YMMV / Shantae and the Seven Sirens

• Alternative Character Interpretation: While in her Mayor disguise, Risky Boots noticeably praises Shantae at several points, especially when compared to her disguise as the Bandit Town Half Genie, where she was perfectly willing to hand out backhanded compliments to Shantae. Was it just a way to keep up appearances and she didn't actually mean it? Or was it Risky's way of showing respect to someone she has clearly come to consider a Worthy Opponent?
• Anti-Climax Boss: For all the buildup around her, the Ultra Empress Siren is not a difficult boss. Her main attack's easy to dodge and the vulnerable points you need to target are easy to hit. The "second stage" is just the final six vulnerable points at her head, more shrinking the battlefield so you don't have to climb back if you fall than making falls more dangerous. Of all the bosses in the game, she's the weakest.
• Breather Boss:
  • The Octopus Siren boss fight becomes this once you figure out that using the Spark Dance turns off her ability to attack for a short time. You can also use the Seer Dance to find the correct order you need to hit the brains in.
  • The Anglerfish Siren is perhaps even easier: she can go for long periods of time without making herself vulnerable, but her attacks aren't all that dangerous in the meantime, and once she does give you an opening she stands dead still, letting Shantae wail on her with impunity for a good ten seconds. Add fully-upgraded sword magic to that and you'll tear through her health in no time.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Fillin is actually Rottytops wearing a disguise. Which wasn't that difficult to figure out, as very few zombie girls even appear in the series prior to that point (let alone with green hair), Fillin isn't on the main art cover with the other half-genies, her stitches and ears are conspicuously hidden, she is incredibly nervous when meeting Shantae and Rottytops being strangely absent in spite of actually being on the cover. Shantae herself already deduced it when Harmony informed her of Fillin using a different alias (Ima Goodgirl). The Art of Shantae Book even refers to her disguise as Rotty-not.
• Character Rerailment:
  • Some fans were rubbed the wrong way by Risky's portrayal in Half-Genie Hero, which seemed to renege on the development she received in Pirate's Curse by having her act uncharacteristically psychotic. Seven Sirens provides a more natural progression for her character to follow, shows her behaving more amicably toward Shantae, and once again emphasizes her manipulative side when she enacts a plan almost identical to the one she formulated in Pirate's Curse.
  • To a lesser extent, after the last two games really emphasized Shantae's Adorkable and Plucky Girl tendencies, Seven Sirens' portrayal is a compromise that incorporates some of the abrasiveness she was known for in the first and second games, without feeling like a contradiction either way.
• Complete Monster: The Empress Siren is the cruel leader of the Sirens, who for years had used their airship to travel from island to island stealing the life force of people to gain power and youth. When the Guardian Genies, the leader of which was the half-genie Harmony's mother, came to stop her, the Empress proceeded to slaughter them and steal their life force, with the leader having to separate her soul from her body in order to stop her and bring down the airship, destroying the Empress's mortal body and sealing her and the rest of the sirens in the sunken ship, now an inhabited island on top. After Risky Boots finds the ship, she strikes up a deal with the Empress, offering the life sources of five half-genies, which would give her ultimate power, in exchange for the airship. After she believes she has gained the life forces, the Empress betrays Risky Boots, stealing her life force and then sends out her siren army to devour the life forces of everyone on the island before blowing it up, and later plans to travel across the globe devouring all life force she comes across.
• Creepy Cute: The Lobster Siren. When she first appears in the window, it'll spook you. And before she faces Shantae in person, she makes no noise, but instead she scuttles away when the Half-Genie approaches her. She loses the Creepy portion and transitions into full-on Cute after she helps Shantae out, with her rather small frame and her high-pitched squeaks.
• Demonic Spiders: The projectile-throwing female siren soldiers can easily eat up a lot of Shantae's health, as their projectiles not only are thrown in an arc, but unlike their male counterparts they also explode into several shards that fly off in each direction, making them very tough to avoid. Thankfully they're limited to the Flying Fortress, but several of it's rooms also tend to place plenty of them in a row with other enemies.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Water Lily Siren was getting fanart before the game even came out.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Several of the cards reduce the magic cost of individual items, such as the pikeball or shield line of items. These effects can stack, and the invincibility power-up returns. Equipping the Jumping Frog (reduce shield cost) and the Coral Siren (regenerate MP) means that you should breeze through the game without needing to worry about dying.
  • If you want damage instead of defense, combining the Scorpgal, Coral Siren and Empress Siren cards will double the damage of Pikeball items, while greatly saving MP. If you upgrade the Pikeball all the way to the Scimitar, this allows you to do a ridiculous amount of damage extremely quickly, and it makes the Final Boss a cakewalk.
  • The Water Lily Siren's card increases Shantae's base damage by one point. At max, this takes Shantae's basic attack from doing eight HP of damage to nine. It doesn't sound like much at first, but it adds up fast, especially against bosses.
  • The Zap Dance. Remember the Obliterate Dance from Half-Genie Hero? Zap Dance is that, except you don't have to buy it and it uses only a tiny fraction of your magic. It does less damage than Obliterate, but still does more than enough to one-shot most monsters. The only real downside is the slow start-up, but basic use of terrain will easily let you mitigate this by standing somewhere the monsters can't reach you and blowing them all away in one shot.
  • The game is so poorly balanced that food is broken. It drops so often that you can easily end up with multiple stacks of 9 food items for more easy healing than you'll ever need, even during boss battles. The "Spectacular Superstar Update" greatly reduced food drop frequency - as well as the food's effectiveness - in the newly-added Definitive Mode.
  • The "Rule Breaker" mode added in 2021 does this intentionally by allowing you to equip all 50 Monster Cards at once.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • The Coral Siren can become this if you don't realise drilling the very hole she jumps towards for causes her to get stuck and left wide open for punishment, something that the game doesn't do an adequate job at hinting of. Without said trick, the battle can last a long while as there's only two short moments where she's vulnerable, when she lands from a background jump (which sends out shockwaves, forcing you to jump over them) and when she dashes across the screen, which forces you to dig and makes it near impossible to damage her without pike balls.
  • The Octopus Siren if you don't know the two tricks that make it easy(The Spark and Seer dances). First off, the game doesn't give you a clear indicator that you can use the Spark and Seer dances to make things easy for the player. Second, some of the brains are hard to hit and if you get the wrong one, it resets. Finally, the lasers and spark balls can be hard to dodge if you are in the wrong spot at the wrong time.
• Guide Dang It!: A player that prioritized the Power-Up Magnet upgrades would have no reason to dance near a Crystal Crab, and therefore be unable to absorb and remove their invincible crystal armor, until the dungeon after their first appearance.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: A major complaint leveled against Seven Sirens when it came out was the overall lack of difficulty, thanks to a combination of easy enemy patterns and items that give Shantae way too much of an edge. In response, the game would later receive a free update that re-balanced the difficulty to be more in line with older games in the series.
• Moe: With her cute-as-a-button design and personality, Plink qualifies as this compared to the other 4 half-genies that aren't Shantae, maybe even Shantae herself.
  • Fillin was also considered extremely cute, even after people discovered her real identity, because of how well Rotty manages to pull off the genie look, and how cute her new hairstyle is.
• Padding:
  • The world design as a whole has been accused of essentially being this, with the lack of convenient shortcuts and markers for certain items artificially lengthening the playtime.
  • Toward the end of the game, you're told to spend about ten minutes running around the island to destroy four silos in order to prevent the Siren Airship from taking off. This takes several minutes to accomplish and winds up being a total waste of time as, once you've done it, you return to Arena Town only to see the airship take off anyway. In short, nothing of consequence was accomplished by destroying the silos; it was just a way to pad out gameplay and give the Jet Octo fusion some use before the final dungeon.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Seer Dance if you're attempting 100% Completion. Some of the Nuggets are very well-hidden in places you wouldn't think there were any, and only the Seer Dance can help to tell you there's something hidden in a room. The problem then becomes actually using the dance using your own intuition, which often leads to walking pass by one of the hidden collectables. Either use the dance any time you move within the screen's field of vision, or use a guide. The "Spectacular Superstar Update" added a "Plink indicator" at the top of the screen when you walk into a room with a secret which helps somewhat, although you still have to use the Seer Dance multiple times in larger rooms to make sure you got everything.
  • The game doesn't keep track of the Nuggets/Heart Squids you can find around the island, the ones outside caves, so it's very easy to not remember what you've collected or not and get stuck at that Last Lousy Point for the 100% Completion.
• Ships That Pass in the Night: Even though they barely interact, Bolo/Plink has a rather serviceable following on sites such as Wattpad.
• That One Sidequest: Tree Town's Dance parlor awards a Heart Squid to Shantae if the player can hit all 10 targets in a max of two rounds, meaning a perfect result is needed. This sounds easy, but the mini-game is made complicated for two reasons. First, Shantae's speed on the stage can drastically change between shots, going from a moderate tempo to zipping from left to right in a flash. Second, the shooting is delayed from the point of pressing the button and Shantae actually firing the projectile, meaning good foresight is needed to hit targets. The worst part? The Heart Squid is in plain sight inside the parlor, but can't be obtained through conventional means and can serve as a mocking reminder to the player.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • With him having been the composer for every game in the series up to Half-Genie Hero, many were disappointed to learn that Jake "virt" Kaufman was not the composer for this game, instead being replaced by a team of four different composers. This is reflected in fan opinions of the music, which is considered by many to be decent, but not up to snuff with Jake's work.
  • The removal of transformation dances was received negatively by some, as WayForward effectively ditched one of the core mechanics of the series just to appeal to overzealous fans of Pirate's Curse's style of gameplay, instead of simply retooling the way the dances worked to make them more convenient, thereby appeasing both sides.
  • While he is amusing as always, having Squid Baron act as an NPC Roadblock instead of his usual boss fights was not taken too kindly by fans.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • The other half-genies are advertised as powerful like Shantae and could've greatly served as boss fights or companions, yet throughout the story they're mostly reduced to Damsels for Shantae to rescue, and have very little interaction with Shantae. The Definitive Edition update addressed the latter by adding more dialogue with the half-genies.
  • The game also introduces Armor Baron, a new baron that's the brother to Ammo Baron, so he'll surely be a boss, right? No, his only notable role is to force Shantae into going on a fetch quest, so he amounts to little more than adding world building to Armor Town.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • At the end, you actually get to meet Harmony's dead mother who is taking the form of a ghost dog. However, you never get to reunite the two or even mention the fact to Harmony.
  • While it was obvious to fans that Fillin the Blank isn't an actual half-genie in the first place, some couldn't help but wonder what a zombie half-genie's powers would have been like.
• Ugly Cute: The Angler Siren is the least attractive of the sirens by far, having a prominent jawline, big fangs and an eyeball lure. She's still pretty by the series' standards in spite of those traits.

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