YMMV / Shantae: Half-Genie Hero

• Anti-Climax Boss: The final boss, Tinkerbrain. While he's a Puzzle Boss, it's much easier than the brutal fight against Risky that came before. He only takes two hits before going down, and it's relatively easy to avoid his attacks by just moving constantly. The second phase (assuming you did everything to fight the True Final Boss) is a little harder, but it's mostly just dodging a few flame attacks on the ground and having proper timing to bounce light magic past the gap in its shield.
• Base-Breaking Character: Is Holly Lingerbean an interesting idea for a rival character that deserved a bigger role, or a forgettable, inconsequential waste of space that has little relevance to the game's plot?
• Breather Boss: Wilbur is a relatively simple puzzle boss at the end of Tassel Town, coming hot off the heels of a rough chase up the Tassel Tower and the player's first real experience with platforming over bottomless pits.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Batgals: they have the tendency to teleport after a few hits and then use afterwards a diagonal downward anchor attack that can easily tear a full heart of your HP. Have fun!
  • Bonelegs: They're enormous and have an absurdly wide attack range, and you often fight them in enclosed spaces. They're also one of the only enemies that can actually block your attacks, which makes whittling down their sizable health pools a chore. And they're actual spiders!
• Ensemble Dark Horse: After WayForward released a trailer featuring a brief, well-animated scene of a giant mermaid boss you needed to unshackle by breaking her chains, the Giga Mermaid has become rather prominent in fanart, even more so after Cuphead came out with Cala Maria, their own giant mermaid boss.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Collecting all of the Gallery Keys and using them to fully unlock the Art Gallery will have the Mayor give you some costume jewelry in exchange, the Magical Tiara. Its effect? Infinite magic. Except in Hardcore mode, where it grants gradual magic regeneration instead.
  • The Gem Jug transformation, which lets you generate gems at the cost of magic. Once you get your hands on a fully upgraded Attract (pulls in any nearby gems and health recovery), enter the Bath House's bath in Scuttle Town and you'll have an unlimited gem supply. The same effect can be achieved with the above-mentioned Magical Tiara. The only thing stopping you would be your patience for mashing buttons.
  • If you don't care for button-mashing, there are places in Main Street where Tinkerbats will spawn in a constant stream if you stand in the right spot. Buy the Magical Bracelet, Super Pike Ball, and an upgraded Attract, then stand Shantae in one of these spots with Super Pike Ball running. The Tinkerbats will drop refill bottles often enough to keep your Magic meter from running out, so you can walk away from the game and leave Shantae to farm gems automatically for you. ^note If you buy the Scimitar upgrade, use the subscreen to switch it back to Super Pike Ball. Scimitar burns through magic too fast for this to work. Since everything you need for this is available in the Item Shop at the start of the game, you can use this trick to buy the shop's entire inventory — including a few of the game's other Breakers — before ever setting foot in Mermaid Falls. This also works in Hardcore Mode.
  • The Bat form. As SomeCallMeJohnny points out, proper use of the bat can break some platforming challenges in half.
  • 3rd level Bubble magic, which grants Invincibility while it's active. The game tries to balance it by having it eat through your mana fairly quickly, but the game gives you lots of ways to replenish your magic. It's especially silly when combined with the earlier-mentioned Magical Tiara, effectively making it the one item you DON'T turn off.
  • The Super Revive Dance completely heals Shantae for less than half her mana, making her nigh-unkillable after she's collected plenty of Heart Containers. It especially shines in Hardcore Mode, where even a Nerfed version of the Magical Tiara^note It only gives Regenerating Mana instead of Infinite Mana in Hardcore Mode is enough to fuel the dance indefinitely even against the Final Boss sequence.
  • The Obliterate dance does 25 damage to everything on the screen, every time you use it (your other attacks normally do between 1-10 damage per hit), with no cooldown. The drawback is its Magic cost, which is, again, easy to manage (just bring a stack of Mega Potions). Obliterate all the locks holding the Giga Mermaid in two hits, then use Flamethrower to defeat her second stage in seconds. Wait until Ammo Baron summons all of his flunkies, then Obliterate them all at once. Instead of hitting the Tinkerbrain's breakers one at a time, Obliterate them all at once (yes, even the ones currently rotated into the background where you can't normally reach them).
  • In the Friends to the End DLC, whenever Rottytops throws her head, time stops aside from her level in the Nightmare Realm and she's completely invincible until her re-forming animation finishes. Her head also does a solid 5 damage when it hits an enemy, regardless of her current level. Have fun chunking down bosses without taking a single scratch!
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Ikki the Chest Monster is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Nikki, the cute host of Nintendo's discontinued Swapnote application. However, since then Nintendo has released a new version of the app called Swapdoodle, in which Nikki is back as the host, and Nikki also managed to make it in as an Assist Trophy in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate; in other words, Nikki/Ikki lives again!
  • While the game hadn't been able to get enough money to get its animated cutscenes during its Kickstarter campaign, Seven Sirens gets to have the animated cutscenes instead. While Part 1 only has the genie celebration and Shantae falling cutscenes, Part 2 adds in a proper intro, outro, credits sequence, and intro cutscenes for the labyrinth bosses, in addition to the other cutscenes.
  • Talking of the Kickstarter, the two modes that were just shy of being funded were a campaign for Sky, Bolo and Rottytops, with unique play styles for each, and a Nega Shantae chapter. Friends To The End effectively means the former did end up in the game, and the boss of the mode? Nega-Shantae, meaning the latter also got into the game.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The biggest complaint about most of the DLC modes in Half-Genie Hero is that they're sparsely-modified versions of the main game, just with minor new gimmicks added.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike:
  • The bonus episodes are a lot more difficult in different ways. They also cap the player's health at 3 hearts.
  • Pirate Queen's Quest gives the player access to any level from the beginning... and scatters enemies from the near-endgame into all of them to make them more-or-less equal in difficulty.
  • In Friends to the End the only healing available during boss fights is Rotty's special move that eats half of her magic bar. The platforming in general is also trickier due to revolving around each character's unique movement tools and often leaves little to no margin for error.
  • The Costume DLC:
    • "Beach" requires the player to constantly pick up bottles of sunscreen or dive into water or else Shantae's health will rapidly drain.
    • "Officer" is based on Mighty Switch Force!, with all the brain-bending difficulty that entails. To make the experience more authentic, ducking is disabled and water is treated as a hazard akin to spikes or lava.
• That One Achievement: "Learn to Fly" in Friends to the End requires avoiding one of Sky's boomerang attack birds for 60 seconds straight, requiring her to consistently jump over her own projectile without causing it to curve at an angle that's impossible to avoid. It's got so bad that the most consistent method of obtaining this achievement is to take advantage of an out-of-bounds glitch that keeps Sky falling continuously offscreen without dying, which means her bird can't catch up with her.
• That One Level: The Nightmare Realm in Friends to the End lives up to its name a bit too well, for similar reasons to the Pirate Master's Palace — it requires pixel-perfect platforming, sometimes into completely blind jumps, accompanied by a swaying background that provides very little reference for how you're moving across the screen. Combine that with the tiny health pool that Bolo, Rottytops and Sky have, and you have the makings of a very frustrating experience. And unlike the Pirate Master's Palace, there's no way to skip past it.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The concept of Friends to the End is that Bolo, Sky and Rottytops need to free Shantae by fighting through her memories. However, it's purely a repeat of the main story of Half-Genie Hero. Considering Shantae has had three prior adventures with plenty of chances for interesting levels or Call Backs and has also be hinted to have had off screen ones as well, the fact that you are basically replaying Half-Genie Hero can be seen as disappointing.
• Underused Game Mechanic: A common criticism of the game is that it has too many transformations, but not all of them are used well.
  • Mouse form lets you enter and navigate tiny mazes. This is only used extensively in the first area of Mermaid Falls, and some optional rooms of Tassel Town. Other areas contain no mazes. The upgrade Mouse Bite lets Shantae attack in Mouse form, but it only does a measly 1 damage, and the only mazes with enemies are the ones in Mermaid Falls.
  • The optional Spider form lets you move on the ceilings. This is required for exactly one puzzle where you need to crawl through a tight space with spikes on the floor. In all other situations where you can use Spider, the Harpy (mandatory transformation) or Bat (optional, but can be obtained much earlier) forms will usually do the job better. You can obtain the Spider Venom to let it attack by spitting venom, but its power is comparable to a Fireball, an early game spell, while the Venom likely won't be obtained until just before the final dungeon. There's also no situation where you need to attack while ceiling-crawling. All in all, there's almost no reason to use Spider.
  • The Bat Sonar upgrade lets you see in dark rooms while in Bat form. There's a grand total of one such room in the game, and it's an optional one. The rewards? The aforementioned Spider Venom.

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