Hello, friends and jerks, today I'm going to take a look back at a game most of you have probably never heard of, or either just don't care about. The reason I've decided to do this short Retrospective/Review/Splooge-fest for Shantae is because the game will finally be receiving a sequel via DSi this year and I've noticed extremely little hype for the game or just acknowledgment that it exists.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":670259,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"gbunfiltered,","session":"D"}']Anyways, Shantae was released for the Gameboy Color and developed by WayForward, who today you might know as the creators of Contra 4 and a Boy and his Blob 2009. The main problem that Shantae ran into on the market was that it was Gameboy Color game released one year after the Gameboy Advance launched. As you can imagine this lead to the vast majority of people completely ignoring the game but it still did garner somewhat of a cult following. Some small extras were thrown into the game when using it on a Gameboy Advance, I suppose to try and give GBA users an incentive to check the game out. The color pallet is drastically improved on the GBA and there's an additional transformation you can buy, the Tinkerbat dance, which is basically a combination of the monkey, elephant and spider transformation just for convince sakes.
[embed:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT3R412-9Zk ]
You're probably wondering now, just what the hell is a "Shantae"? Well "Shantae" is a cutesy half-genie put in charge of defending a small fishing port by the name of Scuttle Town. What almighty weapon does this magical genie use to protect this town you ask? HER HAIR OF COURSE! that's right in addition to being insanely sexy, Shantae's hair also doubles as a mass killing machine. Shantae can also use her genie dancing transformation skills to take the form of a variety of animals and beasts, when unlocked the transformations will allow you to progress to different locations similar in style to Super Metroid.
The story is very simplistic and doesn't go into too much depth. An evil pirate named Risky Boots attacks Scuttle Town and steals the newly invented Steam engine and of course wants to do bad things with it, so you have to stop her. You'll have to explore a variety of dungeons, find the relics necessary to run the Steam engine and keep them away from Risky Boots. The story is by no means the main draw of the game but it does a good job at going along with the gameplay and without being intrusive.
As for the game itself, Shantae is an exploration based 2-D platformer, or as the cool cats on the internet would call it, a Metroidvania. The game has a fairly big over world consisting of a variety of environments, towns and dungeons. Unlike other games similar in style to Shantae though, Shantae has NO MAP, while it certainly doesn't benefit the game much, it does to some degree add to the old school exploration elements of the game. Luckily you'll be able to find hidden "Warp Squids" throughout the game which allow you to teleport back to specific towns by using Shantae's magical genie dance moves.
The dungeons throughout the game are made up of puzzle solving, combat and platforming. The puzzles for the most part are very comparable to Zelda, not ridiculously complex but still enough to get you thinking. As I said earlier, you'll unlock a plethora of transformations throughout the various dungeons in the game. Transformations like the monkey will make you more agile and capable of jumping walls or later game transformations like the Harpy will give you the ability to fly. Bosses, Keys and power ups; they're all present in Shantae's dungeons. Basically what I'm saying is if you like Zelda games Shantae may be worth a look, in some ways Shantae feels like an improved version of Zelda II.
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Shantae without a doubt was one of the best handheld games of it's time, it shared significant similarities to games like Metroid, Castlevania, and Zelda while still having it's own quirks and improving over some the mechanics in those games like Castlevania II's night system. Way back in 2003, shockingly, a demo was released to the press for Shantae's next adventure "Shantae 2:Risky Revolution" or more commonly known as just Shantae Advance. The game seemed to play similar to the style of the original Shantae and featured a revamped graphical design that managed to be even more colorful than the original. Surprisingly the game also featured a 4-player battle mode that could be played with a single cart but not much else is known about it.
As the years passed on the information released for Shantae Advanced reached a screeching hault and although never officially announced it's assumed to of been canceled. In an interview in 2007 with IGN, Matt Bozon, the creator of Shantae said "It's a shame that Shantae Advance dried up…the overall effort was about 50% done. If we find that an opportunity exists, we could still release that in some form down the line. For now, it sits on my hard drive." Bozon also said Wayforward has constantly been experimenting with Shantae on a variety platforms including the Gamecube, GBA, DS and Wii in both 3D and 2D.
After countless years of waiting, Shantae fans finally received some long overdue good news. Shantae: Risky's Revenge was announced on September 15, 2009 for Nintendo DSiWare as a 3- part episodic sequel. Nintendo Power's November 2009 issue featured a 6 page article detailing Matt Bozon's reasoning for moving the game to DSiWare and also giving some information about the game itself. According to Nintendo Power's November 2009 issue having the game released on DSiWare was essential to getting a sequel to Shantae released, Using these service allows WayForward to create the game without being forced to hunt for a publisher.
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As for the game, the screenshots displayed in the November issue show off Shantae's beautiful looking graphics and also a new mermaid transformation available for Shantae. The game was given a release date of Q4 2009 in that same magazine but it was extended to Q1 2010 back in December. I think we can remain certain that Shantae: Risky's Revenge will get released, but hopefully the game manages to gather a bit more attention than the original and the series will finally kick off into the major franchise that it deserves to be.
