Video Game / Shantae (2002)

The first game in the Shantae series, released for the Game Boy Color in 2002 — notably, only a year before the system being retired.

One day, the evil pirate captain Risky Boots raids Scuttle Town with her army of Tinkerbats and steals the Steam Engine, one of the creations of Shantae's Gadgeteer Genius Uncle Mimic. With it, she plans to build an enormous machine which she can use to Take Over the World — but in order to do so, she needs Four Elemental Stones. It's up to Shantae to track them down before she does. This is the only game in the series to not be published by WayForward themselves; it was instead published by Capcom.

The game would later be released for the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console in 2013, Nintendo Switch in 2021 and Playstation 4 and Playstation 5 in 2023. The second game in the series, in release order, is Shantae: Risky's Revenge, while in-universe, it's followed by Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution.

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This game contains examples of:

• All Deserts Have Cacti: Played straight, and they aren't just part of the scenery — you'll take damage if you touch them.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Gender inverted with Bolo, who despite being Shantae's friend, will actively help her Archenemy Risky Boots.
• All Men Are Perverts: Played with. One NPC at the Zombie Caravan remarks that zombie guys are all pigs who only want one thing from girls; their brains.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: The game begins with Risky attacking Shantae's lighthouse and Scuttle Town. She gets the Tinkerbats to fix her lighthouse at the end.
• Antepiece: Every labyrinth introduces a new transformation dance, and gives the player plenty of room to learn its special ability (the monkey's wall climbing, the elephant's charge attack, the spider's background-wall climbing, and the harpy's flight) in the main part of the dungeon, then requires (or at least strongly encourages) the player to use it to defeat the labyrinth boss in some way.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: At the end of the game, Shantae is invited to the Genie Realm to become a full Genie. However, as this would mean leaving her adopted family and friends forever, she refuses.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Your Charged Attack, while very powerful, takes a long time to do said charging and is difficult to control.
• Background Boss: Risky's ship (particularly the second phase where you're in front of it instead of on top), the Tentacle Monster (the Dribble Fountain boss), and the King-Golem (the Golem Mine boss) all occupy the background, with that last one being a Stationary Boss to boot. To a lesser extent, the Tinkertank, as it's constructed out of the background layer, but you run and climb around on top of and inside it. Afterwards, its remains are truly in the background, providing the backdrop to the final fight against Risky Boots.
• Bad Guy Bar: Bandit Town's got the Rusty Gullet where you can see monsters from earlier levels hanging out and having a drink.
• Battleship Raid:
  • The very first boss fight is against Risky's ship, and you have to damage it by attacking explosive barrels. There are two phases; one where you're on deck, and another where you're at the broadside; and the ship is significantly larger than the game screen in both.
  • The enormous mechanical Tinkertank near the end, which you have to destroy by flying and climbing around both outside and inside it.
• Beef Gate: Going immediately west of Scuttle Town in the beginning of the game is not a good idea unless you feel like running headlong into the game's Naga enemies, who have a ton of health, are fairly agile, and boast a homing screech attack that can kill you dead even from a distance. Since there's no way to enhance the strength of Shantae's main attack in this game, you'll want to stock up on items, get a few Heart Holders, and maybe pick up some Fighter's Equipment before blazing into them. Besides, even if you make it past using either brute force or Vanish Cream, you'll find a Broken Bridge in the form of a monkey-climbing wall.
• Betting Mini-Game: The Gecko Hall features a betting game which requires you to put in gems to see whether or not you'll roll higher than your opponent. It's literally 50/50 depending on your rolls, is very forgiving, and an easy way to make money. The Updated Re-release on Virtual Consoles post GBA also allows the player to Save Scum.
• Beware My Stinger Tail: The scorpion people in the desert outside Oasis Town. The female variant just swipes at you when you come close, but the males will jab their stinger through the ground to hit you from farther away.
• Big Boo's Haunt: The third dungeon, full of zombies and creepy-crawlies.
• Bizarrchitecture: There are a few upside-down pyramids floating in the skies above the desert, one of which houses the legendary Spy Scope, which you need to find in order to enter the final dungeon.
• Bond Villain Stupidity:
  • Near the end of the game, Risky manages to get Shantae tied up and totally helpless, but leaves her behind unscathed and unsupervised, allowing Shantae to break free from the ropes just seconds after Risky leaves.
  • Later, Risky also decides to have Shantae be destroyed by the Tinkertank in what she thinks would be a Hopeless Boss Fight. Unfortunately for her, the Tinkerbats hadn't finished installing weapons or a defense system on the tank, resulting in a very easy Puzzle Boss and all her plans for world domination going up in smoke.
• Boss-Arena Idiocy: The Cackle Mound boss, who fights in a room filled with Pit Traps that you could activate by using the spider form on the switches on the wall. Not that this is obvious to a first-time player.
• Bottomless Pit Rescue Service: Float Muffins enables you to cross bottomless pits.
• Bound and Gagged: When Risky steals the Relics, she ties Shantae up as she takes them. It's not very effective, as Shantae gets loose a little after Risky leaves.
• Charged Attack: The Fighter's Cuff allows you to perform one of these.
• Clothes Make the Superman: Anyone with enough money, Genie or otherwise can just buy the Fighter's equipment from Water Town and immediately become a martial arts master.
• Clowncar Grave: Zombies endlessly spawn from the ground in the Swamp area.
• Collection Sidequest: Shantae can collect Fireflies hidden all over the world, unlocking a secret dance once she catches all twelve of them.
• Creepy Cemetery: There is one east of the swamp containing the Cackle Mound, complete with ghosts haunting the gravestones and the surrounding trees.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Dying sends you back to the beginning of a room, while getting a Game Over sends you back to the last save point. All of your items and progress are saved, so the only penalty is time lost walking back to the last area. If you die transformed, you'll even stay in the same animal form. Your health will be reset to only three hearts, however, which gets to be bothersome late-game when you may have as many as ten hearts max health.
• Death Mountain: Mount Pointy is one of these of the Slippy-Slidey Ice World variety.
• Doomed Hometown: Half of Scuttle Town is set on fire by marauding pirates in the opening. Risky attacks specifically because Mimic and, more importantly, his Steam Engine are both located there. Subverted because the town recovers quickly.
• Dragon Rider: The boss of the Twinkle Palace is knight astride a wyvern-like dragon. You can't damage him while he's in the air, so you'll need to ground him first by stomping on his head in harpy form. This boss is the only thing in the entire game that can be interacted with in this manner.
• Early Game Hell: Getting from Scuttle Town to the Dribble Fountain is a huge pain in the ass, and you'll have a similar experience getting from Dribble Fountain to Golem Mines. The enemies in the very first area pop out of nowhere and respawn indefinitely, capable of killing you in six hits. The day/night cycle is a pain early on before you have any good ways to deal damage. And you don't get much money early on without grinding the Dance Parlor, so you might not have any healing items. At that point, you realize that getting past the Beef Gate in the desert is less "getting strong enough to defeat the enemies" and more "using every resource you can to better tank the damage".
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Plenty of it, although interestingly, it's almost all gameplay-related. The lore and themes are mostly consistent with later entries.
  • This is the only game in the series published by a major publisher in the form of Capcom. All future entries are self-published by WayForward, with physical releases of those games done by smaller publishers.
  • The game utilizes a lives system, where any deaths respawn you at a checkpoint. Additionally, falling into a Bottomless Pit takes a life instead of some health, and pits are not clearly, unambiguously marked with upward-floating skull-and-crossbone symbols like they are in later titles.
  • Transformations are considerably more cumbersome, using an actual dance system where you have to do specific button combinations to transform. Future games use more streamlined methods.
  • The game is much more Nintendo Hard thanks to the inability to increase the strength of Shantae's hair whip attack, to say nothing of its poor reach. The enemies have a lot more health than in later entries, with the game's day/night system (inspired by Castlevania II: Simon's Quest) making enemies even more difficult to defeat at night. Overall, there is a lot more Fake Difficulty than in later entries as well.
  • Unlike other entries, there are several minigames that you can play to gain money.
  • Instead of running off of a Mana Meter, Shantae's "spells" are items that you have to stock up on at the store, though the amount of each that you can carry is a pretty generous 99. In addition, there are several items/spells that have never reappeared in the series, such as the Vanishing Cream for temporary invincibility, or the Float Muffins that make you immune to bottomless pits.
  • Shantae's monkey form was brown like an actual monkey, instead of being purple like her hair like it is in every subsequent appearance.
  • Unlike future games which have multiple ending screens depending whether or not the game was completed through a speed run or with one hundred percent completion, there's only one ending screen.
  • Shantae walks by default, and the player has to hold B to run. This would be changed in Risky's Revenge, where Shantae runs by default, but can walk by holding Y, and then in all later entries where Shantae can only run.
  • There are a grand total of five towns, and Shantae walks around them with a unique over-the-shoulder perspective. This perspective would never be used again, with all towns in later titles being navigated with ordinary platforming, and there wouldn't be more than one town in a single game again until Shantae and the Seven Sirens.
  • Unlike later installments, where technology is all over the place, technology in this game is largely renaissance-level, with the only significant exception being the Steam Engine, whose very potential is so incredibly threatening to the status quo, the entire plot of the game is centered around it. This is especially notable, since as early as the first boss fight of the next game, steam power is already taken as a given, and poses comparatively little threat.
• Easter Egg: The Tinkerbat transformation, which is only available if you play the game on a Gameboy Advance (or use the debug mode cheat).
• Fake Difficulty: All over the place. The most obvious example being the enemies in the first real area that love to jump out of the ground directly below you, damaging you. There is absolutely no way to avoid it aside from never being close to the ground, which happens to be impossible until very late in the game. Some enemies like to use homing shockwave attacks before you can see them. Due to how little of the surrounding area the game screen shows, since the sprites are so big, there are a lot of Leaps of Faith. Some enemies hover just above where you can see them, so if you're unlucky and jump near them, you get an unavoidable hit. Sometimes it's impossible to tell where you'll land, meaning you can hit enemies or other, instant death-inducing, hazards.
• Fireballs: Fire Balls work like improved Pike Balls, revolving around Shantae at a faster rate to protect her from enemies.
• Game-Breaking Bug: Getting Baby Warp Squids sometimes crashes the game if played on either of the rereleases. At worst, it could even corrupt your save file.
• Giant Enemy Crab: Humanoid crustaceans serve as Elite Mooks in the Dribble Fountain labyrinth.
• Giant Spider: Shantae can turn into one after gaining the spider transformation.
• Goomba Stomp: The Dragon Rider boss can only be damaged by turning into a harpy, flying above him, and dropping on his head three times. This causes him to fall to the ground, where he can be damaged by regular attacks. This is, as stated above, the only thing in the entire game that can be interacted with in this manner.
• Ice Palace: The Twinkle Palace, which sits at the top of Mount Pointy and holds the Twinkle Stone. It contains frozen Elite Mooks that you must free and defeat to get past certain rooms.
• In-Universe Game Clock: Monsters ramp up the cheap in the night, and towns change. This is the only game to use the mechanic.
• Kung-Fu Wizard: Shantae, who can use a lot of powerful magical items and spells, but is still a kick-ass unarmed fighter while in human form after purchasing the fighter's equipment.
• Made of Indestructium: The Golem Stone is supposed to be the most durable metal in the world, fabled for its ability to withstand almost anything. Granted, Shantae can still destroy it in five hits the same as all the other legendary stones, so the stone's indestructibility may be more myth than fact.
• Magic Is Rare, Health Is Cheap: The only way to refill "spells" is to manually purchase more refills.
• Meaningful Name: Mimic is called "Mimic" due to him making copies of everything he finds as a Relic Hunter, according to an NPC in Water Town at night.
• Metroidvania: This was one of the aspects that set the game apart from other GBC titles.
• Mini-Game: Three: a Rhythm Game, a Betting Mini-Game, and a Racing Minigame (the second variety).
• Mini-Mecha: There are some Tinkerbats who pilot steam powered "mini-tinkerbots".
• Monster Town: The Zombie Caravan, a traveling town full of zombies. Also Bandit Village, many common enemies can be seen in its bar.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • Shantae's default hair whip attack is much shorter here than it is in future games. In addition, there's no way to improve it so it becomes stronger and faster, meaning enemies will never take fewer hits to defeat.
  • Shantae does not restart the room with full health after dying, and enemies in the overworld have twice as much health at night.
• Non-Nude Bathing: Shantae does this when healing herself in the bath houses.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Risky disguises herself like this at one point of the game.
• Public Bath House Scene: Shantae heals herself by bathing in city bath houses.
• Refusing Paradise: At the end of the game, Shantae is given the chance to become a full genie like she's always wanted, but she refuses as it would mean leaving her family and friends forever.
• Rhythm Game: The Dance Hall minigame. The dances you have to perform to transform or fast travel also count as this, as the button inputs must be done on each beat, though the game is pretty generous with the timing.
• Rock of Limitless Water: While it's not shown doing so in-game, the Dribble Stone is described as being this, and its ability to generate water would allow the Steam Engine to run indefinitely.
• Rolling Attack: The Elite Mooks in the Golem Mine use one to get around, as does the boss of the Cackle Mound whenever you damage him.
• Rubber-Band A.I.: The race against Rottytops. Throughout the entire race, she's right behind you and a single mistake means you're definitely repeating the race (unless you flub it right at the start). Beating her is mandatory in order to get to the third dungeon.
• Sand Worm: The enemies in the desert near Oasis Town include long, one-eyed worms that lurk inside holes in the sand.
• Shifting Sand Land: The Men's Desert and the Ladies Desert, deserts filled with Scorpion People, Sand Worms, and upside-down pyramids floating in the sky.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Mount Pointy, an ice mountain with lots of slippery slopes that will send you a good distance back and, as its name implies, tons of insta-death icicles jutting out from the above and below.
• Smells Sexy: Bolo starts following Risky just by following her perfume scent.
• Something Else Also Rises: There's a little clown who likes to watch cute girls dancing, especially when there are many of them. Once Shantae manages to meet his request, he gets so excited that he rockets into the air, opening the path to the room behind him.
• Sound Test: Two sound test menus can be found if you play the game using the debug mode. One of the menus has the music tracks, while the other one has sound effects, some of which were not included in the final game.
• Soundtrack Cover Character Jam: The vinyl release of the soundtrack by Fangamer has its female cast performing in a band; Shantae is on the guitar, Risky Boots plays a skull-shaped bass, Rottytops plays on the keyboard and Skye is on the drums. In addition, the gatefold has Shantae listening to music on a Game Boy through her headphones.
• Spin Attack: The Fighter's Tiara allows you to perform one as an upgrade to your Charged Attack. It's actually pretty strong, but it's very easy to kill yourself using it, since it flings you off uncontrollably at high speed, often past the initial bounds of the screen in a game where Bottomless Pits and Spikes of Doom are everywhere.
• Super-Scream: The Nagas fight with homing sonic screams.
• Teaser Equipment: It's unlikely you'll be able to afford Water Town's powerful Fighter's Equipment when you first come across the shop.
• Swamps Are Evil: The Swamp area is filled with wild zombies and also where the Cackle Mound was built.
• Underground Level: The Golem Mine, which has lava, stalactites, and stalagmites blocking Shantae's path.
• Unwinnable: It's possible to reach the fourth dungeon boss early, without having picked up the harpy transformation dance. This results in a Hopeless Boss Fight, as the only way to make the boss damageable is to first fly above it and smack it in the head. Dying puts you in the same room, so the only way to get out is to get a Game Over or reset, meaning you have to play the whole dungeon again.
• Version-Exclusive Content: Played With. The Tinkerbat transformation is intended to be this, as it can normally only be obtained while playing the game on a Game Boy Advance. However, you can use the debug mode cheat to access it on a Game Boy Color.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Risky's factory is a long gauntlet through traps and obstacles that require the use of all your forms.
• Video Game Flight: The harpy transformation. You can fly anywhere, but you don't get it until the last level, and it has no way to attack at first. Finding the Harpy's Talon, however, bestows upon it the single most powerful attack in the game that doesn't require charging. It can still be a little awkward to use, though, and the momentum from the form takes some getting used to.
• Video-Game Lives: The first and only game in the series to have them. They're promptly done away with after this one.
• Volcano Lair: Risky's hideout. Naturally, it erupts after you beat Risky.
• Warp Whistle: Warp dance, actually. You learn them from a Warp Squid.
• Wrap Around: The overworld wraps around horizontally. The world is even stated to be shaped like a ring. On a smaller scale, all the towns do this, too. Notably, this does not carry over into the sequels.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: Risky gets away with the Artifact of Doom no matter what, and your only reward for beating the first boss is not dying.

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