Sega Nerds

TGS07: Shiren the Wanderer (Wii) hands-on impressions

by Graham on October 5th, 2007

 

{Note: For any videos here, you may wish to turn down the volume, as the sound is loud and shite}

Mysterious Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer 3 or Fuurai no Shiren 3 (to give the Japanese title), was another of the Chunsoft/Sega collaborations shown at this years TGS, the other being Imabikisou

The booth layout was pretty damn cool, one to rival NiGHTS. It was setup to be (what appeared to be) a dojo of sorts. With images of the game and flowers around the outside, and the booth was pretty much open, just a few supporting pillars.

Inside were 5 or 6 Wii’s setup, with, what was a real luxury at the show, seats (!), plus a small bench for which about 10 people could sit and wait to play the game (real luxury!), though the queue was normally pretty long, and one would find themselves waiting in a line outside the booth for longer than they had to sit down.

[youtube width=”400″ height=”335″]gPEBVWnQmXU[/youtube] 

But still, even the few minutes I had to sit down on the bench section was worth the 20 minutes wait I had before hand. It made waiting to play the game worth while, as after a couple of days walking around TGS and the Chiba district of Tokyo, your feet really start to wear.

Plus I was very lucky, had I waited in line on the public days I would have had some 3 hour wait in line. Yep NiGHTS wasn’t the only popular game from Sega.

[youtube width=”400″ height=”335″]RUOwFwVW4ng[/youtube]

In fact, the game was SEGAs most popular, as people were still in line to play, as the rest of the SEGA booth was totally empty, at the end of the 4th day.

But was the wait worth it?

First thing I should tell/warn you about is, that this game does not use the Wiimote or Nunchuck at all. The game has been designed to use the Classic Controller instead, so no fancy wand waving to attack, you just sit and press buttons, (like the people used to do back in the 90’s ;) ).

Well I haven’t played any of the previous titles, so I had no idea what to expect with the game. The game reminds me, visually, of the original Zelda games and, more closely, Shining Wisdom, with a top-down view and cute(ish) characters.
So don’t go expecting a big 3D adventure, one to match/beat Zelda: TP, it is more of an old school 16-bit rpg/adventure game, in looks.

One thing that deeply irritated me, was that SEGA chose the worst dungeon to use for the TGS demo, visually and gameplay wise.  The dungeon was very bland, stone walls and floor, all very samey with no variety. Graphically that can be a bit annoying, but gameplay it is even worse, and I found myself quite bored just walking round square rooms and long corridors, that all looked the same. There were no random objects to make the dungeon rooms look different, they all looked the same - as you will see in one of the videos.

Had I been trying to show off a game before release, I would try to show off some of the more vibrant areas of the game. It gave a bad impression, to me, even though I only had a few minutes play, I was kind of frustrated by the game, and surprisingly, even though the game is 2D, I found it quite claustrophobic. Weird eh?

[youtube width=”400″ height=”335″]Dw0ncQo1vf4[/youtube]

Not only did the level design frustrate me, but so did the gameplay. From the visuals, one would expect the game to be real-time fighting, and the game is… but it also isn’t.

You see you run around in real time, and you see the enemies on screen, and can run up to them, and even start attacking, in real time. But for some reason they decided to make the actually attacking moments very different. In the TGS demo, you had 3 characters on screen, one which you controlled, and the other 2 were AI controlled. When you attacked, you seemed to only be able to attack one at a time.

It’s really hard to explain, but often I would run up to an enemy, try to attack, but my character would stop, while one of the others fired a long-range shot at the enemy. But while I was stopped, the enemy could attack me. Many times I would be trying to fight, but forced to stop and had to take a small beating, or I would be running off to another part of the dungeon, and my fellow team mates would decide to attack random enemies, which would actually cause me to stop running momentarily. So again, I would find myself being stopped, even when I was no where near an enemy.

[youtube width=”400″ height=”335″]PgzH0_EBGow[/youtube] 

Now I could be quite wrong on the mechanic of how this works.  I’m not entirely sure, because the cause of my stopping wasn’t perfectly clear. I am just guessing it is something to do with attacking, as I always seemed to stop as one of the other characters attack, and something was definitely causing me to stop dead, for a second, while I was running along, it wasn’t just random.  All I know is that I found this to be very annoying, and if I had some influence I would implore Chunsoft to change the fighting, and make it all full real-time, like Shining Wisdom or Shining Soul.

While the game has these, fairly serious, issues, I am not going to totally shy away from it.  I would be very happy to give the game another go, if it were in English.  Because at the show I saw some cool videos of the game, which showed off some better dungeon areas, and some pretty decent looking cut scenes.

Also, unlike the old rpg/adventure games, (like Zelda), this game seems to have a great depth to the inventory.  Of course I couldn’t read jack on the menus in the game, but while I was waiting to play, I was watching someone, who seemed to know what he was doing.  The guy picked up a few items, and then went to the menus, and I could see him switching things around and equiping different items and changing weapons.

I’m not sure quite how deep this goes, but, (as I say), I would be very happy to sit down and play a version I can understand some more, and play around with the weapons and inventory properly, because the only thing I managed to do was unequip my sword, at one point, and then run around for a while, until I could work out which Japanese characters signified ‘equip.’

Summary:

Sorry if I didn’t go into much detail about the game, but really all I did was watch part of a cutscene, then run around a boring dungeon for about 10 minutes, until the demo finished.  So I didn’t get to know the game too much.

But while playing the demo wasn’t the greatest experience of my life, I am interested in the game still, and really hope we get a western port of it.

Display Impression: 8

Graphics: 7

Sound: 7

Controls: 6 (The pad controls are good, but really let down by weird stopping)

Overall: 6 (Let down by boring dungeon and, again, stoppings)

~G~

Tags: Exhibition/ Show, TGS

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POSTED IN: G, Japan, News, Nintendo Wii, Video