I have nothing against ports of ports of games, but GameBoy Advance-area platformers are weird things to port on PC. SRRDC is one of those games, added more or less as-is to the world of personal computers. It's okay for what it is, but I didn't spend more time on it than I had to. Some weird art choices, some weird systems here and there and precise platforming using the keyboard don't collide well in this weird belly-dancing metroidvania.
I know I usually don't rant about art styles - and I feel that it's not my place to do so - but the jarring difference between the GBA-area pixel art and the 'hd' versions of the characters, menus and other UI elements is a bit jarring. Besides that, the game is pretty stylish and some cool parallax effects are used here and there - but in some places like the forest, it's hard to tell on which layer enemies are when you're jumping around.
Besides some weird bugs like being able to stand on the very edge of a moving spiked platform, I didn't have many technical problems in SRRDC - one I had was pretty bad, starting a conversation with an NPC just in the path of a projectile that killed me. And since this is a remake of a GBA game, when you die, you're sent back to the last place you've saved. I suppose that in the world of quicksaves, the onus is on the player to realize when the game last saved. The keyboard controls are also weird since there is no button mapped to opening the map and that the escape key opens a system menu and A and Q are used for your inventory. I wish there would've been a dedicated map button. In any case, keyboard controls are sometimes not precise enough, especially when you have to jump above the screen and land on very small moving platforms.
I had never played a Shantae game, but you're a half-genie with a magic meter and belly dances that you unlock in order to transform you into animals. They replace the double-jumps and block-breaking abilities of old. It's a neat little mechanic. The dungeons are a bit too maze-ish for my tastes, but you whip your air and cast spells cross interesting locales and there are also plenty of shortcuts to bring you to spots you've already been when you unlock new movement abilities. I was a bit confused by the spells, were they one-use items? What was that weird symbol next to them? The symbol is magic jams, and the spells aren't one-use, thankfully. Things like fireballs, spinning spikes and other bolt-shooting clouds are things you can unlock, and there are a few passive bonuses to get as well.
In any case, dying after triggering a dialogue box and not being able to get out of the way of a projectile soured me on the whole thing, and I had seen two dungeons and spent a few hours belly dancing my way around. It's an okay game, but nothing special.
