Continued my plan if playing through all of the Shantae games this weekend. Since I just wrapped up Pirate’s Curse, it was time to move on to the fourth and so-far-final game, Half-Genie Hero.
I have to say that a few of my plot-related problems with Pirate’s Curse were addressed by the good ending, which is good. They weren’t addressed to my satisfaction, but very little ever is. I suppose that they wanted to keep things short and simple, so just saying “yes, Risky Boots really somehow miraculously planned everything and it all worked out great for her and you basically got conned but don’t sweat it because it worked out okay for you, too” was good enough for them. I don’t buy some of the finer details, but I suppose I just have to assume that Risky Boots is a mastermind on the scale of Batman for this game. And only for this game.
Half-Genie Hero is probably my favorite of the four, which is good. I’m glad that the games got better as they went. I think WayForward has done a good job of getting better at making platforming games.
A lot of the Metroidvania stuff has been tightened up, and it’s easier to zip from map to map thanks to the world map screen and warp dance than ever before. Part of me misses the larger dungeons from Pirate’s Curse, but I don’t miss the way those dungeons would have easily-missed secret items and passageways in them. I’m the first to admit that Half-Genie Hero is a simpler and easier game than Pirate’s Curse is, but I’m okay with that.
One thing about both of those games is that, after finishing them, you unlock a new mode that lets you start the game with all of the items you get for completing areas. In Pirate’s Curse, this basically means that you shouldn’t need to backtrack to previous areas to get the heart squids or the dark magic at all. In Half-Genie Hero, it doesn’t mean that at all. I prefer how it was handled in Half-Genie Hero, because you still need to find a lot of the stuff that lets you explore the world.
As a quick aside, I haven’t played Pirate’s Curse using the unlocked Pirate Mode yet. I did play Half-Genie Hero in Hero Mode. Twice, actually. So I know Hero Mode and its changes a lot better.
In Half-Genie Hero, the maps open up to you as you unlock new forms for Shantae and get items to enhance those forms. She has a total of fifteen dances she can use, though she can only actually hold twelve at a time. One of those twelve can be upgraded, and two can be swapped out for transformations. There are eleven total transformations, but not all of them open up new areas, and not all of them get additional items that unlock abilities for those forms, and not all additional items that unlock abilities open up new areas. Let me just give some examples to clarify what I mean.
The first form Shantae gets is monkey form, which was also the first form from Shantae (the first game) and Risky’s Revenge. This lets her fit into smaller spaces, jump higher, run faster, and climb walls. It opens up a lot of new areas all by itself, though you get it so early that you don’t need to backtrack much to get the stuff you missed when you didn’t have it. It is further upgraded when you find the Monkey Bullet, an ability that lets monkey form fire off of walls in a straight line. There aren’t a lot of places where you need it, but there are a few. The Monkey Bullet can be gotten as soon as you have the monkey form, though.
A better example might be mermaid form. You have to walk right past it the first time you see it, since you need, um, I think elephant form? To get it. Once you have it, you can immediately go back and find a lot of new stuff you couldn’t before. But it’s really useful when you get the Mermaid Bubble at the very end of the game, which allows you to blow up underwater obstacles and find the last of the game’s hidden items. You also need it to finish the game.
Then there’s spider form, which I’m not sure you even need to finish the game. It’s only required to get a few things, and a lot of what it lets you get to can be gotten to using other forms. It has an upgrade item called Spider Venom which lets you fire a ranged attack, and it kinda sucks. I think it was only included because it was in the first game, which also had a spider form. That spider form looked more like a regular spider, though, and also spider venom in that game made the final battle against Risky Boots super easy. In Half-Genie Hero, spider form is a large human-spider monster that is not useful for combat at all.
There are three forms you can buy from a snake lady merchant who shows up in three stages, and none of them can be upgraded with additional items, and none of them unlock new areas. They’re totally optional. I’m pretty sure that the blobfish form is just a joke. The other two, dryad form and gem jug form, are pretty neat, but not necessary at all. I’ll be mentioning gem jug form again. You get blobfish form by trading away your obliterate dance, which just does damage to enemies on the screen, and you get gem jug form by trading away your warp dance, which lets you fast travel to different areas of the current stage and is incredibly useful.
But anyway, Hero Mode starts you off with five of the fifteen dances, and no items. The five you get are monkey form, crab form, elephant form, mouse form, and harpy form. This lets you get things a little faster than normal because you don’t have to backtrack as much, but it’s not a free pass to everything right away. You still need to get the Elephant Stomp, for example, and return to the first stage with it to get a piece of scrap metal that is required for the best ending. That’s just one example. You actually need to go back to the first stage twice in Hero Mode.
But, if you do it right, you don’t need to go back to the fourth stage at all in Hero Mode. You can grab everything there your first time through it. You gotta do a little bit of prep work for that, but it’s doable.
I played through the first time and took my time. I didn’t use a guide and finished with 100℅ of the items in 7:45. That’s pretty slow, but, to be fair to me, I literally fell asleep once while grinding for gems, and that cost me some time. See, there are places where enemies infinitely respawn, and you can stand Shantae in those areas with a spell on that will kill anything that gets close to her, and then with the Attract ability she’ll pick up everything they drop. So you can just do that and get a lot of money.
Actually, if I’m being honest, I missed a heart and a gallery key the first time I finished the game. This let me unlock the first hidden gallery image. I went back and found the missing items and then finished again, getting the second gallery image.
Then I played Hero Mode, and, after racking up a time of 1:45 before the final area, checked online to see what time I was trying to beat. What I found said two hours, so I said “fuck it,” got the last of the hearts and gallery keys, and used those gallery keys to get the Magic Tiara. The Tiara gives Shantae infinite magic, so I swapped my warp dance for the gem jug dance and gathered up about a thousand gems to buy the rest of the items from the town’s item shop. Then I gathered another thousand and bought what I could from the snake lady, then another hundred to buy the last of her stuff. Swapped the gem jug dance for the warp dance, and finished the game with 100% of the items in 2:45 (fun trick: if you have the Magic Tiara and the fully upgraded fire or lightning spell, just jump and cast one of them during the final sliding section and Shantae will hover over every obstacle). This unlocked two new gallery images. I figured one of them was just for finishing Hero Mode, so I immediately started a new game on the second save slot and finished with 65% of the items in 1:43. I could have done a lot better, but I was happy with that time. I wound up getting one of the same two images I’d gotten from my last playthough, so apparently you don’t need two hours. You can spend three if you want.
The speedrun image is of Shantae in a swimsuit, just like the last two games. The difference is that she’s still drawn in Half-Genie Hero’s cutesy chibi style, which makes it even weirder to me. I mean, look, I get it, she’s a very pretty girl. But she’s proportioned like a bobble head doll. I’m not into that. Maybe that’s just me.
I’ve mentioned before that what brought on my sudden interest in the Shantae series is that I’d Kickstarted Half-Genie Hero. I didn’t pay enough to get my name in the credits, so don’t look for me. I did pay enough for the soundtrack, though, and am actually listening to it right now. I really like the soundtrack. Not all of it, but more of it than what I usually like from video games.
It often feels like a Kickstarter game. I don’t know how to explain it, exactly. There are just a lot of little things. I remember getting the emails asking me to vote for which character design they should use for several characters. Again, though, I didn’t pay enough to actually vote. But that’s why Shantae’s crab form doesn’t have a shell. It could have, and then it’s defensive move, where it pulls a shell from nowhere and hides under it, would have made more sense.
I think Holly might have had her design decided by vote, but I don’t remember. I know Rottytops had her “zombie pit girl” outfit decided by vote, and it appears one time, in one cutscene, and then never again. It’s disappointing! It feels silly and wasted and kind of out of place.
As do a bunch of NPCs who appear once, to either give you an item or swap an item with you. There’s Adventure Man, who gives you a Vorpal Blade, and the Azure Knight, who takes the Vorpal Blade from you and gives you a Foxy Grandma hat in exchange. Those guys serve no other purpose. I have to wonder if they were Kickstarter-funded characters. Probably! There are others like that, too, and they don’t even seem to fit the art style of the rest of the game. They just look and feel very out of place. I understand that this is what happens with crowd funded games. It certainly happened with Shovel Knight. It even happened with Undertale. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.
The game also missed some of its stretch goals, and it shows. The only voice acting is Cristina Vee, who does several female characters and the vocals for the title/credits/first stage song. They really got their money’s worth out of that song. There was a stretch goal to get more voice acting, but they didn’t reach it. They also didn’t reach the goal that would have let you play as Nega-Shantae, an evil version of Shantae that appeared at the end of Risky’s Revenge and, briefly, in Half-Genie Hero. Nega-Shantae only shows up in a lengthy cutscene in Half-Genie Hero, and it feels weird and jarring. Shantae turns evil, her friends call out to her (for hours, apparently), and she stops being evil. Just that fast. Interestingly, Nega-Shantae has the exact same color scheme as Risky Boots, which I didn’t notice on Risky’s Revenge. But it doesn’t go anywhere, so it doesn’t matter.
WayForward has said that they might implement some of those original stretch goals as DLC if the game sells really well, but I can’t imagine it will. It’s just the kind of shit that kind of brings me down. Just because they wanted to make a bigger game, and had plans for a bigger game, doesn’t mean we’re ever gonna see it. Shantae is pretty niche. It will never sell like Shovel Knight. I am not holding my breath for a Shantae amiibo, or Shantae in Smash Bros. I mean, I guess I’d be happy if it happened.
So anyway, that’s it for me. I put about fourteen or fifteen hours total into Half-Genie Hero, after paying
$25 and waiting three years, and now it’s done. I’d like to say I’ll replay it and the other games again someday. Maybe I even actually will. But who knows. I so rarely replay games these days, haha. I’m the worst guy!
