Hi, I'm Palipilino!
Nintendo Switch
2/6/2026
Games get cancelled all the time for all sorts of reasons, but when you hear about it, you usually expect it to be related to some kind of troubled development or shift in focus. But sometimes, cancellations can occur due to factors outside of the developers' control. Of the ways a game can be cancelled, this is probably the harder option for fans to swallow. It can end up feeling like the next game in their favorite series is just tantalizingly out of reach, especially if it got to the point in development with fully functioning demos available for internal testing.
Sometimes, though, on very rare occasions, those games that have long since been cancelled, forgotten by many, and only remembered as a footnote in gaming history...sometimes, they come back. An unlikely revival of a game long since dead, finally experienced by fans for the first time, after all the articles and the speculation—simultaneously a new entry and a piece of history—well, just sometimes, it can end up being the game that so many fans were hoping for and dreaming of. Shantae Advance is not.
As the name implies, Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution was originally slated as a Game Boy Advance title back in 2002, before failure to find a publisher led to it being shelved for over two decades. As such, it retains the 16-bit style that was introduced in the DSiWare title Risky's Revenge. If there's one thing you can expect from developer WayForward, it's excellent presentation, and Shantae Advance is no exception, with its colorful backgrounds and lively pixel animations. Its soundtrack is, likewise, typically excellent, and there are plenty of things for long-time fans of the series to enjoy here.
| Played For | 7h 14m |
|---|---|
| Completion Type | 88% Completion, 42/50 Secrets |
| Favorite...Uhh... | Haha |
| Fun Fact | Thank goodness no one saw me playing this! |
Shantae Advance is more of a 2D platformer rather than a Metroidvania—you will only be returning to previous dungeons or areas mostly for optional secrets—so from a gameplay perspective, it's relatively brief and is paced decently well. Unfortunately, for story purposes, you're also frequently travelling to different areas just to talk to someone to get something to go somewhere else to talk to someone to get something...these moments can drag in what would otherwise be a very short game.
The problem with Shantae Advance is that, other than its aesthetics (more on that later), it really doesn't offer anything unique in the gameplay department, especially for fans of the series. The corpse of Risky Revolution had long since been carved up and dolled out to a litany of would-be sequels by the time it received any public release. Its main foreground/background gimmick could be an interesting gameplay feature—if the game did much more with it. Oh, and if it wasn't already heavily featured in Risky's Revenge.
So derivative has the foundation of this game become that the very best Shantae Advance can aspire towards is being an inoffensive 2D platformer. Sure, maybe this game would have been more (pardon the pun) revolutionary if it had been released back in 2004, but in 2025? It's already been far surpassed in terms of creativity and level design within its own series, and for this game to have truly felt like something new would have required a lot of revision. As it is, it feels more like a Dr. Frankenstein's hobbling together of elements from Shantae's past.
So, the question becomes, why release this game at all? What is Shantae Advance even for? Well...the answer is, let's say, unsurprising. The Shantae series has always featured a fair degree of, shall we say, overt design. It has been a mainstay of the series' identity since its Game Boy debut. It's certainly garnered a lot of fans. There are ways to do it in ways that are not embarrassing, and then there's Risky Revolution. It feels like the developers of this game had a set amount of time to either make the game more interesting or fill it to the brim with blatant fanservice, and they put all their money on option B.
Most Shantae games are probably not living-room-gaming tier, but Shantae Advance could make players feel the ick in an empty room. In an already gratuitous series, this is the game that feels the most like it is catering to one side of the fanbase only. Any moment of extended character portrait animation or dialogue or...basically any strictly non-gaming moment is draining. The modus operandi of Shantae Advance is disappointingly clear.
The future path of Shantae is unclear but foreboding. Shantae Advance is probably the laziest game in the series catalog, and it seems like a vast amount of the work done to get this game on modern consoles was in giving players something to look at rather than something to enjoy playing. Perhaps Shantae 7, the first proper brand-new entry in the series in what will probably end up being a decade, will exhibit some creativity in game design outside of women's bodies. Risky Revolution, on the other hand, was better left forgotten; it amounts to little more than a game that needed much more fleshing out...and a protagonist that needed much less.