The game is quite good: the art, the soundtrack, the level design, the mechanics. However, there are some segments where the difficulty has brutal spikes that ruin the overall experience. Unless you are very skilled at platform games, you'll probably find yourself repeating those segments tens of times, and what makes them especially frustrating is that they are too fast for you to reason about what is happening; you'll have to either be instinctively quick or just die and retry knowing what to expect. Sometimes, the difference between life and death is just sheer luck. I don't think it's fun to play a game thinking "how much time do I have before the next hard section", with the risk of having to spend 2h on a single section. That being said, I completed it, but at the cost of a decent amount of unexpected frustration. That's why it's only 3 starts. A more balanced game would have got 5.
This game deserves 5 stars. It ticks all the boxes an RPG should: character design, story, combat system, soundtrack. The pixel art style may not appeals everybody, but if you can get past it it's a rewarding experience. It's not so long to discourage people who don't want to invest 50+ hours in a single game. I played it on Linux (Arch Linux) using the platform specific-port and I never got i single hiccup. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who loves turn-based JRPG and/or loved the great classics of the '90s.
First things first. I played the entire game under (Arch) Linux using Lutris. The game runs butter smooth with no hiccups, including controller support. The game itself is fun and light. The characters and the levels are colorful and varied. The soundtrack is captivating. The character avatars in dialogues are high-res, while the in-game characters and the backgrounds look old-school. Level exploration mixes looking for secrets, platforming and enemy bashing. All those things are mixed in a successful way, so none of them is neither boring nor frustrating: secrets may require some intuition to be found, but none of them is ridiculously hard. Also, the platforming may be challenging but it never gets to the "rage quit" level, although some sequences near the end require very tight timings to advance. Shantae learns new abilities while advancing in the story, and this leads to some backtracking: you can go back to areas already explored and use your new powers to reach areas there were above (or below) your reach during the first visit. You can only save at save points, which are not excessively distant from one another and always present before a boss battle, so even if you die you don't have to repeat long game chunks over and over again. Overall, a very good game I'd recommend to platformers fans, knowing you can play it on Linux without hassle.
