Shantae (Game Boy Color)

Developer WayForward’s output when they began back in 1990 mostly consisted of tie-in games for computers and handhelds, but in 2002, a remarkably original idea broke through the crowd of licensed products. Shantae, a game about a belly-dancing half-genie created by the wife of one of the programmers when she was young, presented a colorful original word that looked like it could be the key to the company making a name for itself. Instead though, Shantae’s first adventure didn’t do too well, and for a while, it was back to games based on T.V. and film properties until the growing appreciation for indie developers allowed them to bring Shantae back and even make her one of the faces of the rise of independent game development. However, while she would have her renaissance, going back to her first game does make it feel like a bit of a stroke of luck, the original action platformer not having everything quite figured out yet.

 

In Sequin Land, genies used to protect the land and mingle with the people, but as they disappeared, it fell on half-genies like Shantae to take over as guardians. A bit shy to admit she’s not a full-blood genie, Shantae still does her best to protect the fishing village of Scuttle Town, but when her adoptive uncle Mimic concocts a steam engine, it promises to push forward technology for this pre-industrial world. Unfortunately, the pirate Risky Boots and her Tinkerbat minions hear of this incredible device and swipe it, heading to nearby temples to grab the elemental stones needed to supercharge the small engine so it can power full-on war machines. Shantae steps up to try and stop Risky, heading across Sequin Land and meeting a few simple but charming characters like Sky whose pet bird Wrench has a surprisingly apt name and the peppy zombie Rottytops who is happy to talk about wanting to eat your brain even as she helps you out.

What really gives the world an extra layer of character though is the excellent sprite art and animation despite being on the Game Boy Color. Shantae’s basic movement is already fluid, but there are a lot of little touches that bring her to life more. If she crouches down, she wiggles her butt in anticipation of what you’ll do next. Her magic belly-dancing has a range of different moves and not only do they do a fair job of translating such involved motions to 8-bit graphics, but her expression remains readable and makes her seem like she’s having a lot of fun dancing. Enemies can be fun and cartoony creatures or ones who make good use of unusual shapes to add an unnerving air to an area you stumbled into, but others are half-human themselves and can have their own strong posing for attacking like the lamia who leaps into the air or the desert half-breeds with their scorpion tail attacks. When you visit one of the cities you’ll even get a behind the back look at Shantae who is normally presented in side-scrolling 2D, and when you choose which building to walk to her movement is surprisingly clean and bouncy despite the hardware limitations. Music definitely adds to the experience well, even a save room able to have a surprisingly good track. Areas like the Cackle Mound dungeon have a nice mysterious tune while Scuttle Town can sell a bustling feel with the peppy tune to accompany the people walking past who you can ask for adventuring tips.

 

Artistically, Shantae shines among the Game Boy Color library and its world ends up quite appealing for all the extra effort put into realizing even simple actions or basic enemies. Each town even has a different person running the bath house where you can get a free heal, the little touches definitely coming together to form a nice identity for this platformer. However, once your adventure begins, you’ll start to run into small issues with how the actual action unfolds. Shantae’s main way of dealing with enemies is to whip her ponytail forward. Some baddies can take a bit of ponytail punishment before they go down, but usually if it is something that can be killed instantly, it comes with a meddlesome caveat. Many places have enemies that will spawn in repeatedly, and right after you kill one you can expect a near immediate replacement, your hair attack just slow enough that you can’t press forward and grab anything useful they drop like health or money before the new monster arrives. Instantly appearing enemies are a particular issue in the connecting areas between towns and dungeons, these inevitably the spaces you must cross the most because fast travel is something that takes a while to unlock for even one town. The game doesn’t always give you the best directions on where to go next either, Shantae forgoing any sort of map which inevitably becomes confusing as you start uncovering underground routes and other complications to travel.

 

Already passing through the interstitial spaces can be a bit of a drag because of how they’re designed. If you only had to walk through once, some of their design quirks would work as decent challenges. Climbing over large waterfalls and avoiding the fish beasts that pop out of them once is a challenge, but doing it frequently as you go back and forth or possibly even take a wrong turn is tedious and doesn’t offer anything exciting on repeat treks through. You also have limited lives in Shantae where losing them all throws you back to the last save point which can be spaced out a fair bit. However, while you can be whittled down by regular enemies while healing hearts are somewhat rarer drops, there are also instant death pits and spikes, sometimes positioned so you can drop down onto them before you know they exist or because you landed on a slope you were meant to clear with a perfectly spaced jump. Merely heading to where you need to be ends up an obstruction that quickly stops asking you to be reactive and instead just becomes about playing out the same exact actions every time to safely cross the space the best you can.

Technically, you can improve your chances of taking out enemies easily and avoiding certain dangers if you invest in items from the town stores. Most shops sell some attack items like a fireball that will briefly orbit Shantae and a mint that duplicates her so you can do two hair whip attacks at once as well as things like the float muffin that briefly lets you bounce off the bottom of death pits instead of falling into them, but money isn’t easy to accrue. Enemies willy only sometimes drop a single gem when most items cost around 15 or 20 for a few limited uses, and healing vials that can be just as useful are a fair bit more. One shop sells some extra attacks like a backflip kick that can leave you vulnerable if you try to use it or a charge strike that takes far too long to charge for how weak it is while also encountering issues with the fact you hold the same button to charge it as you do to simply run. It’s best to avoid buying the new attacks but it’s a lesson probably learned the hard way, and you do sometimes come to resent how slow your ponytail is to take out specific foes so it’s no surprise you want better options. The attack items also seem to have some issues activating on occasion, and when fighting a swift boss or lining up to strike an enemy in limited space, you don’t want something unresponsive or one that fails to go off and leaves you open to a strike. Some alternate money making methods like a dice rolling game with geckos and a night time dance parlor minigame can earn you money more quickly with some risk, but night time also makes regular enemies across Sequin Land take more hits to kill and the only other benefit to the night time is a set of firefly collectibles that let you unlock a useful dance right near the end of the game where you can’t really appreciate it much.

 

There are a lot of barriers to enjoying regular action in Shantae, but once you do reach a dungeon, things can get a lot more focused and enjoyable. You still have some issues like instant death dangers that aren’t always easy to see before you’re falling towards them, but the temples often have more clear direction to their design as you solve puzzles, face foes that stay dead for a while after you kill them, and interact with new ideas like swirling launchers that let you travel around huge rooms or statues whose eyes you must bounce back into place. You can keep your bearings better in a dungeon and they often have some smart design to let you better traverse them when you do need to backtrack, often because you just got one of the new belly-dancing transformations. Each dungeon will involve Shantae learning a dance for a new animal form she can use to travel in new ways. The monkey can scale walls, the elephant can smash through barriers, and the harpy late in the game even gives you flight, each dungeon having areas that let you test out your new powers for puzzles or even occasionally combat encounters. Most of the forms aren’t really good fighters though, the one that is a bit good in a scrap only available if you play this game on a Game Boy Advance, but the transformations also have another unfortunate downside. Dancing to transform is often slow and unsafe so doing it near enemies is often not worth the risk, and even if you do transform you can sometimes find they have a drawback that means you only spend a bit as an animal to do whatever quick interaction is required. The monkey can scale walls, but sometimes it doesn’t latch on right which endangers you. The elephant is the rare form that comes with a good attack, but its jump is so bad it can’t do the required platforming to get around most spaces, and even the harpy form builds up speed in a somewhat awkward way so moving farther than intended can be a concern.

 

Boss battles and minibosses can at least be good tests of timing attacks or using your forms well, some having a weakness that isn’t best shown but they are often effective parts of the dungeons. The awkwardness in making frequent short transformations is the main hiccup in dungeons and it’s a tolerable enough one for getting to see the game at its best, but there are just five dungeons in total and the navigating the world to get to them isn’t as interesting. However, Shantae does attempt to add some Metroidvania elements with its collectibles. Warp Squid babies are hidden around dungeons, these being what you need to find to learn teleportation dances to reach different cities, but you need four per city dance and the game starts off by making it impossible to even grab some of the ones you find at first. You’re meant to return later with different transformations, this also true of the night time fireflies, but these exploration elements are often the only reason to return to certain spaces, the player heading somewhere with a new power to quickly grab it and leave. This does give you something new to do when trekking between towns and dungeons on occasion, but returning to dungeons ends up being a lot of work for rewards that start to lose their value because you’re too near the end of the game once you’ve got the necessary powers. Health expansions are definitely appreciated though, but some are hidden behind what almost amount to riddles that can be rough to figure out when you won’t know if you even have access to the solution when you first find them. Shantae ends up working better the more linear you can make it, backtracking usually meaning you spend more time running into the game’s issues instead of appreciating where its ideas do come together well.

THE VERDICT: Shantae is a great looking Game Boy Color game and the animations and attention to detail makes its little world feel more lively and vibrant. The dungeons are set up well for exploring and utilizing the new transformations you gain, but then, the rest of the game gets in the way of enjoying what it had done right. Traveling between areas grows old fast because it is demanding but not interesting for how often you must repeat the trek, night time is often a hindrance since it slows down outdoor fights while only adding a mostly useless collectible, and some collectibles are placed out of reach to force backtracking for paltry payoffs. Items are slow to afford and often best for just overcoming the many bothersome barriers in place to trying to see where Shantae does succeed, but those brighter moments are buried beneath the more present annoyances.

 

And so, I give Shantae for Game Boy Color…

A BAD rating. No map, animal forms that aren’t that flexible so you have to do the slow dances repeatedly to do simple tasks, enemies that can wear you down while dropping resources rather slowly or rarely, instant death pits and spikes, backtracking that wears thin… Shantae really does find herself in a bit of a messy first adventure. The dungeons though show the promise of a lot of the ideas and can even overcome some of the hitches by giving you room to at least do your dances. Dungeons have rooms that can encourage curiosity with puzzles and well considered room layouts while also having ways that connect important rooms and spaces that make navigating about easier and more importantly fairly quick once you have the right form to open up the rest of the temple. The Metroidvania item hiding doesn’t do much to enhance things, the dungeons at least feeling like it’s padding that ends up unrewarding since rewards for going back come too late, but the spaces between towns feel like where giving you new options after acquiring new dances had the potential to shine. Too many of them are rough to navigate until you get the harpy though and if you get even a bit sloppy you can be knocked around or even lose a life. While the game didn’t need to be overly generous with the warp squids to fix this, it feels like the game doesn’t apply its dungeon design ethos to the more common parts of the adventure, crossing the land a chore and one that remains as much even when shortcuts and the like become available. Shantae should have been more forthcoming in encouraging item use and not teasing you with high priced attacks that don’t help much, but most things in Shantae have drawbacks that are too strong and that’s the real thing dragging the experience down. While it looks wonderful for the system it is on and has a lot of character, most things you actually do have one element it ends up hard not to resent. Your hair whip attack is snappy, but it feels so weak at night for example. Transformation are cool for getting around, but it takes a while to dance for them and then you sometimes only get a second or two where they’re even able to do what is needed.

 

Shantae’s games would thankfully learn how to arrange themselves better and overcome some of the issues the first game faced, so it is fortunate that the more appealing parts of the game concept and Sequin Land were able to continue on. Shantae on Game Boy Color is rough but it’s a good thing WayForward didn’t give up on the half-genie hero, taking the chance to learn what needs changing to make Shantae a smoother experience. This first adventure though doesn’t have too much story-wise to see and the dungeons, while good on their own merits, aren’t worth the trouble spent getting to them. Shantae’s first game did us the favor of getting something out there so WayForward could start exploring some of their more unique and personal game ideas, but they still needed time to hone their craft, this first entry not really worth the visit even for fans of the series.