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The game features an interesting day-night cycle as players progress, where the night cycle requires players to equip a torch for visibility and uses special abilities instead of normal weapons. Deaths don’t feel cheap, but they will be plentiful for those who don’t think carefully. Monsters are aggressive and generally track down the player as soon as they are spotted. There are ample items and weapons for the player to find, and these must be used very carefully and strategically in order to navigate through the monster filled randomly generated floors. Players will also need to constantly level up as they progress, making sure not to skip too much combat, or they might end up being too weak for later floors. There’s a strength value that decreases from poison and other attacks that must be monitored. In addition to health, players have a hunger meter that decreases as they progress, so food must be kept on hand to mitigate this. So he can’t simply be left behind if players get stuck in a difficult to escape situation.ĭespite these many perks, Shiren is by no means an easy game. The one downside of this however, is the player will need to revive him in order to properly advance in the main adventure. Though the other companions will simply disappear should they fall in battle, the boy is revivable using healing items. He is Shiren’s constant companion in the main adventure, and will actually stay at the highest floor you’ve reached and await your return, serving as a nice note of how far the player has reached, and ensuring an NPC companion for the more difficult floors they have yet to reach. ![]() One of the NPCs is the boy previously mentioned trying to save the sick girl. The player can bring along two of these at a time, and once unlocked, are readily available for future runs. Shiren also features a number of NPCs that can assist along the way. This eliminates the frustration of losing upgraded or rare weapons and armor should the player have no means of escaping from their doom. The best feature by far though is a system whereby equipment can be tagged, and then retrieved on subsequent adventures if the player should lose them. The game also has multiple items, that are not particularly rare, that allow the player to escape back to the start of the adventure while keeping their entire inventory. For example, towns along the way contain storerooms where players can leave excess items for future runs. Death means starting the adventure over, and losing all collected items, but Shiren provides a large number of ways to mitigate or completely avoid this loss. Players will traverse the game’s towers floor by floor, collecting items, battling monsters, and dealing with traps and other obstacles. Shiren’s gameplay is a purely traditional roguelike a turn-based crawl through randomly generated dungeons. Minimalist stories are difficult to pull off without making a game simply feel devoid of story, but Chunsoft has done a pretty fine job at avoiding that. It manages that perfect balance of providing just enough story, without it getting in the way of the proceedings. It’s a simple concept, but provides enough story and interesting dialogue to make the main adventure have some deal of context. Shiren eventually teams up with the young girl’s love to traverse the tower of fate to try and reverse the girl’s destiny. ![]() The game starts out with Shiren and his talking ferret companion wandering into a town where a young girl is gravely ill. It does unfortunately come with a number of annoyances, primarily some frustrating bosses serving as road blocks in the middle of the main adventure. Combined with a simple story that fits the game nicely, Shiren is a fun and challenging adventure. Players themselves can even be rescued by other players of the game. The Shiren series, and this entry in particular, sets itself apart from most traditional roguelikes by giving a sense of persistence between runs, and even allowing items to be saved or rescued should a player fall. Sticking to the traditional aspects of roguelikes, the series starts players at level one at the start of dungeons, and of course strips them of items and equipment should they fall in the middle of a dungeon run. Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate is the latest entry in the long running roguelike series from Chunsoft, with this entry being localized by Aksys.
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