Sega Nerds

Review: Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer

Posted by Chris. Filed under Chris, Nintendo DS, Review. Tagged with Shiren the Wanderer.

Imagine if Satan were to create a video game. If he did, he’d probably join forces with Chunsoft to create Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer.

You see, this game is evil right down to its core. It does everything imaginable to drive you crazy, make you want to turn it off and pull out your hair in a fit of rage. And the chances of you doing that very early into the game are pretty good.

However, before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s take a look at this game’s long and storied past and why this very well might be the most evil game ever to grace our planet.

Some may not know that Mystery Dungeon is actually about 13 years old. Yeah, developer Chunsoft originally released it in 1998 on the Super Famicon in Japan, but luckily for America, it never came stateside. Had it done so, it would have just given us more reasons to hate the ’80s.

The game is a roguelike dungeon crawler that spews Japanese gaming out of every orifice imaginable. Accompanied by a talking weasel companion, Shiren, the game’s main character, is on a mission to find the legendary Golden Condor.

However, you can forget about ever actually reaching your journey’s end because the game makes everything so difficult, you’ll be lucky to make it 30 minutes into the game before you’re starting right back from scratch.

The main problem lies in the fact that if you’re defeated, you have to restart from the beginning of the game. Yeah, you lose all your equipment, levels and experience. Sure, you can store your items in a quaint little cottage in the game’s first town, and they’ll stay there when you’re resurrected. But this just opens up more problems with the game.

If at anytime throughout your journey you want to travel back to the first town to retrieve any of your stored goods, you’ll lose every level and all experience you’ve gained up to that point. Yes, you will lose all your health points, strength and anything else of significance for no reason whatsoever other than the fact Chunsoft wanted to screw with your head.

While this is a fatal flaw in the game, it only makes it worse when you think about the evil paradox it creates. When you store your equipment in the house to ensure you don’t lose it when you’ll inevitably die, you aren’t using it in the game, which just begs the question, “What’s the damn point?”

Through all the bad things the game does, there are a few redeeming pieces here and there that will only make you wish Chunsoft didn’t handicap the game with these silly arbitrary rules. For instance, the game sports randomly generated dungeons to ensure those trips through the same areas that you’ll be going through when you die and respawn time after time will never look the same.

While you have full control of your character in the top-down view, Mystery Dungeon is actually turn-based. That means there are several times throughout the game where you’ll have to carefully plan your next turn because if you waste too much time with silly moves, it gives your enemies time to surround and attack you.

Probably my favorite part of Mystery Dungeon is the quirky character dialogue and the impressive number of NPCs you’ll find throughout your adventure. It’s refreshing to see six to seven people in any given pub or house.

Oh yeah, you remember how I told you that once you die, you basically have to start the game over again? Well, that’s not entirely true all the time. Chunsoft has added in an online Rescue feature where you can request others to help revive you by completing a dungeon.

However, unless you actually know someone else with the game and can personally request immediate intervention, you’ll have to wait until an anonymous Good Samaritan comes by to rescue you. That means that if you want to keep all your hard-earned work, your play time is over until you’re rescued, and who knows how long that will take?

Summary
I’m not really sure why Sega thought Mystery Dungeon would make for a good investment to bring our way. The Japanese may enjoy these ridiculously hard games, and Sega claims the series has sold more than 1.5 million copies, so the audience is out there somewhere. I just don’t think Western gamers will be very receptive to a game that basically works against them in every way.

There might be an enjoyable experience deep down in the abyss that is Shiren the Wanderer, but all the bad, bad things you have to go through to get there just aren’t worth it. You’ll be better off spending your money on a weekend trip to the museum or feeding the homeless. At least then, there’s a positive outcome in the end.

Score: 5/10