GAME REVIEWS: Shantae - Risky's Revenge
After that Depression Quest review, wherein I reviewed a game wherein we tried to address depression and the game itself wound up falling short on multiple levels, I felt it was sort of depressing, which means it's time for some levity. So it's time to throw off my shoes, scream "to hell with it," and break out the big guns - it's Shantae time.
If you can find a copy, this game is amazing.
Shantae is a hugely under-rated series that began on the Game Boy Color and started out with a late entry, but arguably one of the best-looking, most-playable, and overall highest-quality games of its type. Whereas many small-dev-team games wind up in over their heads, Shantae was always a series that took its time and threw everything at being the absolute best it could be - and it shows - the games are beautifully-animated, fun as all hell, and graphically at the top of their field. It got game of the year for the GBC when it came out, and had some of the highest overall reviews of any game for the platform. All very impressive for a tiny IP with a small budget. A sequel was announced, and then dead silence occured.
In the case of Shantae: Risky's Revenge - the game we'll be reviewing today - the game was originally developed for Game Boy Advance, but plans were temporarily scrapped because despite the original game getting top-score reviews and being generally considered one of, if not the best game for the Game Boy Color, the IP was just too small to be considered by most publishers - and so the game languished as the Dev attempted to find a publisher for this little IP that could. The game was eventually backed by Wayforward, those cunning sods who made Contra 4 and Double Dragon Neon, and the game finally got released as a DSiware title in 2010. One might expect the Duke Nukem Forever paradigm to play out here, since a second Shantae game had been in development hell for ages.
The exact opposite happened. Shantae: Risky's Revenge is a fantastic game.
You can't really see it here, but there's stuff going on in the background, and you can jump into said background.
Shantae: Risky's Revenge shows just how amazing a quality 2D game can be. A solid little game with a whole lot of heart, the game involves you taking the role of the titular Shantae, a half-genie, half-human cross-breed. Appointed as the guardian of the port town known as Scuttle Town, Shantae fights off monsters and periodic attacks by a megalomaniacal pirate gal known as Risky Boots, and that's really all you need to know (so if you missed the first game, you needn't worry). When Risky winds up attacking the town (again) in order to steal a magic lamp, Shantae has to get it back. To do so, Shantae will need to use her traditional means of offense (using her massive ponytail as a whip), as well as magic items and the ability to use magic belly dances to shape-shift into other forms to solve puzzles or bypass obstacles. Treasures and secrets lie all across the game world, in true Metroidvania style, and are often hidden away quite cleverly.
Shantae games are noted for their solid graphics that show less raw power and more excellent style. The visuals are sharp, crisp, and colorful, with good use of parallaxing and background effects. Animation is fluid and fast; the game runs extremely smoothly (way more than its trailer might suggest), and the gameplay is fast-paced and action-packed. The boss fights in particular are frenzied affairs where you need to manage yourself well in combat to defeat enemies and use everything at your disposal to bring them down. All of this is done with a lot of careful balancing - Shantae: Risky's Revenge is tricky but not too difficult, full of secrets but never inaccessible, and having a lot to offer without weighing anything down. The controls are absolutely fantastic and completely customizable on the new PC Version on Steam, but I'd definitely recommend a Controller if you have one to spare - the game plays much better with one.
The music matches up well, including really moody, atmospheric songs like the game's Desert music, sinister-as-all hell themes like Risky's theme, and more upbeat, energetic songs like the Scuttle Town theme, and intense, high-paced themes like the boss music. The audio is solid and spot-on, with everything in it sounding appropriate and on-point, from Shantae's hair-whipping to the tinny death sound of the Eyebugs. In fact, really only one sound effect absolutely caught me off guard for how jarring it was - the huge impact of one of Shantae's alternate forms' bubble attack, and that's my fault, because I was expecting a little bubble and not something with the impact of a fricking rocket launcher. The game has a little bit of voices, but not much - mostly Shantae's groans and yelps as she falls in holes or smacks enemies with her hair.
Shantae talking to the Squid Baron, who earleir was a boss.
The true gem of any Shantae game, and one this game has in spades, is the characterization and humor. Shantae is a deeply-sympathetic, incredibly well-rounded heroine, and one that honestly has deeper characterization than many other series' protagonists. As a half-genie, she has personal doubts about her abilities, especially given that Risky's gotten the better of her a few times, and she's repeatedly shown to have a number of flaws, including a deep naivete and a lack of willingness to accept help that winds up being a major centerpiece of the plot later on. Shantae herself has a number of humorous upsides, though - she's competent, flirty, fiercely intelligent, enjoys helping others, and is hilariously genre-savvy. She's completely willing to break the fourth wall if necessary, and the game itself has gotten the kind of laughs from me I normally reserve for the likes of Far Cry: Blood Dragon. Watching her interactions with other characters is practically worth the price of the game in and of itself - the writing is that good.
The supporting characters in the game truly make things shine, from Skye, Shantae's best friend and mentor, who raises warbirds, to Rottytops, a mischeivous zombie who continually jokes about wanting to devour Shantae's brains and tends to wind up being as much a hindrance as a help to Shantae on her journeys. Even relatively minor characters in the game have hilarious lines and really lend a lot to the insane world that is Sequin Land, fleshing it out way more than almost any other contemporary setting for a game of this type. This is something that carried over from the first Shantae game, and into the just-came-out-yesterday Pirate's Curse as well (Spoiler Warning: It's amazing, and will be reviewed soon).
It needs be noted that whilst Shantae: Risky's Revenge is loaded with humor and colorful imagery, it also has its darker moments, and the series as a whole is one of, if not the only series that I'm currently aware of that can pinball between seriousness and hilarious - and back again - without any loss in tone from the change of pace. The final act of Shantae: Risky's Revenge heavily centers around Risky's plan coming to fruition, and what it means for Shantae herself results in one of simultaneously the most genuinely uplifting and touching closers for a game I've seen in quite some time, leaving the door open for a sequel whilst at the same time offering quite a bit of closure in and of itself. There's multiple endings in the game as well, and there's a variant costume in the PC version, which means that the replay value for this game is actually quite high.
The game overall has very little to complain about. Some of the puzzle solutions are a bit off at first, but it's nothing a player can't figure out with trial and error. The endings themselves are heavily focused on a player's ability to find *everything* and still get in at under the time limit, but this is nothing new to a Metroidvania vet. About the only real complaint I have about the game is its length; It's somewhat short for what it is, and by the time you've opened up the ability to fully explore, you're practically at the game's end, but the various endings and heavy replayability cuts this down a bit. If you're a fan of this genre, it's a really hard game to find fault with, especially given its many nice features.
All in all, this is a fantastic game, especially for fans of this style of game. For fans of the series, the game itself is practically a must-have, and the game's coming out for PC makes it a great introduction for anyone to the series as a whole. All-in-all, I'd argue that it represents the creme de la creme of what small-dev gaming can accomplish, achieving much of the skill of games with much bigger dev teams, and showing care and polish throughout. It's definitely worth playing.