I'm really not sure where I stand with Shantae. On the one hand, I love the level of presentation each game has between the cute (but oddly thirsty) visual style and music, and after enough of these IGotW entries you're probably very familiar with just how enamoured I am by Indie spacewhippers in spite of their ubiquity. On the other hand, Shantae games make very little effort to innovate beyond their original formula, even less so than IGAvanias. Shantae: Half-Genie Hero, which received a larger budget than usual due to a very successful Kickstarter, isn't so much a sequel than it is a soft reboot: it follows the same structure as Risky's Revenge, the second in the series, with most of the same genie transformation powers (which work like Alucard's transformations, in that they provide traversal benefits like flight), a hunt for McGuffins across a series of discrete levels (as opposed to one giant branching map), and a brief appearance of Shantae's evil half.

The loop of the game involves Shantae being given a new objective, gathering clues at the hub-like Scuttle Town, and then either finding her way to a new level or retracing her steps to a previous stage for some newly accessible key item. Every level culminates in a boss fight - all the "Barons" of previous games return, like the machine-obsessed Ammo Baron or fan-favorite Squid Baron - and a new genie transformation, which then allows the player to either move on with the story or revisit stages with this new power for helpful upgrades like health increases or collectibles. It's not a long game; six stages of variable lengths, each with two or three major areas to explore. However, the Ultimate Edition of the game extends the content to include all the DLC campaigns that were part of the Kickstarter's incentive tiers and originally given to prominent backers gratis. Many are simply the same game with a new set of moves or conditions, though there are a few short, unique campaigns set during the story that follow what the other characters were up to. Like the Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove collection, it's a decent value-add that largely relies on you wanting to complete the same game over and over with slight differences.

This is my fourth Shantae game, and yet I'd struggle to tell any of them apart were it not for the added amount of resources WayForward puts into each subsequent entry. If anything, Half-Genie Hero actually feels more antiquated than its predecessor, Shantae and the Pirate's Curse, with some of the design decisions behind the game. There's very little in the way of creating a large, layered map to explore, instead opting for a structure where each stage is a linear course with a few hidden secrets here and there. There's no checkpointing except area transitions, which regularly means starting five or more minutes back whenever you fall into a pit, and losing all your health means losing all your progress since the last save. The game mitigates this with ample opportunities to restore HP - you can buy potions, collect food dropped by enemies, and even acquire an expensive healing dance that transfers magic into health - and it will offer to save the game at every area transition, but it still feels a little too much like a game made in the 1990s and not in the preferred throwback sense where a game might be graphically or structurally reminiscent of older eras but buoyed by modern design sensibilities and quality-of-life considerations to keep it palatable.

In fact, with the sterling new look it almost feels like the artists in the studio led a coup and put all the designers into a broom closet somewhere until their demands were met, producing a Shantae game that looks twice as good and plays about half as well. The world of Shantae: Half-Genie Hero is replete with detailed backgrounds and foregrounds, with lots of little character animations on character sprites that look almost hand-drawn. WayForward has never skimped on their presentations, but it's evident a lot of additional time and attention has been put into the polished aesthetic of Half-Genie Hero's tropical world of magic carpets and genies. It's so extensive that it even dragged my laptop's framerate down, which - while I'll be the first to acknowledge my system isn't exactly cutting edge - isn't something I anticipated from a largely 2D, sprite-based game. Yet in spite of this new artistic confidence, the game feels like a giant step backwards for Shantae and her pals. As a long-time fan of this franchise, my hope is that the next Shantae game can raise the bar mechanically as well as aesthetically.

Rating: 3 out of 5.