Hello there, if you don't know who I am, I'm HopesTweet, the one who made a bunch of Fanfiction that nobody cares about. Today, I'll be talking about a certain indie game series, well, if you can call it an indie series. That has been severely underrated and not talked about a lot in the gaming community. Shantae which was created by Wayforward and it's first game was released on the GBC (Game Boy Colour) and has had about 3 game releases so far, with a forth game coming soon. So there will be spoilers.
Now, let me make this clear: I LOVE THIS SERIES, I love the characters, gameplay, and the setting. But the Shantae series isn't what I'll call...Perfect, by any means. It has flaws, and what this...Thing is about discussing one of those flaws. The series's wall breaking humor, and how it's comedy heavily relies on it.
Every character at any given second is always making some meta remark about a gameplay mechanic, item, soundtrack and even its own merchandising. My concern is that in those games it never fully embraces its self-aware logic and it harms the narrative it's trying to tell.
The whole series sets itself up with an interesting lore regarding the realm of the genies, the parents of the titular character and their fates, as well as other bits of character development. But none of it ever comes to fruition, the writing is more concerned in making jokes and putting everyone in funny scenarios than to tell its own story, and it clashes heavily when it tries to have serious or heartfelt moments when earlier you had the characters joking about pallet swaps, or boss encounters.
It gets to a point that you start to roll your eyes as to how hard it's trying, it's very unapologetic about it. So much that the new game decided to ditch the traditional structure of having the story revolve around one fixed narrative, and instead goes for a more episodic approach.
That way they can focus less on character arcs and simply put all the cast in a variety of different humorous scenarios that aren't connected to one another. For me it's rather disappointing, because it feels like this odd hybrid of exaggerated meta humor that also want to be taken serious. I'd argue that it's one of the reason why the Shantae series hasn't reached a level of appeal for a majority of gamers.
The developers don't put a lot of focus in properly developing the fictional world they're creating and it loses a lot of its charm. Sure the graphics may look amazing, the gameplay is fantastic, and the jokes can be really cute and funny when they work; but there's nothing keeping me interested to go back to these adventures, to care about what happens next or even want to know more about these people.
I'm not invested in the context of beating a level or saving the world; they treat it as a video game so I only see it as such. The foundation for a narrative is there, it's just that they need a focused direction. And I get it, it's a platformer, but there are platformer games that have managed to be serious, yet also lighthearted.
An example of this is Freedom Planet, which has flaws ( which to be honest, is something for another time ) but when the serious moments happened, they at least tried to build up to it. And the characters still remember the main narrative and plot when it's being lighthearted, sometimes it uses those moments for character and world building. Which was something that the Shantae series lacked. I really hope that Wayforward finally realizes who repetitive the formula has become over the years. And I wish that they'll at least GO SOMEWHERE with what they've made...But hey, that's just my opinion!