Indie Game of the Week 393: Shantae and the Seven Sirens

We're getting ever closer to Halloween and what's scarier than genies? Y'all seen Wishmaster, right? Those greedy fools didn't get anything close to what they bargained for. OK, fine, so I'm just playing another Shantae game from WayForward because I guess this has ballooned into a full-blown addiction to explormers now. Last time I was here it was with Half-Genie Hero for IGotW #106, but I've covered Risky's Revenge and the Pirate's Curse elsewhere. Shantae and the Seven Sirens had the dubious distinction of being an Apple Arcade exclusive for a while there—I guess that's still better than a Stadia exclusive—but it escaped that world of overpriced planned obsolescence and hit all the consoles and Steam around a year later. The story this time sees Shantae meet up with some fellow half-genies at the vacation resort of Arena Island before they're kidnapped by a mysterious gang of sirens that live in the ancient underwater city beneath.

I was slightly concerned that the game's mobile origins would mean a compromised experience one way or the other, but evidently that hasn't been the case for mobile gaming for a while since Seven Sirens might be the most ambitious Shantae game to date. That's perhaps still not saying much, since this is a series very content to follow the IGAvanias with very small changes to what's admittedly a winning formula of exploring a beautifully-rendered world and powering up via a selection of traversal ability upgrades and other boons. Shantae's animal transformations are back—the first being a very convenient air-dash and wall-climb combo—but adding to those are the magical powers of her fellow half-genies, temporarily gifted over through an arcane process revolving around "fusion stones" (which, naturally, constitute several fetch quests of their own to obtain). These abilities are connected to Shantae's dancing, selected from a quick wheel, and likewise offer skills that are occasionally vital but are almost always somewhat helpful. The first, for instance, is a scanning ability that reveals hidden objects that are usually gem caches but might also include platforms and other needed furniture.

The game is economical with its world design, creating one large overworld with various town hubs and a warp system that vaguely connects to points on the island at the furthest cardinal and intercardinal directions and within that overworld are several self-contained "labyrinths" which can be explored in full on the first visit. These labyrinths take the Zelda dungeon route of funneling the player around a bunch of impassable routes until they find some upgrade contained within that then allows full exploration of the remaining areas and, finally, a boss fight at the end. It's pretty clean too: you might be required to backtrack all over the overworld for every item, but chances are you'll never need to head back into a labyrinth unless it's for the heart squids (the game's health upgrade system; there's exactly three in each labyrinth and there's icons in the GUI to tell you how many you have, making them hard to miss) or some monster cards.

Speaking of which, the game has a few more Castlevania affectations than usual, one of which is how you can collect trading cards of monsters by defeating them enough times that it finally procs the drop %. This farming practice works very similarly to the soul-harvesting of the Aria/Dawn of Sorrow duo, complete with how you can equip up to three of them and enjoy their passive benefits. The game also has an unusually (for Shantae, at least) robust economy and inventory where you can buy any number of sub-weapons, healing consumables, and weapon upgrades at multiple tiers of effectiveness, using the vast amount of wealth you can collect from enemies and hidden caches to really keep yourself stocked with anything you might need. The healing potential alone trivializes much of the game, which is why I've opted to chase after a tough achievement-based challenge where you have to hang onto all the heart squids (rather than "spend" them to turn them into health). Bosses and sub-bosses have been tough enough so far, and they're doing more damage per hit as I keep progressing, so I'm not sure how tenable it might be to get through the game on just the initial three hearts but I've not really run into any serious problems so far and I've so much cash that I can just splurge on these "revive from death" potions regardless. Challenge is never really a major factor in explormers, barring the more explicitly Dark Souls-like ones such as Hollow Knight or Momodora, so I don't really mind having all these convenient heals at hand but even so it's sure hard to avoid feeling spoiled by all this.

Shantae and the Seven Sirens is, in many ways, the Shantae series at its peak. The larger world with its self-contained dungeons is a nice tweak to the formula and though we've seen Shantae transform into animals plenty of times before all of them this time have multiple functions to make them feel a bit more versatile and useful throughout the game, not just in those handful of occasions where you might need it to break down a wall or something, and this is helped by having them all take over different buttons and be available simultaneously rather than force you to toggle between whichever one is active. It should probably go without saying that the music and visuals are still top-notch, something you can usually rely on WayForward to get right, adding a few more catchy tracks to Shantae's repertoire in that trademark Arabic style (one in particular keeps sounding like it's about to break into the Indy theme though, which is a little distracting but I guess thematically apropos). Given Castlevania's current status as a half-hearted shrug from Konami management, Shantae is probably the secondmost prestigious active explormer franchise out there (after Metroid, naturally) and even if they do tend to run the same with their similar ideas and set-ups they're still reliably solid games that offer well-crafted action and presentations alike. To add on that, Seven Sirens is possibly the best this series has ever been if nothing too revolutionary, making it a fine choice if you ever needed a reason to go back or are perhaps checking the franchise out for the first time.

Rating: 4 out of 5.