WALL OF TEXT INCOMING, SORRY

Having played them all, i can safely say Pirate's Curse is the game i enjoyed the most out of the Shantae games. It just hits so many right spots in terms of exploration, humor, pacing and controls.

The original Shantae is still a fun experience, but i feel it hasn't aged too well thanks to some design choices and limitations of the Game Boy Color. For instance, the small screen makes it difficult at times to find hidden items or be prepared for enemies that appear so close to Shantae, and the lack of a map makes navigation the first time around very confusing. Still, the graphics are amazing considering the platform and it's obvious WayForward were passionate about the game. I'm hoping it'll get a remake someday that irons out the issues while having the game's pros further lightened up.

Risky's Revenge made a lot of improvements over the first game. For one thing, you can now buy a map very early in the game that shows the locations of Sequin land, making navigation easier. The controls were also made better as now, Shantae can be set to always run rather than having to hold down a button, and the transformations were streamlined, making them less of a pace-killer.

That being said, RR suffered from being too short as there's only 2 true dungeons in the game, there's actually 3 but the 2nd one is an endurance tower so it doesn't really count. Plus, i wasn't too fond of the requirement of finding magic jams to buy certain upgrades and items, that ensured RR is the only Shantae game i haven't 100%'d. Supposedly, this was because it was intended to be an episodic release, but WayForward ultimately only released the first half, resulting in the game's length being so short.

Overall though, i found Risky's Revenge consistently more enjoyable than the first game.

Half-Genie Hero meanwhile was good, but in my opinion a small step down compared to Pirate's Curse. The biggest departure is the change of gameplay, from a Metroidvania into a traditional platformer, compareable to Mega Man and Shovel Knight, and thus i felt the level design suffered from being a bit too linear. In terms of backtracking, i felt HGH also had it only for padding, whereas in PC i felt that the backtracking had a purpose for the story, in addition to also being helpful when you had to.

HGH's positives were it's very detailed and colorful artstyle, which i liked, and once again the amazing soundtrack by Jake Kaufman. In the end it is a worthwhile game to play through, and over time it got DLC that extends the play time. I just was left wanting a bit more after having experienced Pirate's Curse and being so pleasantly suprised.

And yeah, sorry for the huge wall of text, but explaining my thoughs required some heavy writing.

Pirate's Curse was my personal favorite. It had the best music, levels felt most cleverly designed, and I loved the pirate weapons despite them, ya know, not being one of Shantae's signature abilites. There's just something so satisfying about using them. Love that game, I'm getting the LRG Limited Edition copy for my Switch soon.

half genie hero