Shantae: Risky's Revenge - Director's Cut

The direct sequel to the original Shantae combines platforming and metroidvania style level design for an action-packed adventure that takes you all over Sequin Land. Without a modern iteration of the original, this was my foray into the Shantae series with the game leaving quite a mark on how the series would play out as well as evolve on some mechanics as time goes on. I am a huge fan of platformers and metroidvanias so being able to play a new series featuring both was fun to jump into. The game doesn't take any time in preparing the player as you're thrust into an enemy encounter against Risky Boots and her minions which follows into the main plot of the game of thwarting her into restoring the power of the Genie Lamp to take over Sequin Land. From the start, the game controls well for an older title with the pixel art being quite nice to look at well holding up today through Shantae's movements, enemy design, and character design/portraits. The combination of hair-whipping along with the magic upgrades you can obtain provide a nice balance of options for combat with my personal favorite utilizing the maxed out Pike Ball along with the fastest hair-whipping you can unlock. The level design is well planned out with the map certainly taking a minute to process, but once you're able to connect everything together it flows well as the given map contains the world itself with mini areas being condensed throughout as you're unlocking more abilities for traversal. The dungeons were definitely the trickiest to navigate as you're not given a map and need to rely on your own mapping which with enough movement across the rooms you're able to get a handle on them until the boss encounters which aren't too difficult. The transformations were all fun to utilize particularly the monkey dance as it helped shorten your hit-box and the extra momentum for your jumps were helpful the whole way through with the elephant & mermaid dances being limited to only when their obstacles came up. With everything the game offers as an initial entry in the series there aren't too many things to nitpick about based on its design, but there were a couple of snags that impeded gameplay. Too much movement or inputs would actually delay any jumps you would be able to do so many a time I would just fall into pits because the game wouldn't register my input or Shantae's hair wouldn't register a hit on an enemy because the animation for her jumping would impede it actually tagging until you hit them dead on. This style of game at least for the older entries are notable for being fairly difficult to extend game length and while there wasn't a section in the game that made me rage, there were some moments where I was baffled by the enemy placement at least early on when you don't have many upgrades particularly the flying enemies as they would always land on your head where you needed to adjust your position to hit them. Bosses took a lot more damage than I thought they would, particularly the final boss which even with the triple upgrade of the Pike Ball and fast hair whip it took so much time to defeat them; luckily you're able to purchase potions to mitigate the constant damage you'll take without reacting properly but I feel it was a bit overtuned to say the least. For achievements, the game is fairly straightforward with needing to max out Shantae's abilities and buy all of the magic upgrades along with defeating enemies a certain amount of times with certain actions or completing certain criteria like defeating the first boss with only the lightning magic. The hardest aspect for completion are the four different endings you can obtain which are dependent on the total special items you collected along with how long it took you to beat it, so unless you're planning out to knock a couple out between runs it'll take you for separate ones which isn't too bad considering the game is fairly short once you know what you're doing. The hardest achievement for me was the speedrunner achievement or ending 4 where you needed to beat the game in under two hours with any amount of items collected with my time ending at about 1:45 which I can say isn't too bad to unlock if you know the route and area able to pick up some upgrades along the way, but my biggest advice would be to backdash everywhere which saves a lot of time compared to running. Overall, I had a fun time playing through Shantae: Risky's Revenge - Director's Cut. The level design complemented the tools available to you along with how diverse Shantae becomes through her dances with the combat pairing well with the platforming which is solid for an original DS title. I'm curious to see how the series evolves from here with titles that have gained more notoriety. I can recommend this game for those seeking a fun platformer/metroidvania with a fun combat system on top of nice looking pixel art.