Each skill is available by simple button press, and with them all having unique commands, you always have access to whatever moves you’ve learned. Late-game dungeons would utilise different forms at different times, but the need to stop and shapeshift limited options for combining these different abilities – something that isn’t an issue in Pirate’s Curse. In earlier games, Shantae was always limited to the abilities of a single form at any time. A pirate hat doubles as a parachute, letting Shantae glide over great distances a sword can be used for a downward-travelling attack that can break rocks with a cannon, Shantae can double, triple, and even quadruple jump. Instead, an uneasy alliance with her arch-nemesis, Risky Boots, sees Shantae collecting pieces of pirate gear that give her new abilities. The end of Shantae: Risky’s Revenge saw Shantae lose her genie powers, and so she no longer has her belly-dances in Pirate’s Curse. Pirate’s Curse takes a very different – and much better, I’d say – approach. The monkey form, for example, would let her jump much higher and cling to walls, while the elephant form could use its heft to break certain rocks and walls. In each game, you’d learn new dances through progress, giving Shantae new abilities and expanding her range of tools for exploration. With Shantae being a genie, the first two games had plenty of emphasis on genie powers – specifically, Shantae’s ability to shapeshift by performing magical belly-dances. Far more than a simple sequel, it expands on the series’ foundations in some drastic ways – while still remaining true to what makes Shantae special. Now Pirate’s Curse has also found its way to PS4 (as well as Xbox One), and I’ve been able to revisit it with a fresh perspective. Since then, I’ve had the chance to play Shantae: Risky’s Revenge on both Steam and PlayStation 4, as well as a reasonable chunk of the original Shantae on 3DS Virtual Console. As much as I loved the game back then, I couldn’t really appreciate just how much it carried the series forward. I was somewhat familiar with the franchise just through general exposure and my fondness of some other WayForward games I’d played, but I didn’t have any first-hand experience. This ensures that players are able to navigate this labyrinthine story from a zoomed out perspective, allowing them to keep track of the story even when the characters in it cannot, both due to its duplicitous presentation and that between Fragments, the player characters lose their memories of what happened during the previous one.With its original 3DS release back in 2014 (well, early 2015 for New Zealand), S hantae and the Pirate’s Curse was the first Shantae game I’d played. As such, the game intelligently implements a variety of tools that lets players investigate and go back to specific points throughout the game, going as minute as allowing them to look over the individual points that made up an individual Fragment they have previously experienced. The non-linear, multi-tiered narrative of Zero Time Dilemma is complex to say the least, as players are able to complete different selections of different parts of the story (called Fragments) entirely out of order, with different choices and characters leading to larger branching paths even further from there.
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