Liam Triforce

Lately, I’ve been playing through a lot of WayForward’s back catalog. I recently played through the Mighty Switch Force series again, and over the past few days, I’ve been playing games like Wendy: Every Witch Way, Xtreme Sports, Contra 4, and Sigma Star Saga. Naturally, I’d be crazy not to revisit the Shantae series as well. Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse combines elements from every game I love into one incredibly attractive package, and I mean that in more ways than one…

WayForward’s passions are observable through the fun games they create being successors to the ones they loved to play growing up. Shantae combines elements of Metroid, Castlevania and Zelda, while Wendy and Mighty Flip Champs serve as spiritual successors to Metal Storm. Even oddball projects, like Xtreme Sports (which was created as the portable counterpart to the console game that Infogrames published), are far better and contain far more identity than you’d expect from a game like that at the time.

All of this has somewhat coalesced into a potential video on WayForward as a studio, as I find their committment to staying afloat in the indie space admirable. During the 2000s and 2010s, they took on whatever work they could find in order to eventually create the games that they were most passionate about, and that’s exactly what they’re doing today. But as I broach the concept of making a video on WayForward (or perhaps even exclusively Shantae), it is impossible for me to escape from my past.

Seeing as the tenth anniversary of my first written retrospective is coming up, I wanted to talk a little bit about some of my earliest projects on YouTube. As I built the identity for the channel I now have, I was averse to discussing these projects; honestly, I found myself embarassed by them. But these days, I realize they were important stepping stones for me to get to where I am now, and I was just painfully insecure about my work and myself back then. These days, I really couldn’t give a shit, and I’m so much happier because of that. Life is short, so let’s have a look at some of these old videos.

Beginnings, “Voice-Acted Let’s Plays,” Shantae

From 2010-2017, I convinced myself that I was going to be a full-time Let’s Player. I started on an old YouTube channel (now deleted), as well as a different website (which has since shut down), but finally settled into YouTube properly in 2013. At the time, Let’s Plays were not a dying medium; they were actually evolving. Game Grumps popularized the format of what was essentially watching your friends play games on a couch together, while Markiplier’s Five Nights at Freddy’s series would begin a year after I started making my own videos. Yes, I’ve been on YouTube that long. Even longer if you count before I started making videos; I think I’ve been using YouTube since 2007 (I was a pretty tech-savvy kid).

In these videos, I’d point a camcorder at the TV and talk while playing through games I knew pretty well. I did Let’s Plays of Wind Waker, Sonic Adventure, and Spider-Man 2 (2004), just to name a few. These gave me a chance to practice articulating my feelings toward art in general, and the format allowed me to go into a lot of detail about each game. In essence, they encompassed exactly what I do today – I talked about the things I loved.

Ultimately, I realized Let’s Plays were becoming oversaturated as a medium very quickly, and simply doing what I was doing was not going to be enough to break the mold. Unless you were at the forefront of this medium early on (and your videos were of decent quality), you were not going to find an audience, and even then, it was tough. So, I thought a bit outside of the box, and one idea I had ended up making for one of my first instances of online recognition.

I’ve been very passionate about voice acting, dubbing and ADR since I was young, and between 2014-2015, I played through all of the Shantae games that were available at that point. I got to wondering what the dialogue would sound like if it was fully voiced, and decided: “Hey, I want to do Let’s Plays of these games, but I’ll dub over the dialogue with voice actors that I’ll recruit from the Internet.” This proved to be the first time my channel was noticed by… anyone, really. It was a niche community, but it was a lot of fun to be creating something that people looked forward to for once!

Working on the ADR side of these videos was some of the most fun I’ve had making any video, in spite of the amount of work it took to direct each actor and edit it all together. It featured actors and actresses that would go on to do great work, despite doing all of this for fun, for a YouTube channel that, at the time, nobody watched. The voice actress I chose for Shantae, Risky, and Rottytops, for example, went on to voice Becky Blackbell in Spy X Family and Timerra in Fire Emblem Engage, while the voice of Sky would go on to become an accomplished theater actress in her own right. I haven’t spoken with either of them in a while, but I wish them both the best!

That said, no one was coming to these videos for the “Let’s Play” portions. They were coming to them for the voice acting. Anything that I had to say about the games was a bonus, and that’s being extremely generous. Coupled with my own insecurity as a coddled teenage boy with great shame in who I was turning out to be, and the obvious sex appeal that drew eyes to Shantae in the first place, and you have the culmination of why these videos were insufferable, despite my intentions: The Tan Line Temple episode.

This segment of Pirate’s Curse is one of its most famous. You have your items taken from you, you’re adorned with what is essentially Princess Leia’s golden bikini, and the whole thing is like that one part of Metroid: Zero Mission, where you have to sneak around and outsmart your enemies in revealing clothing – itself much like the final sequence of Alien. Naked and afraid.

It’s a classic trope, and the game is entirely self-aware throughout the whole sequence. You get to see all of the main girls in this outfit, while the dialogue makes fun of the circumstances. The sequence is hilarious, memorable, and frankly, I applaud the cheeky bit of fan service because it also shakes up the gameplay, which is something I felt that the “Run, Run, Rottytops” segment did prior to this.

Of course, seeing as I had still not worked through the shame and fear of being judged that I held as a teenager, I was nauseatingly prudish about the entire segment. I somehow managed to make the entire episode about how I was morally above the sexual overtones of this scene and that I would never find such desperately sexual material attractive. Shame on them…!

I was projecting. It’s a tale as old as time. In reality, I thought the entire sequence was hot as fuck, but good heavens! I couldn’t live with myself if anyone knew that!

The irony is that the entire game features sexual innuendo, pronounced breasts and revealing outfits, but for some reason, that was the episode where all my insecurities came through. I won’t go into why I feel I carried such shame regarding sexuality (that’d be an overshare, for sure), but I can say that I have since matured considerably, and I’m far more secure with my… enjoyment of this kind of thing, to be delicate about it. I’d have to be miserable to try to prevent people from enjoying something that hurts no one.

Of course, I still continued to make these videos as normal, eventually wrapping the series up with Half-Genie Hero. I also tried my hand of other games, like Hyrule Warriors and Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure. I created Part 1 for One Piece: Pirate Warriors (which would have been an ambitious dubbing project), but around then, I realized how pointless it was to continue including commentary in these videos, and stopped doing Let’s Plays entirely to focus on written videos. Needless to say, that was the right call.

In the aftermath, I created a Shantae series retrospective in 2017 that is now private, but I’d love to revisit the series today with a fresh perspective. The voice of Shantae in that series politely agreed to join me in dubbing over the terrible Midna sketches I wrote into my “reviews,” as I called them back then. I chose Midna in a pathetic attempt to tie things back to my screenname, “Liam Triforce,” and I quickly learned that forced comedy is a bad idea, and the sketches would be absent from my videos by 2018. A year later, my Half-Life Retrospective gained traction, and the rest is history, I suppose.

Tak and the Power of Juju

For those of you that consider yourself fans of these games and know me for my videos about them, you’re probably excited to read this next part. To those who have no memory of the game series that name belongs to – buckle up.

Tak and the Power of Juju was a Nickelodeon-commissioned video game series that began in 2003, and eventually spun off into a horrible TV show that I don’t like to talk about. If you want my thoughts on the games today, I’ll run through them very quickly:

The original Tak is a funny and fairly inventive collect-a-thon platformer, with gorgeous art direction that I remain a passionate fan of. The game has some painful low points, but it’s still quite fun to exist in the world that Avalanche Software created – the atmosphere is phenomenal. I don’t think it aged particularly well, but I hold a lot of fondness for it, as I played it a lot in childhood, and the same goes for Tak 2 and 3.

Tak 2 is more linear (with a few open-ended levels at the end), but it zeroes in on what made the core identity of the first game so solid, and its original ideas are brilliant. Tak 3 is really only fun if you have a friend to play it with, but I did get a lot of mileage out of learning to speedrun it solo.

Ultimately, they’re all perfectly above average games in my opinion. Some love them more than me, while others dislike them for valid reasons. Not to mention, they were each horribly rushed and are not nearly as polished or well-executed as something like Sly Cooper. Honestly, I think you can do a lot better than Tak, but they’re fine.

That said, if they are simply above average, then why am I dedicating a whole segment to these games? Well, it’s because in 2016, I realized how few people had talked about the games in any capacity, and decided to do something about it. I was intensely nostalgic for these games, and I committed to a Tak marathon, where I would create Let’s Plays of the three main games, their GBA and DS counterparts, and eventually the games based on the TV show. Ultimately, I got two games in, and gave up on Let’s Plays for the most part, instead opting to create a written retrospective on the first game and go from there.

Unbeknownst to me, that first retrospective would earn me my second boost in viewership, eventually pushing the channel to 1000 subscribers by early 2017. It struck a chord with many – even moreso than my Let’s Plays did – that remembered the game with fondness and wanted to see them covered in an organized, professional manner – not that any of my old videos are professional. Really, that’s the beautiful thing about the internet, isn’t it? It unites people with common interests from all over the world. I had no reason to be apprehensive about any of it.

That changed as I continued to pursue other things. I decided that I had done all I could with Tak for the time being, but whenever I made a video on something else, the Tak comments would come in like clockwork. I reached a breaking point in 2018 when I decided to write a serious video commentating on Manhunt’s place in the games industry, and I still could not escape those comments. On a video about a decidedly violent and transgressive work… I was getting comments about a Nickelodeon platformer from my childhood. When you have a burning desire to grow as a writer, you never want to feel chained down by your past.

Despite what I’m saying, I have absolutely nothing against these commenters. I do think their incessant pressure to get me to make Tak videos was a bit much, but I know what it’s like to feel alone in a niche interest. At my current age, it still happens to me, and I channel that into my work. I love Kat from Gravity Rush way, waaaaay too much, and I did my best to do her and her games justice back in 2025. So I get it, but all it did was push me further away from ever wanting to return to the series again.

After the Manhunt video, I admittedly started work on a Tak 2 retrospective out of spite, but as I wrote about the game and played through it again, I remembered why I was such a huge fan of it growing up, and it ended up being a surprisingly fun video to make, despite my positive opinions on the games diminishing with time. After that, however, I wanted to be done with the series, as I had long since grown sick of them. The Tak comments did not vanish, however, and I eventually made the difficult decision to privatize the videos around 2019. Eventually, the comments dwindled, and that was the end of it.

The short answer as to why I swept Tak under the rug is that it attracted some very weird and obsessive people, and as time went on, the popularity of those videos intimidated me, as I felt they did not reflect what I was making contemporaneously. The obsessive comments eventually became an in-joke between my friends and I, and to this day, they still hit me with it. The jokes are infrequent enough that they make me laugh every time, especially because I’ve put so much distance between now and when I was making those videos. Even my father is in on the joke. He’ll text me a picture of Tak’s face every now and then, with the caption “Give the people what they want.”

I have since rewatched the videos, and I personally don’t feel comfortable with them being public for the time being. It’s not a matter of me being insufferable in them like the Shantae videos; I have matured a lot since then, and I could show them to people with confidence because of that. I don’t have a problem with the content of the Tak videos; I just don’t want to deliberately re-open a door that took years for me to close. Yes, those comments were that annoying. At some point, though, I’ll make them public again, or at the very least visible through a playlist.

As for a future Tak video… A million subscribers. Since that won’t happen, I think I’m safe. By that point, I could make anything and it’d be chill.

At the end of the day, though, those games are near and dear to my heart, and I don’t regret the time I spent on the series.

Some More Stuff + Conclusion

I’ve mentioned a few of my earlier projects in some of my videos. In 2017, I did a Star Fox marathon where I went over every game in the main series. The videos were horrible, and I honestly don’t think I had any idea what I was talking about for the most part. I eventually returned to the series in 2024 with my Star Fox Retrospective.

Others are videos you’ve probably never even heard of. Did you know I made a video on the Legend of Korra video game? Or a video where I compared Wind Waker and Twilight Princess directly despite them being completely different games in terms of direction and design? Now you do! Naturally, these videos are now private (they’re horrible).

Many of my older videos, however, are still public and easily viewable. The Ty the Tasmanian Tiger and Bargain Bin Game Boy Color videos offer glimpses into a timeline where I decided to become the next Caddicarus or Angry Video Game Nerd, but I can’t tell you how much happier I am with the direction I have since taken. Channeling my passion for this medium into my writing took a long while to work out, but the honest emotion that I put into my Half-Life retrospective ended up being the thing that finally resonated most of all, and it led into me finally having the confidence to write about Zelda.

All of this experimentation in my early days was done in order to figure out exactly the kind of videos I wanted to write, and I don’t regret any of it for a second. That’s really what all of this is about. In order to make peace with who you are and let go of the shame you once held, you have to change what you can, and accept what you can’t as a part of you. It’s easier said than done, of course, but I would not be where I am today, both as a writer and as a person, had I not learned to do that, and that’s why you’re reading this post today. These days, I’m not ashamed anymore. I could talk about the sex appeal in WayForward’s games, or make another Tak video, or pretty much do anything that my past self would have prevented me from doing because I am so much more sure of who I am today. I used to think every mistake I’d made, any quirk I demonstrated, or any interest I had was a reflection of my character, and I would judge myself, and be afraid of judgment, for all of those things.

In a way, they are a reflection of my character. They are what it means to be human; to be me. And as a result, I have come to fully embrace them.

Anyway, thanks for reading! The tenth anniversary of my written videos is on June 4th, and I’ll be live streaming to celebrate the occassion!