Shantae: Risky's Revenge - Director's Cut

Even if you already own this game on the Nintendo DSi or 3DS, Director's Cut has more than enough extra features to keep you coming back for more in this short-but-sweet entry in the Shantae series. Expect the characters to dance around the fourth wall and keep you interested in the story! The whole experience is very well polished. You can't beat this kind of professional quality artwork in a video game for its price; more so if it's on sale. Overall, I would gladly recommend this game, if only to experience Magic Mode, the Mermaid Form, and give someone better context for Pirate's Curse's story. Short or not, it's another humorous Shantae experience to add to your library. Pros: • Colorful and lively animations, artwork, backgrounds, and characters. Even the enemies can be charming or cute. • More awesome music by Jake Kaufman. • Three adorable animal forms that are faster to access than in the first Shantae, while keeping her iconic dancing animations intact. • Tongue-in-cheek humor with a mild awareness of the fourth wall. • Tons of upgrades that can make each playthrough a different experience. • The Squid Baron is an awesome reoccurring character. • A large overworld with lots to see! • If you look for it, many of the NPCs have hilarious things to say. Cons: • Most of the bosses are damage sponges. (The final boss is the worst offender.) • While the layered structure of the overworld is neat, it can be a little confusing on the first playthrough.

Shantae is back with a vengeance! After 8 years Shantae finally got a sequel and it was worth the wait. Shantae: Risky's Revenge continues right after Shantae. Risky returns and Shantae must stop her again. The gameplay is still Metroidvania but now it adds where you can hop into the background. Music is still good and the story is as simple as you would expect. The game is easy and short. It can be completed in about 2-3 hours. All in all a great Shantae game.

It's a nice little platformer. Very cute, and the art-style is lovely, if you like the retro-look (which I do). It's also generally fun to play. The characters are charming, and the dialogue occasionally funny (it's not 100% top-notch wit, mind you, but it's pretty decent for a computer game). It is undeniably short; 5-6 hours for a "normal" playthrough (glitch-less speedruns have been done in around an hour), but that's not really a critcism per se; just bear it in mind when deciding how much you're willing to pay for it. You can only save a pre-determined checkpoints, which is normally a big deal for me; I often play very short sessions and resent loosing progress if I quit. But the checkpoints are consistently close together; you'll never have to wait more than about 15 minutes at the most for one, so this is one game where that didn't frustrate me too much. My biggest complaint I suppose would that the game is really pretty easy. There is no very hard platforming (the very hardest section in the game took me about 20 attempts to complete, and that was the most by a large margin), but the platforming difficulty was about right for me (I'm rubbish at platform games, though, I should say). If you fall into a pit, you respawn at the entrance of the current screen, losing 1 hit; if your fall takes you to 0 health you die and respawn at the last save point. This is pretty generous, and does nicely avoid a problem you get it some platformers where enemies do 1 point of damage, but falling into a bit kills you instantly. The real problem, though, is the combat, and especially the boss fights. You effectively start with about 12 hits (3 hearts, but most attacks only deal 1/4 heart). Over the course of the game you can double this to 24. You can also carry around up to 9 (very cheap) healing potions that restore all health. So you have effectively around 200 hit points. This makes cheesing any boss fight trivial- just drink healing potions until the boss is dead.

This is a direct sequence to the original Shantae for GBC, it's an adventure platformer where you explore Sequin Land in order to collect itens to prevent the villain from being able to use them to unleash a powerful weapon. It can be enjoyed even if you didn't play the original, and it improves on it in almost every way. The music is upbeat and fits the environment very well, just like the original, and some of the tracks are modified versions of the ones from the first game, which made me quite happy to hear them again. Graphics are incredible and create a gorgeous scenario that just feels great to explore, props to the artists of this game, they did a fantastic job. The story and characters are simple but charming and engaging, and will probably give you a laugh or two. The gameplay is where is stumbles a little. It is still a solid metroidvania with many areas to explore, and it does a great job at slowly opening up and integrating newer areas of the game as you get more powerful and unlock new itens. The bosses feel more challenging and fun to play, with new ideas for boss fights in comparassion to the first game, which is a very welcome addition, since I felt the original game's bosses felt a little lackluster. However, the game in general is easier, because healing itens drop more frequently and are super cheap to buy, you could easily cheese any boss by stocking up on potions for very little money. Granted, the original wasn't super hard either, but still, this one's even easier. It is also shorter, I finished my first playthrough in ~7 hours, collecting all the itens and thoroughly exploring the areas, but personally this doesn't bother me. If you liked the first game and/or like metroidvanias in general, and don't mind a shorter playtime and lesser difficulty, I think you'll have fun with this game like I did. Also, it worked great on linux through wine 7.12, other than the fullscreen which doesn't work for some reason, but I had no issues otherwise.

This game has a special place in my heart, one of my favorite games of all time, and the best Shantae game for me, i recommend it.