better, but I was happy with that time. I wound up getting one of the same two images I’d gotten from my last playthough, so apparently you don’t need two hours. You can spend three if you want.

The speedrun image is of Shantae in a swimsuit, just like the last two games. The difference is that she’s still drawn in Half-Genie Hero’s cutesy chibi style, which makes it even weirder to me. I mean, look, I get it, she’s a very pretty girl. But she’s proportioned like a bobble head doll. I’m not into that. Maybe that’s just me.

I’ve mentioned before that what brought on my sudden interest in the Shantae series is that I’d Kickstarted Half-Genie Hero. I didn’t pay enough to get my name in the credits, so don’t look for me. I did pay enough for the soundtrack, though, and am actually listening to it right now. I really like the soundtrack. Not all of it, but more of it than what I usually like from video games.

It often feels like a Kickstarter game. I don’t know how to explain it, exactly. There are just a lot of little things. I remember getting the emails asking me to vote for which character design they should use for several characters. Again, though, I didn’t pay enough to actually vote. But that’s why Shantae’s crab form doesn’t have a shell. It could have, and then it’s defensive move, where it pulls a shell from nowhere and hides under it, would have made more sense.

I think Holly might have had her design decided by vote, but I don’t remember. I know Rottytops had her “zombie pit girl” outfit decided by vote, and it appears one time, in one cutscene, and then never again. It’s disappointing! It feels silly and wasted and kind of out of place.

As do a bunch of NPCs who appear once, to either give you an item or swap an item with you. There’s Adventure Man, who gives you a Vorpal Blade, and the Azure Knight, who takes the Vorpal Blade from you and gives you a Foxy Grandma hat in exchange. Those guys serve no other purpose. I have to wonder if they were Kickstarter-funded characters. Probably! There are others like that, too, and they don’t even seem to fit the art style of the rest of the game. They just look and feel very out of place. I understand that this is what happens with crowd funded games. It certainly happened with Shovel Knight. It even happened with Undertale. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.

The game also missed some of its stretch goals, and it shows. The only voice acting is Cristina Vee, who does several female characters and the vocals for the title/credits/first stage song. They really got their money’s worth out of that song. There was a stretch goal to get more voice acting, but they didn’t reach it. They also didn’t reach the goal that would have let you play as Nega-Shantae, an evil version of Shantae that appeared at the end of Risky’s Revenge and, briefly, in Half-Genie Hero. Nega-Shantae only shows up in a lengthy cutscene in Half-Genie Hero, and it feels weird and jarring. Shantae turns evil, her friends call out to her (for hours, apparently), and she stops being evil. Just that fast. Interestingly, Nega-Shantae has the exact same color scheme as Risky Boots, which I didn’t notice on Risky’s Revenge. But it doesn’t go anywhere, so it doesn’t matter.

WayForward has said that they might implement some of those original stretch goals as DLC if the game sells really well, but I can’t imagine it will. It’s just the kind of shit that kind of brings me down. Just because they wanted to make a bigger game, and had plans for a bigger game, doesn’t mean we’re ever gonna see it. Shantae is pretty niche. It will never sell like Shovel Knight. I am not holding my breath for a Shantae amiibo, or Shantae in Smash Bros. I mean, I guess I’d be happy if it happened.

So anyway, that’s it for me. I put about fourteen or fifteen hours total into Half-Genie Hero, after paying $25 and waiting three years, and now it’s done. I’d like to say I’ll replay it and the other games again someday. Maybe I even actually will. But who knows. I so rarely replay games these days, haha. I’m the worst guy!

This was, I think, the third day I’d played it. I used a guide as I went and finished the game with all 34 collectible items. Somehow, I even made it in three hours and fifty-six minutes. This means I got the “best” of the four possible endings, which requires that you finish in under four hours with all of the items. I squeaked in with only a few minutes to spare! I thought that was extremely funny, but I may be the only one.

I liked the idea of the unlocked hero mode a lot, which gives you more magic power for using items and causes you to take more damage. Obviously, I like the “bonus magic” more than the “extra damage,” but it wouldn’t be right to just get nothing but bonuses. I guess. I’ll be mentioning this again later.

I don’t know if I’ll ever go back and try to get any of the other three endings. The ending where you have all of the items and take over four hours would be, you know, pretty easy, of course. I’d need to start over again to get the other two, though, which require that I finish in under two hours without every item, and over two hours without every item.

Now, the only difference between the four endings is which of four images you get to see after the credits. Strangely, the “speedy and greedy” ending, the one I got, which sounds like it would be the best one, gets you a picture of Rottytops, a zombie girl who barely shows up and has very little character development. In the first game, she meets Shantae and agrees to help unlock a dungeon for her if Shantae can beat her in a race. If Shantae loses, Rottytops gets to eat Shantae’s brain. If you do lose, Rottytops just tells you that you can try again, so there are actually no stakes. It’s just keep trying until you win. Rottytops unlocks the dungeon by removing one of her legs just above the knee and ramming the exposed bone into a hole of the dungeon’s front wall, which causes the door to open up. She reattaches her leg and appears to be fine after that.

In Risky’s Revenge, she really only shows up fairly early on to help point Shantae to a dungeon, and then at the end to express remorse for having helped the villain off-screen when nobody was really paying attention. She’s not exactly a major character. So I’m confused about why she’s the ending image you get for clearing the game quickly and completely. I’m also not exactly a big fan of the sexy zombie girl anyway, you know? It’s weird. Even assuming she isn’t actually rotting, despite the green skin and stitches and ability to pull herself apart at the seams (to be fair, she only does that in the first game, so maybe it’s a character trait that was dropped later), it still makes me uncomfortable when a zombie is sexualized. Maybe that’s just my problem! And you can’t call me a bad person for my prejudices on this one!

Anyway, after finishing Risky’s Revenge, it was time to jump back into Pirate’s Curse, the third game and the one I was actually farthest in when I decided to start the whole series over to feel like I’m doing it right.

Last night I made it to the final island, with all but one item collected. I left the last item so that I could see both endings. Unlike Shantae and Risky’s Revenge, Pirate’s Curse has two different final bosses based on whether or not you’ve gotten all of the Dark Magic scattered around the different islands. In Risky’s Revenge, Risky Boots, the villain from the first game, uses a magic lamp to suck the genie powers out of Shantae and turn them into an evil genie that Shantae has to fight. This has the unforeseen consequence of scattering Shantae’s magic around a bunch of different islands, since Shantae can’t just, like, beat magic up until it is destroyed completely; she is apparently limited to beating magic up until it explodes and naturally gravitates to Risky Boots’ inhuman minions, the Tinkerbats. It’s just good science. This leaves Shantae with no genie powers, though she can still use some other types of magic, I guess.

By beating up those specific Tinkerbats and collecting the magic up in that same lamp from before, you can get a better ending. This is the canon ending used for the fourth game, Half-Genie Hero, in which Shantae has her genie powers again. I haven’t seen either ending of Pirate’s Curse yet, but, I mean, it’s not super hard to figure out what they have to be based on what I’ve already said.

But anyway, Pirate’s Curse is a lot of fun. It’s also much easier in many ways than the first two games, which is fine with my stupid ass. The gameplay is a lot faster, since Shantae no longer has to stop and dance and transform to use her unlocked powers. You just get new button commands that you use while running around.

There are also references going all the way back to the first game, which is fun for me. Like the three “gamers” you meet in the Village of Lost Souls, who are the three different opponents you can face in the gecko races of the first game. Apparently they died at some point!

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear (reasons are given, but I don’t find them satisfying), Risky Boots has lost a bunch of her own pirate gear and turns to Shantae for assistance. As Shantae finds the items, Risky Boots refuses to take them, and just lets Shantae use them to solve puzzles and fight monsters. Which is certainly useful, but I do think Risky Boots would be more qualified to do these adventures herself. Maybe I’m wrong, though. Maybe Risky Boots knows that Shantae has superior natural athleticism and core strength. You know, from all the belly dancing and hair whipping. She’s got to have, just, insanely powerful abs. Also, Shantae can buy things at the local store, and Risky Boots probably wouldn’t be allowed to after all the times she’s tried to destroy the town. It’s just not convenient.

But one thing that’s annoying as hell is that they didn’t redo all of Shantae’s sprites. Just some of them. And they don’t match. So when Shantae fires Risky Boots’ pistol, she wears a bandana and has a belt on one pant leg for some reason. But then, as soon as the firing animation ends, the bandana and belt vanish. This happens whenever she uses most of the pirate items. It just looks really sloppy to me. I don’t think it happens when she uses the downward stab with the scimitar, but with that one, her ponytail suddenly goes from pointing up to pointing down, and that looks sloppy, too..

They also added a little jacket to her character portrait, and redid some of her sprites to show it more clearly. Some of her sprites in Risky’s Revenge had the jacket (when she spins around when warping, getting a new dance, or finishing a level) and some didn’t (climbing a rope), but none of her character portraits did. In Pirate’s Curse, they were at least more consistent about that one. They also changed her pants for the character portraits, making them tighter and opaque instead of baggy and translucent, but her sprites still show the old pants.

I don’t know. That kind of thing really gets under my skin. I don’t care which design they go with. I just wanted some consistency. Maybe the game had a smaller budget than I thought, but I didn’t think it was a low budget title.

I mean, I guess I do care about the designs. I wouldn’t have spent so much time talking about Rottytops the sexy zombie if I didn’t. And you can try to tell me she’s just supposed to be cute, not sexy, but considering that she’s clearly got nothing under that torn up t-shirt, and that a human version of her is straining the buttons on her top, I’d say somebody on the art team was trying to make her sexy. And I guess that’s… fine. I’m not going to say they shouldn’t do that. But I am glad that Half-Genie Hero went with a simpler design for everybody that dials things further towards cute than sexy.

I don’t have a problem with sexy. I just have a problem with mixing cute and sexy. Kittens and bunnies are cute, but I don’t want to see sexy kittens or sexy bunnies. And yet, I do, all the time. It’s just a personal preference, I guess.

I guess I’ll probably get both endings to Pirate’s Curse tonight and move on to Half-Genie Hero tomorrow. Then I might go back and replay any one of them. Well, not the first one. It’s definitely the worst of the four so far. I have to assume there’ll be a fifth game in 2018 or 2019, just based on the pattern of Pirate’s Curse coming out two years after Risky’s Revenge and Half-Genie Hero coming out two years after that. But then, Half-Genie Hero took three years to develop, and I’m not aware of a fifth game in development right now. Doesn’t mean it isn’t happening, just that I’m not aware of it. Anyway, my point is, there probably will be a fifth game someday, and I have to stay open to the possibility that it will be the worst one. Like how Sonic the Hedgehog games suddenly started getting worse. It happens!