Shantae and the Seven Sirens

My first few hours with Seven Sirens had me genuinely excited: the controls feel snappy, the single interconnected map of Paradise Island opens up at a satisfying pace, and the quality-of-life overhaul to transformations is a real improvement. Where older entries forced you to stop and dance through a menu to swap forms, Seven Sirens ties each transformation to a button press. The Dash Newt wall-cling, the Bonker Tortoise rock-break, the Gastro Drill, the Sea Frog swim - each ability triggers contextually or with a single input, which keeps movement fluid in a way the series hadn't quite achieved before. Couple that with four Fusion Dance spells (revealing hidden platforms, powering electrical devices, healing, shifting obstacles) and you have a toolkit that genuinely rewards curiosity as you comb back through color-coded dungeon zones. The Monster Card system is the other standout addition. Cards dropped by enemies slot into a small loadout and let you tune Shantae's stats in minor but satisfying ways: faster crawling speed, reduced spell costs, boosted hair-whip damage, higher gem drop rates. It's a light build layer that also doubles as a bestiary, which is a clever two-for-one. The dungeon design itself is solid, and boss fights are structured to test whichever transformation you just unlocked, so the Angler Fish Siren fight leans on the Sea Frog and the Tubeworm Siren punishes players who ignore the Tortoise. There's logic to the progression that feels considered. Here's where the honest accounting starts, though. The difficulty is low enough that it barely registers as a factor. The game throws health items and gems at you so freely that even the final bosses can be brute-forced through auto-heal potions. Veterans of the series or anyone who's cleared a few metroidvanias will cruise through without much resistance. The asset reuse from Half-Genie Hero is noticeable too - recurring enemies, recycled sound effects, and boss attack patterns lifted wholesale from the previous game. The new characters, the seven sirens themselves, arrive with real visual flair (Studio Trigger handled the animated cutscenes and they show) but almost none of them get meaningful screen time before the credits roll. That's a wasted setup. For newcomers or younger players, none of those criticisms will land hard. Seven Sirens is probably the most accessible entry point in the entire series - short enough to finish in a weekend, light on grind, and genuinely charming throughout. The tropical soundtrack is catchy without being annoying, the writing still lands its fourth-wall jokes, and WayForward's character art has never looked sharper. It's also a decent option if you bounced off the more stage-gated structure of Half-Genie Hero and wanted the series to go back to a proper interconnected map. On those terms, it delivers. Just don't come in expecting the mechanical ambition of Pirate's Curse or the setpiece variety the series used to pull off.

Alex · Scout Team

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