The Mystery Dungeon series has been around a long time. In fact, the very first game was in 1993, almost 30 years ago now, and the first Shiren the Wanderer game (the second installment of the Mystery Dungeon franchise) was originally released in 1995, but not ported to the US until 2008 on the Nintendo DS. Suffice it to say that this is a game with a pedigree, and a series that has won the hearts of gamers the world over. If you haven’t heard of Shiren the Wanderer though, you still may have heard of a few of the Mystery Dungeon games! There are Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games, Final Fantasy Mystery Dungeon games, and even an Etrian Odyssey Mystery Dungeon game. The style of play is so popular it’s been adapted to other titles outside the series too, like Void Terrarium which we recently reviewed here.
Shiren the Wanderer is the backbone of the Mystery Dungeon series, and the latest game, Shiren The Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune & The Dice of Fate (or just Shiren the Wanderer for short) from Spike Chunsoft isn’t even technically the latest game. In point of fact, it’s the 5th game in the series, but was previously released on the DS in 2010 in Japan, remastered and translated to English in 2015 for the Playstation Vita, and now re-remastered and re-released for the Nintendo Switch and PC! Whew! But what the heck is Shiren the Wanderer? In Shiren, you play, well, Shiren the Wanderer, a man who wanders about solving people’s problems for them, accompanied by his faithful talking ferret Koppa. Weird, right? But the plot is probably the weakest point of the game, as the entire goal is to explore ever-changing mysterious dungeons, hence the “Mystery Dungeon” franchise. This is one of the original rogue-like games where each time you play, you get a new procedurally generated dungeon with random item, weapon, and enemy drops.
Your goal in Shiren The Wanderer is to reach the top of the Tower of Fate with a local town boy, Jirokichi, to save his love from illness by appealing to the god of Fortune, Reeva. To do so, you’ll have to pass through three towers to reach the Tower of Fortune, gathering the three Dice of Fate. Once that’s done, you must survive the Tower of Fortune itself and save the day. Simple, right? Well, the mechanics of Shiren the Wanderer might give you a bit of a challenge along the way!
Shiren is a top-down turn-based dungeon crawler. Each time you move, all the enemies do as well. You move in a square-based grid dungeon and can move horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. Not sure what to do as enemies approach? Don’t worry, they can’t get to you until you move. As you walk through the various dungeons in Shiren, you’ll find weapons, items, and traps galore at every step. Some traps send you flying, others take away your health or paralyze you, making you easy prey for monsters as you try to escape. There’s such a variety of objects in the game that there’s actually a setting to tell you what each thing is, since there’s no way you’d remember on your own.
As you climb each tower, the monsters get tougher. And tougher. And tougher. Their attacks add massive status penalties, taking down your attack power and defenses, poisoning you, and causing all sorts of trouble. If you’re not careful, they’ll corner you and it’s curtains for Shiren. That’s when things get tough. Shiren, like other roguelikes, sends you back to town if you die, losing every item you’ve acquired. That includes weapons, armor, healing items, and anything else useful. If you manage to beat a tower, you make it back with all your gear, but if not, it’s time to start over right from the beginning. This is obviously quite frustrating, but there are a few things you can do, including storing items in the warehouse and the storage facility and tagging items so they aren’t lost when you are inevitably defeated. In fact, the main town is chock full of all sorts of things you can do, including training that nets you extra items, alternate dungeons, assorted item shops and weird rigged lotteries. This is a complex game with enough extra tasks to keep most players busy for quite a few hours, even without the main game.
Unfortunately, dying in the dungeon has some significant issues. If you’ve been travelling with Jirokichi, he dies as well and you need to find him, revive him, and carry on to complete the level. And if you’ve died a few times, just getting back is hard because your inventory is randomized so badly that you can’t really stockpile the items you’ll need or upgrade your weapons fast enough without running out of food. Want to go back and store some items? Tough luck, the only way back is to die unless you luck out and find and escape scroll, and they’re quite rare. So instead, each time through Shiren, you end up spending a couple hours playing only to die again, lose everything and accomplish absolutely nothing. Once you get to the Tower of the Present and the Tower of the Future, things ramp up significantly. Fortunately, after beating each tower, you don’t have to play back through them all and instead only pick one to go through to reach the Tower of Fortune on subsequent playthroughs.
However, the biggest issue with dying is trying to salvage your game though. Shiren the Wanderer has an online rescue system that allows you to request help from other players. You can request rescue three times per game, and then must depend on the largess of others to revive you and let you continue. The downside of this elegant interdependent rescue system? There’s no one online playing it and rescuing people! Every single time that you try to get rescued in Shiren, the same thing happens. You submit your online rescue ticket and wait. And wait. And wait. And eventually, you give up and try to struggle through underpowered and die again, slowly grinding away any items you had stored up because the rescue system simply doesn’t work. The sensible solution would be to patch the system to work virtually and not require direct interaction from other players since this is a niche game that not many people will be playing concurrently, but as of the writing of this article, that hasn’t happened and the rescue system is absolutely and frustratingly broken. No one wants to sit around hoping someone will play the game and happen to use the rescue system to help them. Especially not with hundreds of other games available to play and the increasingly limited amount of time most people have to play them in. This was a total mistake on the part of Spike Chunsoft. Oh, and don’t forget about suspending your game! Fail to suspend Shiren and exit to the main menu before closing the game to play something else and the game assumes you’ve died in the dungeon, restarts you at the town at level one and you lose all items and money you’ve collected. Considering the save capacity of the Switch, this is really an outrageous thing not to eliminate. There’s no auto-saving at all, leaving you to remember to manually exit each time or face the consequences.
Aside from the teeth-grinding difficulty, Shiren is a uniquely challenging game. The difficulty requires some tactical strategy, especially in regards to item use and there are an absolute ton of items available. You can warp, paralyze enemies, zap them with electricity, eat leaves that help your weapons power up, and much much more. The careful use of items and avoiding the impulse to hoard them for later are the only things that will get you through Shiren the Wanderer. Get cornered by enemies and you’re done for, so zap them, freeze them, send them flying, anything to line up your movements so you can face them one at a time. Your health regenerates with each step but enemies next to you move with you and can hit you if you move diagonally to them, so walking away often isn’t an option. Over time, you get hungry too, running out of stamina and if you don’t have any food left, you’re in big trouble. Heck, if that wasn’t enough, your food can spoil too, going bad and becoming nearly useless unless you store it in a special Preservation Pot that you find entirely at random and have to smash to get the items in it back out. As you can see, rushing head-on through a dungeon won’t serve you well as you navigate the towers to save the girl.
The graphics in Shiren the Wanderer are excellent. This is a case study in the beauty of pixel artwork and the monsters, townsfolk, and even backgrounds in Shiren are a pure delight. Considering the game has been revised twice since its initial release, it’s not much of a shock that it looks this good, but it’s still nice to see a solid sprite-based game coming out on the Switch that has the richness of a vintage SNES style with modern sensibilities. The soundtrack is quite good as well, though it will eventually become repetitive as you die over and over again in the same dungeons.
Shiren The Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate is an odd game. It’s got the gruelling challenge of a game from the early 90s, lush visuals, and a complex and creative gameplay system, but it’s also plagued by that same challenge and an incredibly frustrating rescue system that handicaps players that aren’t familiar with the franchise. The dungeons and gameplay are fun, but surviving is so hard that Shiren will turn most players off fairly quickly. This new remaster adds more side dungeons and a music collection as well as streaming video options, but those additions really don’t fix the core issues with the game. This is a title that’s designed for real hardcore gamers and virtually no one else, and as such, it’s tough to recommend it to most people. That’s a shame, as Shiren the Wanderer is a great game overall, but it simply won’t be worth the $20 price on the eShop for most people. That would likely change dramatically if there were an update to the rescue system to eliminate the need for online interaction, but as it stands, Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate is a difficult game that only the most dedicated players will manage to enjoy fully.
This review is based on a digital copy of Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate and was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes. Shiren The Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate is also available on Steam for PC.