This is gonna be a short post. Partly because I haven’t played much of the game(a bit over 4 hours) and I don’t plan on playing it ever again, and partly because, frankly, there’s not much to say about it. As such, I also won’t be posting a full review.

Shiren is an established franchise is Japan, starting… either on the SNES or the Game Boy. It has multiple games spanning multiple consoles including the  previously mentioned ones, as well as N64, GBA, PC, PSP, GBC, Dreamcast and DS. We got the DS version in America 2 years ago, so this is the second game in the series that we get here.

I did play a bit of the DS version, and didn’t enjoy it much. I actually barely heard about the Wii release until just before it came out, and didn’t really inform myself about it, but I did rent it a few weeks after release.

So read on and see what I thought of it!

Presentation
The graphics aren’t too great. The textures are very low-res, the everything has a bland look, and there’s nothing really great to look at in the game. Some parts might as well be on the N64. Though some of the cinematics look really nice, they last around 10 seconds, so there;s not much to say about those either.
The sound is okay. The music is classic japanese style which I always quite enjoy, the rest of the sounds are pretty much just attacks and traps triggering, with every sound being distinct enough for you to know what’s going on just by listening.
The story isn’t the game’s strong point. Granted, I didn’t get very far in it, but it’s just about some guy looking for a certain treasure in the area of the Otsutsuki Village, and there’s possibly a prophecy about him, something to do with events 1000 years in the past. It… doesn’t go too deep. There’s a few minor twists, and you do lose control of Shiren for a while which I wasn’t expecting, but overall it’s not very enticing. The writing doesn’t help. The conversations seem to have been written by someone who has no idea what he’s doing, and are rarely interesting.  And inconsistent too. For example, Shiren gets a curse partway through the game, with the vilain saying “There’s absolutely no way to lift that curse”, and minutes later a random characters gives you an item that is “sure to lift the curse”. Yeah, great “uncurable curse” you got there, if the solution is found moments later. And the protagonist is a silent protagonist. And not an interesting one like Link or Crono, but rather just some guy who follows the other characters around like a puppet.

Gameplay
This plays just like every other dungeon crawler out there. When you’re in a dungeon, each time you move (it’s basically a grid), or attack, or use an item, you use a “turn”. After you used your turn, your ally (if you have one) uses his, and then enemies use their’s. So basically nothing happens if you don’t move. You explore dungeons, which are, I think, randomly generated, and made up of small rooms and corridors, leading to stairs or other things to bring you to the next “floor”. On the way you pick up items and fight enemies. When you get through enough floors, you get to the end of the dungeon, and normally fight a boss, or continue the story.

Fighting is really simple. look towards an enemy and press A. An attack will be done and after your allie will do an attack if he’s near an enemy, and then if the enemy is still alive he’ll attack you or your allie next. From what I’ve seen there’s no special skills you can learn or anything. Instead, you pick up arrows, stones, and scrolls through the levels, which enable you to use spells (with various effects), and gives you projectiles. You can, however, with certain characters (Shiren and Sensei can do it, Asuka can’t), equip 2 weapons instead of a weapon and a shield, maximizing your damage output, which I highly recommend if it’s possible at all. Killing enemies give you and your allies experience, they level up and get stronger that way… Basic stuff. Enemies can be pretty cool though, some having weird effects like making your weapons weaker, or possessing other enemies to level them up, things like that.

Allies move around depending on an order you give them(in a menu). You can get them to stay close, attack first, search and destroy, pick up items, do whatever they want, and a few others. This changes what they’ll do. “Do what you want” can be pretty useful for exploration, since they’ll usually stay away from you and explore more of the map, which appears in your minimap as they visit it. Each order you can give to allies has a different effect, so you can change that to your advantage. You can also set “actions” to your characters, which will determine what they can or can’t do. If you don’t want Sensei to shoot arrows, just set them off, if you want him to give priority to healing you, you can do that too. Though, overall, I did find the allies to be fairly stupid and rarely helpful unless you control them yourself. Yeah, you can have full control on the allies, but that REALLY slows the game down, and it’s not really useful except maybe against bosses. The bosses, which are, at least the few I’ve fought, complete pushovers.

The game flow is simple. Choose a dungeon, get to the end, fight the boss/watch a cutscene, go to the next. Most dungeons let you keep your levels when you finish them. Some will make you start at level 1 and won’t let you keep your levels, but will let you find new gear. In dungeons, your characters will get hungry, and they’ll get stat downgrades if they get too hungry, so you have to feed them rice balls from time to time, or herbs if you’re desperate. I think that’s a stupid feature… Outside of the dungeon, there’s really not that much to do. You can talk to NPCs, which rarely have anything interesting to say, and there’s a store in the village that has new inventory each time you visit it, and you can sell your stuff(note: press Z to select multiple items to sell). One thing that really annoyed me: when you die, you lose everything you have, unless it’s in the bank or storage. Now that’s a pain in the ass. And reloading your save won’t do anything, you’ll still have nothing. And you don’t keep your levels if you don’t finish a dungeon, so dying basically just makes you waste tons of time since you’ll have to go around other dungeons to pick up some gear and items before going back to the one you were actually at.

That’s really all there is to say about the gameplay. It’s a very simplistic dungeon crawler. Not a bad one, but it doesn’t stand out.

Overall
If you’re a fan of the genre/series, you should like it. I don’t feel that it really adds anything to the genre that has never been done, nor does it do anything much better than other games in the genre, but it’s at least competent in what it does. It’s not really my kind of game, I’m not a big fan of Dungeon Crawlers in general (though I did quite like Azure Dreams on GBC and Tao’s Adventure on DS), but it’s not exactly a bad game. It’s worth checking out if you’re curious about it.
And the “lose all your items” thing is really annoying.

jobocan Console, Games, impressions, wii