I’d been putting off playing Shantae and the Seven Sirens, the fifth Shantae game, for quite some time. So long, in fact, that it got updated to include a new “Definitive Mode” before I had played it even once.
As I type this, though, I’m staring down the release date of Final Fantasy XIV’s new expansion Dawntrail, so I didn’t want to start anything too huge. And thus it seemed like an ideal time to jump into a 10-hour adventure like Shantae and the Seven Sirens. So I did.
And it will doubtless not surprise you to learn that I had a good time. So let’s take a closer look at this lovely game after the jump.
As you’ll know if you’ve read my previous Shantae Cover Game feature, the Shantae series has, over time, experimented and evolved while still remaining true to its basic principles. The first game is probably one of the most ambitious, impressive titles to ever be released for Game Boy Color; the second is a love letter to 16-bit console games; the third feels like a lost 32-bit platformer; and the fourth introduced a new, non-pixel art animation style and also experimented with a new structure.
Shantae and the Seven Sirens doesn’t really introduce anything Shantae hasn’t done before, but it does feel like a fresh shakeup of things thanks to its combination of 1/2 Genie Hero’s beautiful hand-drawn animation style and the original Shantae’s Zelda-esque structure: exploring an overworld split into discrete regions, then delving into dungeons to defeat bosses and advance the story.
This specific combination of presentation and structure hasn’t been done before in the series, so it’s enough to make Shantae and the Seven Sirens feel fresh and new. I go back and forth on which Shantae is my specific all-time favourite, but Shantae and the Seven Sirens is definitely hovering around the top end of things.
Following the beautiful Trigger-animated intro — which features a song that would be perfect for a Shantae TV series — Shantae and the Seven Sirens sees half-genie Shantae and her extended cast of friends kicking off a holiday on a beautiful island.
Well, Shantae’s not exactly there for a holiday; she’s been invited to participate in a half-genie festival alongside several other members of her kind, but partway through the group’s preparation for their stage performance, Shantae’s new-found pals all disappear, leaving our heroine to do what she does best: strut confidently around a side-scrolling 2D world, whipping enemies with her hair and gradually gaining in power through the acquisition of items and money with which to purchase said items.
The world of Shantae and the Seven Sirens is split into several discrete areas, each with their own distinct visual theme, backing soundtrack and cast of enemies to deal with. Not every area has a labyrinth to conquer, but several do; these are treated as separate from the interconnected world areas, and mark the culmination of each of the game’s narrative “chapters”.
Much of the game involves enjoying a short bit of story, then heading off to accomplish something in the overworld, which in turn, either directly or indirectly, provides access to the next labyrinth Shantae needs to conquer. Upon reaching the end of the labyrinth in question, Shantae faces one of the titular Sirens in a boss battle, at which point the chapter is considered clear, the story moves on and you do it all again.
Despite having a “chapter-based” structure, Shantae and the Seven Sirens is pretty much completely open-structure, within the usual constraints of the genre. That means while very little of the map has a hard “block” on it preventing you from going that way, your exploration tends to be gated by the abilities Shantae earns over the course of her quest. These take a couple of distinct forms, as in previous games: transformation abilities, which tend to relate to mobility of various forms, and dance magic, which has a specific effect on whatever is on screen at the time you use it. Unlike the original Shantae, her transformation abilities are not triggered by dancing; instead, once you unlock them, they’re either assigned to a specific button, or automatically trigger in the appropriate context.
The first transformation ability you unlock is known as “Newt Dash” and has two key benefits: firstly, a short-range horizontal air dash, and secondly, the ability to stick to a vertical wall and climb up it. While this might sound like it would open up a lot of the world almost immediately, Shantae and the Seven Sirens’ areas are cleverly designed so that there are just enough awkwardly placed overhangs and platforms to prevent you from climbing absolutely everywhere.
Not long after unlocking the Newt Dash, you earn Shantae’s first dance magic, known as the Seer Dance. This allows Shantae to see hidden objects. Some of these are simply destructible scenery items that can be hair-whipped for bonus items, but it will also help reveal invisible platforms (which are also intangible while they’re invisible), enemies that are usually invisible, and spots that can potentially reveal hidden items when used in conjunction with other abilities. There are a lot of hidden items in Shantae and the Seven Sirens, so Seer Dance is something you’ll be using a lot if you want to go for 100% item completion.
The next transformation ability to put in an appearance is the curiously named Gastro Drill, which allows Shantae to drill into (and through) soft dirt. This allows her access to numerous areas that were previously inaccessible. Some dirt patches have sleeping monsters buried in them; freeing one causes it to roam the path that Shantae has dug out, though she can defeat them if she runs into them with her “drill bit” head. There’s one sequence in which you have to locate hidden items buried in a large dirt area; the room they’re in is indicated on the map, but in order to actually find them, you have to drill through the specific tiles they’re concealed behind, which are indicated by a subtle sparkling effect. Not a super-challenging puzzle, but a nice use of the mechanic for more than simple traversal.
Shantae’s next Dance Magic is the Refresh Dance, which will likely be primarily used by most players as a self-heal, but can also restore withered plants to vitality and turn poisonous liquid into harmless, swimmable water. It also has a devastating effect on undead enemies; in just one of many wonderful examples of the game’s gentle but cheeky sense of humour, several undead enemies have unique animations for if they are defeated by the Refresh Dance, with my personal favourite being the mummified enemies whose bandages are stripped by the Refresh Dance, revealing a very embarrassed-looking disrobed zombie beneath.
Next up, Shantae earns the delightfully named Bonker Tortoise transformation, which allows her to do two things: a ground pound that will smash through cracked stone blocks below her, and a charge attack that will shoot her horizontally across some gaps and, again, crack stone blocks in her path. There are also some of the hidden items revealed with the Seer Dance that require the Bonker Tortoise to ground pound in a specific place to reveal themselves, so there’s already some synergy between Shantae’s abilities.
The next Dance Magic Shantae earns is the Spark Dance, which summons a localised blast of electricity, powering any electrical items in the vicinity. There are a number of sections in the game where you need to use this to power objects or light up rooms, but there are also plenty of optional scenery elements it can be used on for bonus items, too. This is one of those abilities that, once acquired, makes it worthwhile to wander the whole map you’ve previously explored, looking out for previously inaccessible bonuses you might now be able to trigger.
After that, Shantae earns the Sea Frog ability, which allows her to swim underwater. There are several underwater rooms throughout the map where Shantae must collect all the coins as a Sea Frog while avoiding shots from enemies moving up and down the walls; a nice idea, but nothing was really done with it beyond making the rooms a bit more maze-like. It would have perhaps been fun to have some slightly more elaborate puzzles involving this mechanic.
Shantae’s final Dance Magic in Shantae and the Seven Sirens is the Quake Dance, which causes a screen-wide earthquake. This damages enemies, moves certain walls out of the way and sometimes reveals hidden items. Like the Spark Dance, it’s an ability you’ll probably want to roam the complete map with if you’re going for 100% completion. There’s also one sequence in the game where it’s essential to progress, but I’ll leave that for you to discover yourself.
Finally, Shantae gains the ability to transform into a Jet Octo, which essentially allows her to double and triple jump by squirting ink out beneath her. This is the last ability you unlock because it’s probably the one that has the biggest impact on your mobility; notably, though, gaining access to the Jet Octo also coincides with some of the trickiest platforming in the game. There are several sequences (some optional, some not) that require clever use of the Jet Octo’s double and triple jump in concert with the Newt Dash in order to successfully traverse a perilous, spike-filled corridor; nothing too “masocore”, thankfully, but it’s good that the environment does present a bit of a challenge once Shantae has acquired all her traversal abilities.
One of the nice, rather considerate features of Shantae and the Seven Sirens is that if you enter a room where one of the Dance Magics will reveal something, you’ll see an icon depicting one of Shantae’s new friends, with each corresponding to the Dance Magic they teach her. While you’ll still have to make a few circuits of the map to attain 100% completion, this feature at least alleviates the frustration of searching areas that have nothing to discover. It doesn’t remove the challenge of discovery, either, as many “rooms” throughout Shantae and the Seven Sirens’ world scroll across several screens, so you’ll need to find the right part of these rooms to use the Dance Magic in to uncover the hidden items.
As well as the transformations and Dance Magic, Shantae can also collect Monster Cards by defeating enemies. Acquiring these allows Shantae to equip up to three passive abilities. Some of these can be unlocked by collecting just one card from an infrequently appearing monster; others require multiple of the same card to be collected before they can be used. Particularly powerful cards corresponding to the Siren bosses are also available; these all require Shantae to find metallic Nuggets as hidden items using her various transformation and Dance Magic abilities, then present them to one of several “card collector” characters scattered around the game world — only once she’s defeated the boss depicted on the card, of course.
The “Definitive Mode” update to Shantae and the Seven Sirens also includes two additional game modes: one where she has access to all the Monster Cards from the outset of the game, but can still only equip three at once, and another where she can equip up to 50 simultaneously. Both of these, as you might expect, change the balance of the game quite radically, as the cards allow you to customise and tweak the way the game plays to your own preferred style.
Some cards increase the effectiveness or reduce the magic cost of some of Shantae’s special weapons, for example, while others increase the damage of her basic attack, cause her magic meter to automatically regenerate or make it more likely for enemies and destructible scenery elements to drop certain items. Cards can be swapped out at any time without penalty, so savvy players will, for example, swap in the cards that reduce the cost and increase the effectiveness of the Refresh Dance when Shantae needs to heal, then perhaps swap back out to cards that increase the likelihood that magic replenishment items drop, or the aformentioned automatic regeneration ability.
Shantae and the Seven Sirens is a reasonably challenging game; it’s certainly not one that most players will get through with zero deaths on their first time through, but it’s also not so punishing that you’ll ever really feel like you’ve hit a roadblock. The hardest part of the game by far is the very beginning, when Shantae has only three hearts of health and none of her special abilities; the further you progress, the easier the game gets, until you reach the final boss with the ability to turn invincible for short periods, a reliable healing spell, regenerating magic, halved damage taken from enemies and halved magic consumption. While the growth in power is, on the one hand, pretty fun, it also makes the endgame encounters near-trivial; the final boss battle in particular is more a test of endurance rather than a fight that requires any real skill.
That’s a bit of a shame, but it doesn’t undercut what Shantae and the Seven Sirens is really good at: providing an interesting, well-designed world that it’s a pleasure to navigate thanks to responsive controls, excellent animation and solid mechanics. Since the vast majority of the game is about exploration rather than combat, the slightly underwhelming nature of the final boss battle (mechanically, anyway; visually, it’s quite spectacular) doesn’t sting as much as it might have done in a more combat-centric game.
All in all, Shantae and the Seven Sirens is an excellent Shantae game. It’s beautifully presented, with the gorgeous character art and animation complemented by the excellent music the series is known for and some short but sweet animated video sequences that introduce each boss encounter and major story moment. Being rewarded for progress with a movie scene is a pleasingly old-school touch that works well with the overall structure and feel of the game.
I don’t think I’d necessarily recommend it to anyone as their first Shantae game, primarily due to how it makes numerous references to her previous adventures via recurring characters and in-jokes, but it’s definitely a very solid installment in the series. It gives me confidence that this almost certainly isn’t the last we’ve seen of our half-genie hero, so I can’t wait to see where her next adventure takes us.
And in the meantime, there’s always Yars Rising, too.
More about Shantae and the Seven Sirens
More about the Shantae series
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