Mystery Dungeon: Shiren The Wanderer

Do You Feel Lucky

Despite the talking weasels and tiny Samurai caricatures, Shiren is actually an incredibly difficult game and is clearly more suited to masochistic role-players rather than the half-hearted gamers who aren't interested in a game if they can't complete a quest on the first run.

Here’s how the basic gameplay works – Shiren and Koopa set out from a village and push forwards through a dungeon. The word dungeon is a little bit of a misnomer however as the dungeons don’t actually have to be underground – they can be light, breezy and airy. In fact, the first few dungeons you’ll progress through will be pleasant fields and your movement will be restricted by hedgerows rather than stone walls.

There’s three things which tie the dungeons together though – occasional traps or swag, oddly placed stairs leading to the next level and constantly roaming monsters who you'll have to fight.

Combat in Shiren is basic and turn-based, with every action taking one turn – fighting, moving, eating, reading, everything. Every time you move, the monsters move. Or at least, that’s how it is for the first part of the game. Once you get into the later levels you’ll find enemies like Death Reapers who’ll move twice for every move you make.

Shiren is by no means defenceless though and can make use of a wide range of weapons, wands and spells that he picks up along the way. Unfortunately, he doesn’t always recognise the items he finds, so hauling things back to the nearest village to have them identified is an unfortunate necessity.

So far then, Shiren The Wanderer is an incredibly simple and standard turn-based rogue-like. It’s got the standard randomly generate dungeons, a mechanic which puts the player constantly on the defensive and a level structure which forces player to do enormous amounts of backtracking if they want to stand a chance of winning – though this is remedied a little as the game progresses.


There are however two things which make the game stand out a little. The first is that in-game death is final. If you die then you’ll get booted all the way back to level one and returned to the starting village unless you’ve arranged a rescue. The second thing that makes Shiren The Wanderer stand out is the fact that you can arrange rescues at all – calling in friends via the miracle of Nintendo’s Wi-Fi Connection service who can aid and revive you.

WFC rescues are a handy little feature, but slightly pointless. If you send out a rescue request then you won’t be able to continue until it is fulfilled by kind strangers who get no reward for aiding you. There are frankly a lot of better ways that the WFC could have been used and co-op dungeon exploration would have been a more welcome addition then this flimsy get-out clause.

WFC rescues are very much needed though, because if Shiren was to be described in a single word then that lone descriptor would be ‘Punishing’. Players will get to know the sight of Shiren’s dead body intimately and no matter how seasoned a gamer you are or how wisely you ration your riceballs, scrolls and staves, death will always be a constant companion for you in Shiren.

Conclusion

I’ve always wondered something about hardcore JRPGs like Shiren The Wanderer – is the punishing gameplay something which is always deliberately introduced, or is the game just very poorly balanced?

With Shiren The Wanderer in particular, it’s honestly quite hard to tell. On the one hand you’ll find yourself dying so many times that you might think that Chunsoft has taken a personal offence at your very existence, but on the other hand the game itself is at least consistent in its difficulty.

Shiren The Wanderer isn’t a groundbreaking game, or even a stand-out game. What it is though is a perfect example of it’s genre – streamlined, challenging and long, with plenty of replayability piled on by the random levels. It’s taxing, often to a painful extent, and it isn’t for everyone, but for those in the market for a Japanese rogue-like Shiren The Wanderer will provide a rewarding enough experience. Or maybe not - tell us what you think in the forums.