From little things like Shantae being stupid enough to eat a library card to after hearing a villain talk about his plans to destroy the town using a specific item and then when you find said item, Shantae's first reaction is to go deliver it to the villain because somebody asked her too, she just isn't a compelling character here. She also went from being a likable, capable hero to being a brain-dead jackass. She's sounds like a terrible anime school girl to compound how poorly she's written. They added voice work but Shantae's voice is awful. Not an in-game setting menu (because this game has zero setting options), actually changing the Wii U settings. But the game that just came out and was explicitly designed for the console I am playing it on requires me to go to system settings and change things around to display properly. I've primarily been using my Wii U to play games made 10-20 years ago that were designed for older systems on CRTs or handhelds, and they all display just fine. I can only fully see one of my health hearts and two digits of my money because the rest are beyond the border of the screen. The screen doesn't even properly fit the TV. The ending of the game has a giant seam in the scrolling background and you can't take your eyes off of it. It's fun and enemies are lively and there's so much of it, but the game looks really bad on a TV, as if they just took the 3DS version and stretched it out in some parts. Creepy sexualization aside, the sprite animation is fantastic. You can't appreciate the characters that are sexy and whimsical because all of the women are in fetish gear or have their breasts flopping all over. I love sexy female video game characters, but when you have Shantae stripping for a bath in the opening for no reason to NPCs gratuitously stripping down to bikinis in the first area to later putting the cast in metal slave bikinis, it stops being fun and starts getting weird/gross. And on the female character front, they took the universe from being a cute and wink-wink-nudge-nudge sex appeal to cramming it down your throat. They hand wave away the awful ending of Risky's Revenge multiple times, so they don't even have the decency to cop to the last game's faults. I love that Nintendo Power cover! I want to play the heck out of the game on that cover. The art isn't as bad as the change for Half Genie Hero, but if you compare the art from Pirate's original reveal on the cover of Nintendo Power to the anime look now, the original is vastly more compelling. By losing Matt Bozon's art and moving towards a more generic anime look, Shantae and the characters in her world just aren't as interesting. And you know what, I was totally right on all those parts. Despite formerly being a fan of the franchise, I passed on Shantae and the Pirate's Curse when it first came out because Wayforward ran a scummy Kickstarter, I despise the change in the art style, Risky's Revenge has a terrible, half-assed ending, and the promo material showed a really sleazy treatment of the female characters.

Shantae sprites pirate curse