Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution

Risky Rebound!

Console: Nintendo Switch 2

When Shantae was released for the Game Boy Colour in 2002, it did not sell well. Releasing on a console when its successor has been out for a year will do that. As good as the title reviewed, with those poor sales, no company wanted to invest in the Shantae sequel for the Game Boy Advance, already in the works, so the game was shelved.

Since then, however, Shantae has grown quite popular with its colourful cast of characters and witty dialogue. This gave WayForward the opportunity to finish what they started all those years ago, and so they did. They even went as far as to create a genuine Game Boy Advance version to play on original hardware!

As cool as that sounds, I waited for the game to release on the Switch. It’s where I own all the other Shantae games on and I just really like all the conveniences and extra features this release offers. From the HD character portraits, better menus to just playing it on the TV.

So, without further ado, let's talk about the game that rose from the ashes and see if it can live up to its own history.

It’s a beautiful day in Sequin Land when, as if right on cue, Risky Boots shows up with a new evil plot. Using a special device, Risky can rotate parts of the land, placing landlocked locations at the coast where she can attack them. With Sequin Land in disarray Shantae, helped by her friends, goes on the hunt for the Relic Hunters. A group of explorers and archaeologists that Uncle Mimic believes can come up with a plan to stop Risky's dastardly plot.

Risky Revolution's story is fine for the short and simple narrative that it is. The quest to find the Relic Hunters is formulaic, with each chapter playing out the same until the big final. You visit two towns that have swapped places, which leads to hijinks that are resolved along the way of finding a Relic Hunter.

It's not bad, but it doesn't lead to much surprise if you know what I mean. You go through the motions with the focus being on the microplots that happen in between, as is often the case with Shantae. Finding a lost baby, helping with a festival, that kind of stuff. That is what caught my attention and I had fun with.

What was notable to me, as someone who played all the Shantae games, is the references and callbacks (or callforwards) to the other titles. We have Risky mentioning her former boss, whom we meet in Pirate's Curse, and the ending of this game leads straight into Risky's Revenge. Pretty sure these are all 'new', put in after the revival, which is why they stood out to me.

Unsurprisingly, for a game designed 20 years ago, Risky Revolution plays exactly like I expect a Shantae game to play. A casual metroidvania with more focus on platforming than dungeon crawling, filled with animal transformations and magic powerups. What it introduces is a gimmick developed for this game, but what WayForward also put in what would become the series’ 2nd game. There are both foreground and background layers visible that Shantae can jump between.

This is how the foreground and background layers are distinquished form one another. 

This 2-layer gimmick is neat for what it is. It leads to some decent platforming challenges while not being too involved. You see a hidden goodie, and you have to think about how to get there by switching between the layers, aside from good platforming and switching between your transformations, of course. It could've been more fleshed out though if you ask me by, for example, creating a dungeon that also leverages this mechanic. As it stands now, it is only used in the ‘overworld’ sections of the game’s few levels.

Now that I’ve touched on it, let's talk about the length of this title. Risky Revolution is shorter than I expected going in, taking about 6 hours to beat and having only 3 'big' levels with dungeons and whatnot. That is noticeably shorter than Pirate's Curse, which I had the impression this game was aiming for in terms of content. That isn't an inherent issue with this title; it's a matter of managing my own expectations.

Risky Revolution lacks a map feature, meaning you can’t see where you are exactly at any point during your journey. I still think this should be a standard feature in any metroidvania, but I can't say the lack of a map ever got me into trouble. I only got lost once, and even that didn't last all that long. Why? Because the levels are pretty easy to oversee, as they aren't that big nor all that complicated. If you compare the levels and dungeons of this game to mazes, then they are mazes designed for kids, not adults.

Challenge comes in more with that old school kind of difficulty mentality Risky Revolution has. It isn't as forgiving as most modern titles tend to be when you screw up. You can cheese boss fights with some good investment in the right items (and I imagine the extra costumes from the special edition will make that even easier), but not all of them. Practicing patience and trial and error is the name of the game here.

Save points are also pretty spread out, so you can easily lose 10 minutes of playtime when you hit a game over. All stuff to keep in mind, since, depending on who you are, this will either be a good or a bad thing. I didn't mind it, which is exactly why I didn't buy that deluxe edition. For one, I think 10 bucks is too expensive for 3 customers, and secondly, I welcomed the extra challenge. It made some moments nice and tense.

Realizing that this title wasn't as long as I hoped it to be, I started to worry about the animal transformations. We have a total of 6 of them here, which felt like a lot for a game of this length. I feared that this would mean some transformations would inevitably be underdeveloped. Feel tacked on, only useful in one specific situation, etc. To my own surprise, Risky Revolution might just be the best game when it comes to balancing the quality and quantity of Shantae's animal transformations.

Each transformation gets its time in the spotlight and has more than one use. The spider is the most situational, but even it has a series of puzzles designed around it uses its sticking ability in a different way than is initially presented. This also means that even if transformations overlap, like the mermaid and the crab forms, one doesn't negate the other since they behave differently.

There is also a quick chance feature for your transformations, which are handy when in a pinch, a common suggestion among Shantae fans for every new title. I was just stupid enough to always forget it existed when in the heat of the moment!

That brings me to my single biggest frustration with this game: the controls and how they affect the items. The magical items Shantae can gather and use, like the pike ball, are as effective a tool as ever, but actually activating them? That was a struggle in and of itself for me for two reasons.

The first is the way you select an item. You have to hold a button, which then starts to cycle through all your usable items. I really dislike this as it is slow and cumbersome. The delay this causes has resulted in a game over for me more than I care to admit. The second is that you activate items with the 'A' button, the same button you press to go through dialogue boxes. More times than I can count, I activated an item right after some dialogue because I thought the conversation wasn't over yet. Really wished you could've customized the control scheme because of this.

I also wish the game was a bit more stable. The game crashed during the opening boss fight. After that, Shantae glitched out of existence while platforming not once, but twice. I heard the jump noises and saw the screen moving, but that was it. As I couldn't leave the current screen I was on, I had to load my last save. After these opening issues, I did not experience any others and the vanishing glitch got patched a few weeks later, but these three are more glitches than I usually encounter.

It was right here that the game crashed on me the first time around. Maybe it had something to do with Shantae being right in front Risky when the animation started playing? Who is to say.

Moving on from how the game plays to how it looks. Visually, this title looks nearly the same as Risky's Revenge and the Pirate's Curse visuals, which I really like, just not as detailed and with a more limited colour palette. This game was designed for the GBA after all.

That isn’t to say you have to experience it that way. You can go with the classic mode, or you can choose modern mode. The former is the GBA version while the latter is my preferred way to play. It has some extra features such as a border, HD pixelated portraits, and other new art assets for the cutscenes, UI, and more. Modern flair that I appreciate.

Unlike some games with such modes, you cannot change between them with the press of a button. They are two separate options, each with different save files. Since the core graphics don't change between the two, since it’s only a difference in secondary assets, I don't think this is at all a loss.

Conclusion

Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution is a fascinating piece of Shantae history, finally playable after twenty years. It's fun to see this lost chapter brought to life with a story that connects neatly to the rest of the series. Its fore- and background platforming gimmick adds at least one nice gameplay twist, and the transformations are some of the best-balanced in the series. But for all of that, it’s held back by some frustrating design choices, and the game is shorter and more formulaic than I would've liked.

It may not be the best for newcomers, but for longtime fans it’s a charming, if imperfect, chance to experience this missing piece of Shantae’s history.