WayForward Talks Shantae on Nintendo DS, WiiWare & GBA

WayForward has just released the first edition of its Shantae newsletter and discusses the game's past, present and future in great detail inside. Matt Bozon, the self-proclaimed 'Shantae Guy' talks readers through just why the sequel to Shantae on the Game Boy Colour never made its appearance on the GBA as planned, despite Capcom actually being quite eager for the developer to keep the franchise alive, even on GameCube (just prior to the 'Capcom 5' announcement, apparently), with part of the blame being on the over-saturated GBA market in the US, with far too many platform games popping up on the platform in a short space of time. Then it became a case of the key developers on the Shantae 'Pocket Team' splitting to head other groups within the company as it expanded and attempted to stay afloat by taking on licensed development projects such as the million-selling Spongebob the Movie on GBA (compared to just 15,000 sales of Shantae GBC worldwide!). There was simply no chance of the game coming to fruition. Bandai Namco then gave WayForward some creative freedom for Sigma Star Saga (a game that had the soundtrack composed by Manfred Linzner and the gang at Shin'en, the German developer behind Iridion and Nanostray, and close friends of WayForward's) and following this Contra 4 came blasting onto the scene courtesy of a deal with Konami.

Shantae was never forgotten, though, with plans at one point to even make a NES-style adventure that could be played via the e-Card Reader device from Nintendo! However, the current status of Shantae projects has now been revealed below:

Shantae DS: In 2006-2007 we hit pretty hard, with a massive undertaking to redo the cast of hero and enemy sprites, and about half of the sequel's backgrounds were created by the legendary Henk Nieborg (who then shifted to Contra 4). As you can see, the handheld market is again flooded, which is why we intentionally never made a formal announcement. But, you can see a first look here! Just be aware that this game exists as design, artwork, and tech only. Unlike the GBA game, there is no 2 hour long gameplay demo.

Shantae WiiWare: Informally (and inadvertently) announced at GDC, this is an ongoing experiment in 2D on the Wii. As it currently stands, the game is very traditional as an action/platform game (no Wiimote Wagging) with its main draw being 480P 2D artwork. If the project gets legs, we'll have more to say in the next newsletter. For now, it just looks cool!

Shantae GBA: The 2 hour long demo of Risky Revolution exists in a near-polished state. Because there is high demand for the release of this rom, our hope is to eventually move it to a suitable platform and release it as bonus content, cleaned up and presentable, able to stand on its own as a video game "short".