Game Ramblings #30 – Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse

More Info from WayForward

• Platform: PS4
• Genre: Metroidvania
• Also Available On: 3DS, Fire TV, Steam, Wii U, Xbox One

The Shantae series has been around for a while, whether as one of the most valuable Game Boy Color games, experimenting with digital distribution on the DSi, or getting Kickstarted for its latest entry.  This time around I played the third in the series, Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse.  As the series has evolved, it’s generally followed a Metroidvania style, with some key twists to stray a bit from the formula.

One of the key differences typical of the series was that Shantae gained Genie transformations, rather than the more typical weapon upgrades of the Metroid series.  However, that went away for Pirate’s Curse for some relatively valid story reasons.  This one uses the more typical gear upgrade path, but with a bit more themed variety.  Since this is ostensibly a game involving pirates, the gear upgrades end up being things like a pirate hat to slow falling, a cannon to allow multi-jump, or pirate boots to allow for speed boosts.  It all ends up feeling much like the Metroid upgrade path, with a very appropriate theme for the game.

Where this game highly differs from the typical style of the genre is that it is level based.  Each piece of gear is found within a dungeon hidden within a themed level.  The typical path is to get to a new level, explore and do some story quests to open up the dungeon, then head on in for an upgrade and a boss fight centered around the new piece of gear.  In a lot of respects, the game feels like it brings in a very Zelda-esque focus there, where the boss fight is clearly themed around the particular item you got.  There is some back and forth going to levels that were already finished for side quests and upgrades, particularly in picking up the effective replacement for health tanks, as some are out of reach without later upgrades.  Overall while the setup is very familiar to the Metroidvania genre, the breakup across different themed levels brings a nice change of pace to each new area as you get to it.

In general this is one of the mechanically better Metroidvanias in recent years that I’ve played.  Traversal is rapid, but easy to control.  Jumping feels extremely tight, and mixes in some of the Mario-style jump height differences based on how long the button is held.  The upgrades all serve noticeable purposes in enhancing the skill set available to get around the environment.  Generally speaking, the core melee attack is going to be the 90% usage, but there’s also upgrades available for it, so there’s a noticeable power curve as the game goes on.  The bosses are all pattern based, and by and large have some amount of challenge, but are fair and typically obvious in their weak points.  Despite its relatively short length (avg 7.5 hours), the time spent in the game will go fast due to its fun play.

All that said, the last dungeon nearly made me shelve the game entirely, and did stop me from completing a 100% run.  The tl;dr here is that its a multi-level dungeon with each level having its own mechanic to complete.  However, they were more often than not based around memorization, rather than pure skill.  One level had me using the boots dash to traverse across a set of spike traps.  Due to the speed of traversal, I basically couldn’t see where I was going, or which path was the valid one until I hit a wall and died.  Another level had me using the multi-jump cannon and destroying blocks in my way as I went through another series of spike traps.  However, there were a few spots where I couldn’t see ahead, and basically had to blindly jump and die until I shot out my perfect path to get through.  Once I got to the boss, everything was fine, but for a game that had to that point been so skill based in its traversal, it felt like a really strange turn right at the end of the game.  My as spoiler free as possible recommendation here is to finish the 100% run as much as possible before entering the last dungeon, as you need to be there to get the true ending.

In the end, the game was still worth playing, especially for fans of Metroidvania style games.  It’s mechanically sound, has a good story and soundtrack, and is visually fantastic.  Given the recent rarity of the genre outside the indie space, you could definitely do worse than to give this series a try.