Them's Fightin' Herds -- Shanty Tutorials: Pirate Ninja?!
But... why is she always yelling?
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Well, it's been a fair bit since I last gushed about this thing... and a lot's happened since then. The game actually got its first DLC character! This is generally pretty exciting for any game, but especially so for an indie, and all the more for such a unique and flavorful fighter as this.
It's also given me a fair amount of time to mess around with my capture process and bring a much better production to bear, although this is largely incidental and less to do with anything i learned from the considerable shortcomings of my earlier coverage... but the results are encouraging from what I can expect from here on out!
...you know what's less encouraging? I've played absolutely NONE of this since the last videos went up, so... I should really probably do something about that. Maybe. Eventually. If I can. (Time to wrangle up some opposition once again?!)
Heck, I can't even seem to remember the general flow of these tutorials or which button pauses versus which one advances to the next segment!
(I even managed to misremember the flow to the point that the training had to wrap up in TWO shots instead of one continuous one!)
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As exciting as Shanty is thematically and visually... I'm pretty sure she's not going to be that big a game-changer in my han-- er... hooves? She embodies some concepts I've encountered in other games with characters that had pretty significant execution barriers... even if hers is a lot lower than theirs, I'm not especially confident that I can bounce off the walls with as much aplomb as goats apparently do. (Or maybe it's just her. She might be especially committed to the shtick.)
Don't get me wrong, I think the game at its core is very welcoming to players of all skill levels, and even I feel capable of doing "magic" ground-to-launcher-to-aerial strings... um... more often than I normally ought to be able to, anyway... but her signature stance gimmick has me and my fingers perpetually tied up in knots... even trying to do things that only require one attack button.
There's also an unmistakable element of timing involved with basically all of her moves... gotta know when and how long to Parley... holding or not holding a prancing sidestep headbutt... heck, even her magic meter needs you to manage a ticking countdown of twitchy actions and reactions to get anything of value out of them...
Then again, my general "training" method hinges on the notion that experience is the best teacher, and trying to outsmart a training dummy isn't exactly the most encouraging of ways to have a little martial prowess beaten into you. (Plus all the lacking personality and pressure that'd naturally be provided by a living, breathing opponent!)
Besides, part of the joy of a new character joining the fray isn't whether or not you can use them to wreak unspeakable acts of violence... it's also the way you encounter other players using them and trying to overcome things you might personally not have felt confident doing, but acting and reacting amidst the unexpected onslaught in the hopes of coming out on top! ...or at least putting on a pretty good show of your own in the process, I guess.
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And there's no training segment on this, but Shanty's musical accompaniment will bring a whole new flavor of instrumentation to ALL existing stages, not to mention a bevy of amusing one-liners to trade with the already colorful cast of quipsters.