Here comes
my fourth and last post about Shiren the
Wanderer. Describing my eventful run was entertaining enough and I could
have stopped at that, but I felt that I needed to complete the picture by
delivering my ultimate thoughts about the game. Without further ado, let’s put
an end to my musings about Shiren!
Freedom is mine—and yours too
Everything
I said in my first post about Shiren
still stands, despite the fact that I wrote it a good year ago. I was a
newcomer to both the roguelike genre and the Shiren series back then, and I was still under the false impression
that there was a clear-cut, so-called “right” way to play such games in general
and Shiren in particular. If there is
one thing that I discovered in the meantime, it is definitely the fact that there
is no such thing as a “right” way of playing Shiren: this game is anything but linear and forceful, preferring
instead to treat the players to a staggering, nearly dizzying amount of
freedom. I happen to be a freedom-hungry gamer, but even I had never dreamt of
a game that would leave the player entirely free to experiment at will within a
fixed set of rules. There is no canonical way to play Shiren, indeed: the only thing that matters is to progress,
regardless of how you do it, and the right way to play that game is the way
that suits you. If there ever was a
game that you could play your way, then Shiren
has to be that game, and I love it to pieces for it.
Not only
does Shiren lavish a generous amount
of freedom on you, but it also endows you with similarly large doses of
autonomy and responsibility. You are in charge of your run from beginning to
end, and it’s up to you to design your own strategies, manage your inventory
and progress as smoothly as possible. Since the game’s rules are fixed and
never vary (or nearly so—more about that in just a bit), any mistake you make
is yours only; but so is every victory, however small it may be. Shiren’s world is rough, dangerous and
unforgiving, but it can be navigated with the right amount of care, preparation
and patience. It is a formidable challenge: there is no hand-holding and very
little to ease your way through, but you can still learn, slowly but surely,
and use every shred of gained knowledge to progress further. The ultimate
victory that crowns that painstaking yet compelling process is all the sweetest,
as it gives you the priceless feeling of having succeeded against all odds. Shiren makes you toil and sweat more
than any other game, but it also offers you the immense satisfaction of overcoming numerous hazards and perils by relying solely on your finely honed
strategies, and that’s a deeply fulfilling reward that is not so often encountered in
the gaming landscape—at least, not since the end of the 8-bit era.
Fake difficulty averted—or nearly so
Shiren being a game as tough as nails, it wouldn’t
have been too surprising to discover that it indulged generously in fake
difficulty. The frontier between fair and fake difficulty is a thin one indeed,
and can be crossed oh so easily; and yet, amazingly, Shiren manages to stay on the fair side. It does so by implementing rules that are
strict and unforgiving—sometimes even downright sadistic—yet unchanging. This
allows the player to learn and thus to anticipate future events as well as
devise strategies to overcome obstacles, and it works like a charm all through
the game. That is, except in one case. There is indeed one exception to that iron
rule about unvarying rules, and it is embodied by your allies: Pekeji, Oryu and
Keichi, aka the Deceptive Ones.
The
behaviour of these three is the closest thing to randomness that you’ll find in
Shiren. Keichi’s Healing Massages can
occasionally hurt you and deplete your health bar instead of refilling it,
Oryu’s long-range attacks miss their mark as often as not, and Pekeji has these
infuriating habits of misaiming his punches straight at your face on a regular
basis and of gorging on your precious Riceballs without any discernable hunger
pattern. This is already bad enough, and it stings all the more when you add
the fact that this trio is all wild and uncontrollable: they can abandon you in
the blink of an eye to run after an enemy at the far end of the screen or march
stupidly on a sleeping enemy that would have been better left dozing off. To
add insult to injury, there is no way to bring them back to you once they start
straying away, which forces you to run after them or forge ahead without them.
Even worse is the fact that you cannot check the state of their health at all:
for all you know, they could be on the brink of death at any given moment. Not
that knowing it would be useful, mind you, since there is no reliable way to
heal them: throwing Herbs at them works only occasionally and staying at an Inn
doesn’t restore their health one bit. And of course, you can’t expect them to
look after themselves either, for instance by doing something as sensible as
retreating when they are hurt: their only course of action is to plant
themselves in front of enemies and suffer blows until they pitifully die. Well,
at least you can learn how not to
play by observing their behaviour; it’s better than nothing, I guess.
All in all,
the behaviour of these so-called allies is so random and hindering that it has to have been designed that way on
purpose. I wouldn’t been surprised if these three were conceived from the
get-go as a way to take the piss out of the player for wanting to ease their
way through by resorting to allies: instead of offering reliable foils, the
game throws in characters that are more akin to giant boulders dragging you
down. This trio is a huge practical joke played on the player, teaching them
that there is no easy way in Shiren
and that only relying on one’s own resources and wits can lead one to victory.
While I certainly appreciate the humour of it all, it doesn’t change the fact
that this trio of allies creates some fake difficulty by sporting such an
unreliable behaviour. It is hard to integrate them in any kind of strategy because
their patterns are not predictable, and they can even put you in hot water by
acting so randomly, like when they die while fighting a monster and make said
monster level up and become ten times more dangerous—and of course, you’re left
alone to deal with the thing. Why, thank you so much! I guess there must be some
ways to integrate them in some strategies if you rack your brain hard enough,
but I found much more comfortable to avoid their company entirely most of the
time. I only manage to put them to use efficiently in the first floors: I would
retreat behind them when facing Pickpockets in order to avoid having my Gitans
licked away, and managed to save a substantial amount of money that way. Still,
that’s really a poor compensation for all the trouble I went through to recruit
them in the first place, and I may well abstain from that hassle in my next run
of Shiren.
Fake longevity—up the wazoo
Ironically
enough, while Shiren manages to
gracefully avoid fake difficulty and dabbles in it only for the sake of
teaching the player a good lesson about roguelike philosophy, it indulges
shamelessly in fake longevity. Now that’s
surprising: I would have thought that the game’s relentless difficulty alone
would suffice to provide a decent number of gaming hours—all the more so while
combined with the huge postgame content. And yet, Chunsoft seems to have
thought that this was not enough, and thus devised and implemented a bunch of
features whose sole purpose it to force you to play longer than strictly
necessary. Lo and behold, here’s the list of impediments:
—There is
no way to warp back to town from the depths of the dungeons. There is not a
single item that can return you there, nor is there any kind of portal or
transportation mean that can take you back to the safety of one of the game’s
villages. Your only option is to go forward until you reach the next town in
line, or to backtrack until you reach the town you just passed—the latter being
possible only in the first half of the game, i.e. until Cryptic Rock Valley.
Now, this is just plain mean, and utterly exaggerated. There could have been at
least a returning item, if nothing else: make it rare if you wish, but give us
something. Give us something that could save us some time and spare us the
chore of crawling back to the last town or forward to the next one while
praying not to die. Give us something that could save our hide when we’re on
the brink of death and spare us the chore of starting all over again
empty-handed. Do you see the fake longevity at work now? And still, I guess we
could deem ourselves fortunate with this DS port: from what I’ve read, the
original SNES instalment didn’t allow the player to backtrack at all. I shudder when thinking of how
impossibly longer my run would have become if I couldn’t have gone back and
forth between towns in the first half of the game.
—Items are
ridiculously expensive and money is hard to come by. As a result, scraping up
enough gitans to buy whatever you’re longing for is more often than not a
tedious process that involves scouring every inch of every floor, picking up every
item in sight before going all the way back to Bamboo Village to sell them and—last
but certainly not least—avoiding being cornered by Pickpockets at all costs.
This painstaking collection of money can be extremely time-consuming, and doesn’t
even have the grace to wield unfailing results. Sometimes, you don’t manage to
collect the necessary amount of money no matter how hard you try; when this
happens, the only option is to restart the whole process from scratch. For, lo
and behold…
—There is
no bank in Shiren, nor any other
reliable way to save your hardly collected money. In practice, it means that
whatever purchase you plan must be made in the course of a single adventure,
and whatever money you may have left after the deed is done is doomed to be
lost forever when you die/give up on your current adventure. If the absence of
any way to warp back to town was mean, this absence of money storage is
downright sadistic: I’m sure I could have bought a dozen Melting Jars just with
the money that I was forced to relinquish as I moved on to the next adventure
in line. And let’s not even mention all these aborted runs during which I
didn’t manage to collect the desired amount of money because I was killed in
the process or because the game had decided to play stingy. Now that’s fake
longevity served on a silver platter.
—The two
resident smithies of the game can upgrade your sword only once per adventure. I
think this is pretty self-explanatory: instead of allowing you to upgrade your
weapon as much as your funds will allow, the game forces you to restart a whole
new adventure as soon as you’re done visiting the smithies. The blacksmiths
even tease you by saying “Come back later” if you ask them for another upgrade!
How lazy can these guys be? Jeez, I’m sure I could have forged two Lv.60 Master
Swords with all the upgrading opportunities that I lost in the course of my
run. But wait, there is worse…
—The smithies
cannot upgrade shields. Yup, you read
that right. As a result, shields can only be upgraded by using the ridiculously
expansive Melding Jars or the not-so-common Earth Bless Scrolls. In practice,
this means that you’ll have to scrape up money as I explained above in order to
buy the coveted Melding Jars AND find shields with interesting Seals and levels
to fuse with your main shield, as well as repeat adventures until you’re lucky
enough to find some Earth Bless Scrolls. If you have enough money, you can go
back and forth between Bamboo Village and the floor just before it in hope that
an Earth Bless Scroll will pop up as the Bamboo Village shop. It can be a bit
tedious, but it will reap rewards if you’re patient enough: I managed to get a
couple of Earth Bless Scrolls as well as interesting shields by using that
trick. At any rate, brace yourself for some tedious and lengthy toiling, should
you decide to upgrade your shield all the way to its maximum level. Now that’s the cherry on top of the fake
longevity sundae.
So, I think
I’ve made my point: Shiren is rife
with fake longevity, no doubt due to its origins as a 16-bit era title. Fake
longevity was pretty much the norm at that time, and every game pulled out such
dirty tricks to ensure that the player wouldn’t witness the credits too soon.
In regards to its origins, I won’t slander Shiren
for making such generous use of fake longevity. This was the way of the early
’90s, and such glimpses in the past eras of gaming always fascinate me, so I
won’t complain too much—especially since Chunsoft tried to damper the fake
longevity at work by allowing backtracking in the first half of the game. And
fake longevity or not, I sincerely enjoyed every minute spent playing Shiren, and I am grateful for the very
existence of that amazing gem of a game.
I want to
conclude that post and the whole Shiren
epopee by exposing my most ridiculous death in the game. Any run of a roguelike
is bound to be littered with stupid and/or absurd deaths, and such deaths can
be worn as a badge of honor as well as the sweetest victories. I’ve already
exposed my sweetest moment in Shiren,
i.e. the epiphany I had when I managed to escape a Monster House unscathed with
only a Switching Staff; now, it’s time to expose my most ridiculous death, the
one that left me gaping at the screen in sheer incredulity over the stupidity
of the whole thing. This happened in the Old Mine, on the 9th floor
exactly. I was cruising around and trying to collect money to purchase a
Melding Jar, armed with an already conveniently powered up Lv.30 Master Sword
and a Lv. 14 Armor Shield. Oryu was guarding my back, and any resident enemy
was hardly dealing more than one point of damage thanks to my Armor Shield, so
I thought I was as safe as I could be, and didn’t bother healing myself when the
last Spike Bomb of the floor exploded at my face and took away half of my life
bar. I mean, I had explored the whole floor, killed all enemies and stood just
one room away from the exit; what could happen at that point? Well, I’ll tell
you: walking on a Boulder Trap and being crushed to death because I didn’t have
enough HP left. I did SO not expect something like that to happen that I stood
frozen for a few seconds, not believing what I just saw—not wanting to believe it. And yet, it did
happened, and I lost some excellent equipment in the process—all because I was
careless and let my guard down for a couple of seconds, making the fatal
mistake of thinking that it was fine to cruise around with only half of my HP.
This pretty much sums up the philosophy at work behind Shiren’s deceptively cute assemblages of pixels: always expect the
worse, and don’t ever let your guard down.
It’s now
time to say goodbye to Shiren and
Table Mountain. As I mentioned before, it’s not an adieu, neither in gaming nor in writing: I will most certainly play
Shiren again, as well as its
successors, and write about them while I’m at it. I’m really proud and
overjoyed to have cleared Shiren the
Wanderer: it feels like I have passed a test in rogueliking, and it gave me
a lot of confidence in that department. I may be wrong, but I have this feeling that Shiren is somehow the New York of rogueliking: if I managed to
beat that old-school roguelike, then I can beat them all. We’ll see soon enough
if this holds true: I have a couple of other roguelikes in my gaming library,
such as the two Izuna instalments and
ZHP Unlosing Ranger—not to mention
the whole Shiren series—and I will
tackle them as soon as I’m in the mood for rogueliking again, hopefully to great
success. Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!
I'm sure you'll be pleased to hear that almost all these flaws were fixed in subsequent Shiren DS games except the frequency of blacksmith upgrades. And cheap deaths, but that's just how roguelikes roll.
ReplyDeleteWell, that's good to hear! I can deal with not upgrading more than once per run if the smithies can upgrade shields as well as weapons. And cheap deaths... Yeah, they're pretty much part of the fun. Although I was not laughing that much when I was crushed to death by that boulder trap, I find it hilarious now. Victory can sure heal many wounds! :-D
DeleteFantastic articles on one of my favorite games of all time. I hope your also happy about the shiren vita game coming to soon :-)
ReplyDeleteThanks a lot for the kind words! "Happy" is a mild way to describe how I feel about Shiren 5: I'm absolutely overjoyed about that release! Never in a million years did I expect a Shiren entry to be released again on our shores, all the less on the Vita. I adore that console more by the month! :)
DeleteWhy does the character looks like a mushroom ? Ok je sors... :D
ReplyDelete:D :D :D
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