I'm a long-time Shantae fan so I was super excited when they announced they'd be finishing and releasing the cancelled Shantae Advance.

• As usual for the series, the art is great and full of charm. Almost all of the new character designs fit right in.
  
• The game runs on the GBA!
  
• The gameplay feels snappy even with the limitations of the GBA.
  
• The story and writing are cute and quirky.
  
• A handful of clever uses of the revolution gimmick

Unfortunately, much the game feels straight out of 2004. The dungeon and level design is a significant step back from the later entries in the series and there are some serious artificial game lengtheners to push it past the 5 hour mark. Labyrinth layouts feel almost random, often requiring you to pick a direction arbitrarily and follow it for minutes just to find you needed a key from a different arbitrary path. Later enemies are simple recolors with significantly more health and damage and you cap out on whip upgrades pretty quickly. The same miniboss is reused multiple times and it wasn't even very fun to fight the first time. Puzzles are more tedious than challenging and often boil down to "do you have the powerup?". The collectibles serve zero purpose in game except for your completion percent at the end and there's no good way to track if you missed one in a labyrinth aside from knowing there are 3. The new boss designs feel pretty uninspired and don't really fit with the rest of the series. The boss fights, especially the final boss, are pretty underwhelming and feel like they have way too much HP. This game reuses the same transformations from the other games meaning you aren't going to be surprised by anything you unlock here. The revolution gimmick is neat but the game never really has a moment where it feels fully realized. It's not obvious in what ways spinning the foreground and background will help you so it's often just trial and error until you find where you need to be and in what orientation. The swapped towns are a fun idea but once you fix them it's done and you couldn't even swap them back if you wanted.

$25 for this game and $35 for the deluxe edition is ridiculous. It's a 5 hour GBA game with very little novel content to justify that price.

It might be a little unfair to judge this game so harshly considering it was intended to release in 2004, but sadly it did release in 2025 and for $25 so we have no choice but to judge it by modern standards.

If you aren't a die-hard Shantae fan, skip this one and pick up Pirate's Curse or Half-Genie Hero. If you are a die-hard Shantae fan, wait until this goes on a deep sale and play it as a fun piece of Shantae history.

Well it's more fun than getting a tooth pulled

bad

Perfect for people who love digimon and terrible translations.

A garbage game intended to cash in on the "simulator" hype. "Games" like this shouldn't be allowed on Stean.

Garbage.

Gamebreaking bug 15 minutes in. 10/10.