05/04/2015

Shiren the Wanderer (4): Sayonara, my love



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!

6 comments:

  1. 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.

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    1. Well, 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

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  2. Fantastic articles on one of my favorite games of all time. I hope your also happy about the shiren vita game coming to soon :-)

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    1. Thanks 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! :)

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  3. Why does the character looks like a mushroom ? Ok je sors... :D

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