Publisher: Aksys Games
Developer: Spike Chunsoft Co.
Medium: Digital/Vita Card
Players: 1-2
Online: No
ESRB: T
I avoided laying Shiren The Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate for the longest time. When I casually mentioned to an employee at my local Gamestop that it was on my to-play list, he instantly launched into a spiel about how hard it was, and how it was brutally unforgiving towards newcomers from the get-go. As someone who generally isnโt fond of games for which โbrutally unforgivingโ is adjective, that made me hesitant to even start playing.
Turns out it was just another bit of bad advice from a Gamestop employee. Shiren the Wanderer is definitely hard, but not to the extent that newcomers shouldnโt even think about playing it. Itโs more tough-but-fair, a game that includes a three-hour-long tutorial for a reason โ the reason being, of course, that itโs a complex game that demands a lot out of players. Just play that tutorial, learn what youโre doing, level up your character a little before heading out into the world, and youโll be fine.
Well, not โfineโ. More youโll die a little bit less. Because Shiren the Wanderer is definitely a challenging game. Itโs an unapologetically difficult, old school roguelike dungeon-crawler, and it forces you to be methodical as you make your way through each room.
Iโve played harder, though. Provided you play through the lengthy tutorial โ which you really, really should; I cannot emphasize this enough โ Shiren the Wanderer actually is much more user-friendly than other games. Combat is a relative breeze, as is moving. Your character levels up pretty easily. Organizing the many, many items you need to carry around is pretty simple. In almost every respect, itโs as if the developers understood how hard their game was going to be, and decided not to complicate things even further.
Which makes the gameโs one big flaw all the more puzzling. Shiren the Wander has a baffling save system. Thereโs no autosave, which is something I only learned after completing that aforementioned length tutorial. I completed the first, simple dungeon, my backpack full of useful items, arrived in the second location, stopped playingโฆand then returned to discover that the game assumed I had moved on to the next dungeon, died, and lost everything Iโd earned in those first few hours. It was, to say the least, infuriating. Iโd have avoided had I just realized that the options menuโs โAbortโ was another way of saying โSave and Quit.โ For a game thatโs otherwise clear about most things, this one lack of clarity is surprising.
But itโs also something that youโll learn from, and then move on. And once you do move on, youโll be reminded that Shiren the Wanderer is one heck of a game. Youโll get the most out of it, of course, if youโre the type who likes tough dungeon crawlers with a retro feel, but even if youโre only mildly interested in the genre, this game has enough to get you hooked.
