izigame.me

IMPORTANT: PLAY IT ON RULE BREAKER MODE

Okay, I've been expecting much worse from this game, and it pleasantly surprised me. I wouldn't say it's an outstanding game, but it's an enjoyable experience. Graphics are fine, music is, obviously, not as good as Jake Kaufman works, but is not bad either. Cutscenes are great, monster girls are adorable as always, and gameplay is surprising refinement of a transformation system that used to annoy me so much. I can understand why it worked that way in the original game, given how few buttons GBC had, but going through dances to, say, turn into a mermaid every time you wanted to swim was really annoying and unnecessary in sequels. Well, now traversal abilities are finally divorced from dances - if you unlocked a transformation, you automatically transform into a digging or swimming form when you go into dirt or water, respectively.
Level design is a bit of a double-edged sword - now it's a big Metroidvania map again rather than several separate levels. Diversity of locales suffer a bit even compared to the earlier games, as it is all different flavors of aquatic ruins - but, to be fair, Castlevania games are mostly different flavors of castles and Metroid is different flavors of alien caves, and no one complains about them (though they do manage to pull off more variety in their respective themes).
And now we get to my biggest gripe about the game that tainted my first walkthrough.

I REPEAT: PLAY IT ON RULE BREAKER MODE

Everyone seems to be angry about Seer Dance, but no, the one aspect of this game I hated the most was the card system. You see, the monsters drop cards that give you bonuses, and that's fine, but you can only equip three cards at once in the Definitive mode. In theory it means that you have to choose wisely what cards do you need the most, but the problem is that most of this cards give small situational bonuses, usually to a certain ability, and they also have to compete with cards that give big and powerful abilities like mana regeneration. My "favorite" example is Wetman card - it gives extra health from food, and you can only eat food in pause menu, so there is no reason why it shouldn't be always on, you just have to go through extra step every time you want to use food. Having to constantly switch between cards is just an annoying busywork, so you just pick the three strongest cards and ignore the rest. The smart way to design cards would've been a system similar to Paper Mario badges, where every card has some kind of Power Rating and you can equip as many cards as you want as long as you don't exceed certain Power Total that you can upgrade - so you can pick between having few strong cards or many utility ones (and certain cards, like Wetman, should have rating of zero). But for the game as short and easy as Seven Sirens, the Rule Breaker mode where you can just equip every card works just fine - I don't think it breaks the game in any way. It shouldn't even exist in first place, it should be a part of default Definitive mode, with current system relegated to Classic mode.
So, I understand this whole grievance is kinda self-afflicted, but they did worded Rule Breaker mode like it's some kind of cheat mode for repeat walkthroughs. So, as a good boy, I did not picked it for the first walkthrough, and even though I had second thoughts at 15% mark, I did not fully realized my error until it was too late to restart the game. So do not repeat my mistakes, pick the Rule Breaker mode if you want to have fun times, and if you want to experience the busywork, just do it when you are achivement-hunting.