To prevent this disaster from happening, Shantae has to travel all over the island, seeking assistance from her friends so that she can get all four Elemental Stones before the pirate mistress does.Īfter a linear introductory stage, the game opens up to reveal a seemingly endless, looping overworld, with side-scrolling fields and dungeons and third-person, behind-the back towns.
Shantae gba guide how to#
The poor old man doesn’t have a clue on how to use it, but Risky does: in combination with four of Sequin Land’s most powerful artifacts – the Simmer Stone, Dribble Stone, Golem Stone and Twinkle Stone -, the ancient piece of machinery can be converted into an endless power source for her fleet of pirate ships, finally enabling her to take over the sea and the land. The plot is kicked off when the evil pirate Risky Boots and her crew of Tinkerbats, tired of not receiving their imposed “taxes” over the people’s traversal of the sea, stage an all-out attack on Scuttle Town, stealing Uncle Mimic’s most recent discovery, the Steam Engine, along the way. To back up this quirky plot, Shantae is packed with an equally-quirky, largely-female cast of characters that truly brings out the game’s charm and make it a great experience to play. Pure Genies eventually became extinct/disappeared for reasons unknown, while their daughters grew to live alone or with the human side of their families. For many years they remained a complete mystery to the island’s human populace, but once both sides approached each other, their worlds and traditions merged, and eventually Genies began to bond with human men, resulting in the birth of the Half-Genies: spunky, energetic girls who combine their fathers’ mortality with their mothers’ attractiveness and magical powers, except that, for some odd reason, their abilities are always incredibly weird. Sequin Land is a small island located smack dab in the middle of the ocean that has a long history with the ancient, all-female tribe of the Genies: beautiful, immortal women who wielded powerful magic. However, while the aforementioned titles suffer from poor translations and little-to-no story, Shantae has some basic yet creative and entertaining lore to back up your quest, all told in-game by NPCs (it also helps that the game was developed in North America, meaning that it didn’t need to pass through translation woes). The game shares many elements with these classics, such as a big, peculiarly-structured overworld (it’s a horizontally-oriented endless loop, with no dead ends whatsoever once you’re fully powered-up), several towns to visit and lots of backtracking, both optional and mandatory. Shantae, the Game Boy Color’s swan song and the first original game developed by the now-famous neo-retro developer WayForward Technologies, can be considered the unsung beginning of the ongoing nostalgia-mania that’s affecting most indie game developers, harkening back to a genre known by many and despised by most but extremely influential to the game industry as a whole: the 80’s side-scrolling action-RPG, a style that brought us games such as Zelda II, Simon’s Quest, and the Monster World series).
Shantae gba guide series#
Given a wider audience, the series has since built up a substantial following. While the first game was initially unsuccessful at retail, Wayforward continued to develop and pitch the series to publishers for many years, until they were able to self-publish a new game for the Nintendo DSi downloadable platform. Taking place in an Arabian-inspired setting, featuring 2D gameplay in an open ended world. It starred a cute purple hair genie, a character developed by Erin Bozon, the wife of Wayforward game designer Matt Bozon. But seeking to create their own intellectual property, they developed Shantae, released for the Game Boy Color. Wayforward Technologies was founded in 1990, and worked on a number of licensed and education products over the course of the decade.