3/5 ★ – ExpNoob's review of Shantae: Risky's Revenge - Director's Cut.

Upon first glance Risky's Revenge may seem like a massive improvement from the original Shantae, and in some ways it is. Movement feels much better, the world is a lot less annoying to navigate, transforming no longer requires the rhythm mini game and of course the graphics. However nearing the end of my playthrough I couldn't help notice all the things it made worse from the original. Dungeons, while confusing in the original, were all well designed and really just needed maps to bring out their potential. Instead of keeping to that design style, they are now all linear, doubling down on the lack of maps, with one of them being a combat gauntlet. The transformations are also a downgrade. While they control pretty much the same, not only are there less now, but they pretty much only serve to bypass one roadblock and maybe one obstacle room each. The new mermaid transformation has a fetch quest and a shoot'em up section near the end, but they really aren't that interesting and feel more like padding than anything. In the original, the monkey and harpy completely changed world traversal upon unlocking them, in Risky's Revenge not only is the harpy gone, the other transformations provide no such navigational utility and are only useful for destroying their associated block type. While I did enjoy Risky's Revenge over the original for its improvements, I can't really rate it any higher for everything it did worse, not to mention it's extremely short length.