Shiren the Wanderer (1): I’m in love with a roguelike

It’s never too late to fall in love. Especially with a gaming genre. 

'Roguelike' is a term I had encountered before in my gaming life and was vaguely familiar with. It’s fair to say that I knew at least the basics of the genre. I knew that the name 'Roguelike' was derived from Rogue, a cross-platform game released in 1980 that defined the mechanics of the genre. I knew that the said Rogue somehow single-handedly created dungeon-crawling as a gaming style, while at the same time setting itself apart from yet-to-be dungeon crawlers by sporting specific features like permadeath and random level generation. And, last but not least, I knew roguelikes were supposed to be hardcore and unforgiving. This, added to the fact that the most famous ones belonged to the PC realm, cemented my vision of roguelikes as games beyond my reach; games I knew about but would never play, mostly because I’m not a PC gamer, and maybe also a little bit because of their fabled difficulty. 

And then came Shiren the Wanderer on the DS, a game that blew away all those misconceptions and made me discover the delicious, pungent flavour of Roguelikes.  

Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer, released on the DS in 2006(jp) and 2008(na/aus/eu), is quite an interesting game. It was developed by Chunsoft and is part of the Mystery Dungeon series, which I introduced earlier in my posts about Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. Shiren is the only Mystery Dungeon game featuring completely original characters instead of characters pulled out from a well-known series; and it’s also by far the hardest Mystery Dungeon game and the truest to classic Roguelike mechanics. It was initially released on the Super Famicom in 1995, and quickly enjoyed a huge popularity in Japan, which motivated Chunsoft to release no less than five sequels over a period of 15 years. Meanwhile, the western world remained widely unaware of this series and firmly set on the belief that Roguelike=PC=Diablo; that is, until Sega decided to publish a DS port of the original game in Japan and then, seemingly guided by a divine inspiration, to bring it to the West in order to expand our gaming horizons. We then discovered that there were indeed console Roguelikes—and excellent ones at that; but I’m getting ahead of myself there. 

First impressions

One can hardly talk about Shiren the Wanderer without mentioning first its graphics and soundtrack. Roguelikes being repetitive games by nature, it’s nearly mandatory to have graphics and music that are pleasant enough to the senses and will not bore the player to death after a few replays. And fortunately, Shiren totally shines in these departments. The graphics are clearly lifted straight from the Super NES era, with no visible enhancement; but they manage to convey some charm and create a really unique atmosphere, despite being undeniably primitive by today’s standards. As for the music themes, well… They are truly splendid. Composed by Koichi Sugiyama of Dragon Quest fame along with co-composer Hayato Matsuo, they are soulful, gorgeous pieces of ear candy that accomplish the tour de force of never becoming boring to the ear. Ever. Many of them have a cinematic quality and wouldn’t feel out of place in a movie, and they play a massive part in giving you the feeling that you are involved in a fascinating adventure. And if you’re familiar with the Dragon Quest games or with their soundtracks, you should click immediately when hearing the Pegasus Ridge theme, which is a more complex take on the World Map theme from the first Dragon Quest games. 

Let’s broaden the picture and talk about the general atmosphere of the game. The very sweet and lovely atmosphere, shall I say: for Shiren may kill you routinely and without mercy, but at the same time, it treats you with an atmosphere so gentle and loveable that you always want to come back to it and play more. I find this to be an extremely clever design choice: instead of conveying a gritty or dark setting that could increase the discouragement already caused by repeated deaths and prompt you to simply give up, this game puts you at ease with its lovely setting and makes you feel that dying over and over is not such a huge problem after all. 

And while I’m mentioning clever design choices, kudos must be given to the sheer brilliance of the random level design. It’s not brilliant per se, mind you, for no random level design can ever be considered truly clever. But in the context of Shiren, a game in which you are bound to replay levels over and over, it’s pure genius. Random level generation saves you the unbearable boredom of having to replay the same exact levels and provides some constant freshness to your explorations. 

By some strange and ironic twist, Shiren first reminded me of the Platformers of my youth. In the 8 and 16-bit era, you simply couldn’t avoid Platformers: they were ubiquitous and pretty much the dominant genre, and despite not being too fond of them, I played them just like anybody else. And I really found some similarities in the process of dying over and over and progressing a bit further—or not, as we’ll see later— every time. The platformers of old, especially the harcore ones, would submit the player to a similar test of patience with their die&retry approach; but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Shiren is much, much deeper than any platformer, hardcore or not, and it doesn’t take long to notice that. I already mentioned the highly clever level design that saves you the boredom induced by many of these platformers with their never-changing layouts, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. Let’s now explore the depths of Shiren’s gameplay!

Diving into the game

To put it bluntly and candidly, Shiren is one of the most fulfilling gaming experiences I’ve ever had. 

This was definitely not what I expected when I picked up that game, and I was utterly surprised by this turn of events. What I expected was a punishing, frustrating and unrewarding game that would beat me to a pulp, because that’s the way Shiren was pictured in most reviews. What I discovered instead was a deep and engrossing game promoting patience, perseverance, strategic thinking and planning, all things I totally lap up in games. Shiren is the perfect gaming illustration of the Japanese gaman, which is the notion of enduring seemingly unbearable circumstances with dignity and patience. Like, the dignity of not smashing your DS on the floor when you die in the most stupid and unpredictable way and the patience to forge ahead with a smile instead.

Not that death is a problem at all in Shiren, oh no; perish the thought. (Ha-ha. Erm… Sorry.) Far from being an occurrence to be avoided at all costs or a punishment of sorts for your lousy gameplay, dying is part of the process of progressing through the game. It acts as a reset function that will allow you to further advance side quests: to put it simply, each run until you die is a loop, during which you can perform some actions only once. If you want to perform the said actions another time, you will have to die—or to use the “give up” command in the menu, which is technically the same as dying, only you decide to do so. This will save the progression you made in side quests and send you back to the beginning of the game, from which you can restart and further progress. 

This may be a bit too abstract, so let’s take examples. Recruiting allies is a process that includes several steps: you have to first meet them and talk to them, upon which they will either trick you or ignore you somehow. (I love how this differs from what you usually see in J-RPGs, where people you just met are ready to follow you to the end of the world after just five minutes of chatting. Shiren brings a healthy dose of realism to this whole party members matter.) If you want to recruit them for good, you will have to die/restart a few times in a row and interact with them every time until they finally join your party. The same goes for upgrading weapons at the local smithies: you can only do so once per run in every given smithy, so you’ll have to die/restart to repeat the process. 

As its core, Shiren is a purely iterative process. You progress through the game by increments, creating some accretion of experience and knowledge as you do so. The good old trick of level-grinding won’t get you far in Shiren: it’s all a matter of learning and building up solid bases that will lead you further and further into the game. In that regard, no run is totally useless: even the shortest one is likely to teach you something or help you advance a side quest. This is a fascinating experience, not unlike learning a new language, with its specific grammar and set of rules. You may learn at you own expense that throwing an item at an NPC will prompt the said NPC to retaliate by punching you to death, or that some of your allies are not as reliable as others. 

This learning factor is a key element in Shiren. Far from feeding you endless tutorials, this game lets you figure out its many rules mostly by yourself. The instruction manual gives you only the most basic information regarding menu navigation, completed in-game by random tips and clues offered by NPCs; as for the rest, you’ll have to try, observe, and learn accordingly. No hand-holding there: it’s just you, your brain, and the game. This is trial-and-error, only applied to a whole game world instead of just specific traps in a level; and it’s incredibly stimulating and thrilling. Not only that, but this learning process will carry on through the whole game, from the first dungeon floor to the last, keeping the game fresh and challenging up to the very end. 

And you will need all the knowledge you can get, along with clever planning and honeying of your equipment: for Shiren is an unpredictable beast, and one that can lash at you when you least expect it. There is definitely an element of randomness and unpredictability to that game, which adds to the challenge and forces you to use all your knowledge to the fullest. You never know what to expect from a dungeon floor, let alone from a whole run. You may die at the first floor surrounded by a mass of enemies, or you may have a massive breakthrough and make it all the way to a floor you never reached before. You have to learn to bend circumstances to your advantage and get hold of the game’s randomness, and this is a truly fascinating and exciting thing to do, especially when you finally succeed.

It’s worth noting that Shiren, while being demanding, remains fair to the player. The difficulty curve is well-balanced and quite regular, and you will definitely notice and feel your own progress. To breeze through a dungeon floor that felt incredibly difficult just a few hours before is a sheer joy, and one that is bound to repeat itself through the whole game. Shiren shows even more fairness by giving you the possibility to train yourself and get the feel of the various traps awaiting you before you encounter them for real in dungeons. This can be done in the so-called Fey’s Dungeon at the very beginning of the game, where you will be offered fifty puzzles of strategic nature with increasing difficulty levels. These puzzles replicate situations that can happen in dungeons, and mastering them will definitely give you some strategic advantage and an edge over your many foes, on top of being an absolute treat for puzzle lovers. 

So, that’s Shiren in a nutshell, from a beginner’s point of view. I’ve now played the game for 15 hours, reached floor 17, and I’m taking my sweet time. I’m planning to play this game as a red thread over the course of several weeks, maybe months, and I will of course give my final thoughts on the matter when I’m done with it. But for now, I plainly and simply adore it. I adore it so much that I’m firmly planning to buy the full series, which will give me a great incentive to dive back into my long-forsaken Japanese studies. I just can’t let a series that good pass me by. 

This prompts me to mention how poorly received was Shiren in the West, for it may well be the reason why we didn’t get to play the subsequent installments. Critics lambasted Shiren for being too unforgiving, punishing and not rewarding enough, to the point where I actually formed the mental picture of a game that was more torture than entertainment and would whip me good and shatter my soul. None of this happened, as I stated above; far from it, I actually found Shiren to be easier—yes, easier—and globally much more forgiving than I had expected. This is the Avalon Code syndrome all over again: a good game that is dismissed and sniffed at because it’s at odds with the current gaming trends. In the era of general hand-holding, intrusive in-games tutorials and scripted games playing on rails, the notions of figuring out a game’s mechanics on your own and progressing through increments while doing so was not likely to make a hit. Which is a shame, for Shiren is quite the gem. Oh, well.

That’s all about Shiren for the time being. Expect at least another post on the matter when I’m done with the game, and maybe more, if it inspires me. As for now, thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!

(Edit: The rest of my Shiren epopee can be found here, there and there.)