Re-release this: Shiren the Wanderer

This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Despite being the flagship of the Mystery Dungeon series, Shiren the Wanderer was not Chunsoft’s first attempt at bringing the ideas of Rogue into the present. That honor instead went to Torneko no Daibōken: Fushigi no Dungeon, also known as Taloon’s Great Adventure: Mystery Dungeon, as it was going to go by for its canceled European release. Chunsoft had just freed themselves from creating new Dragon Quest games after the fifth entry, wanting to embark on new adventures and be something besides “just” the Dragon Quest studio, but to do so, they decided to launch a series featuring Dragon Quest characters, anyway.

It was a success for Chunsoft, too, as the inaugural Mystery Dungeon, released in 1993, sold 800,000 copies in Japan. Through 1995, the Super Famicom had sold 16.25 million units 800,000 copies of a niche game in a “new” genre is pretty great when you consider that. (Why through 1995? The Playstation and Saturn were already out and established by that point in Japan, and none of the Super Famicom’s 16-bit competition picked up meaningful sales beyond that point, either.)

The problem was that associating with Dragon Quest involved licensing and restrictions on what could and could not be done with their Mystery Dungeon games, and didn’t fully allow for a separation from that highly successful venture, either. Chunsoft had their new series launched, but needed to figure out something that belonged wholly to them. That’s where Shiren the Wanderer came in. There wouldn’t be a second Torneko/Taloon game until 1999, on the Playstation, but in between the first and its follow-up, Chunsoft would come out with three Shiren the Wanderer games: one for the Super Famicom, one exclusively for its Satellaview add-on, and a third for the Game Boy.

As Chunsoft’s Seeichiro Nagahata explained in a 2008 interview with Engadget:

To ensure that the association was explicit, this game was titled Fushigi no Dungeon 2: Furai no Shiren, with a “2” right there in the title to make it clear that, Dragon Quest shopkeeper protagonist or no, this was a Mystery Dungeon game, and a mainline one at that. Mystery Dungeon 2: Shiren the Wanderer featured all brand new characters, including the protagonist, Shiren, and introduced many of the core gameplay functions that Mystery Dungeon is known for that the initial game had not. While the basic gameplay loop and many of its conventions were already established in that first game — the idea of upgrading weapons and shields with scrolls, plating your equipment to protect it, hunger wearing on you and eventually costing you hit points when you’re starving, the way the game controlled, the semi-transparent map for navigation, etc. — the inaugural Shiren added on the blacksmith system, recruitable (but randomized) allies, in-dungeon shops, special jars that could hold items to expand your inventory, and the concept of the “dungeon” as more than just descending for a set number of floors until you reach the bottom.

Here, the “dungeon” is just the entire world that you experience, when Shiren starting in a town and learning of the legend of the region, and deciding to go see it for himself, which takes him through forests and mountains and caves and the like, with stops in various towns and villages along the way. You meet a larger cast of characters this way, and learn of their problems, which you can solve the next time you come by that way. And you will, too, because this is a Mystery Dungeon game: you’re going to die, a lot, and have opportunities for follow-up conversations when you do.

And while additional wrinkles have been added over the years, Shiren the Wanderer was already pretty fully formed in this first outing. It helps that it had the first Mystery Dungeon to build on, but like with that game, it’s incredible to go back to the beginning here and see how much of what you know the series to be was already in place. The most notable things missing are some kind of training area to ease you into the gameplay — something Chunsoft took care of with the game’s eventual re-release on the DS — and the absence of key supporting characters like Asuka the swordswoman and Sensei, Shiren’s uncle who taught him the way of the sword. Sensei wouldn’t show up until the Shiren release on the Wii in 2008, however, but Asuka would be there for the first mainline sequel to Shiren, on the Nintendo 64, and she’s been in most of the games in the series since, including a spin-off of her own on the Dreamcast.

Koppa, Shiren’s weasel sidekick who can talk — like, the animal, not a description of his personality — is already here, however, and does the speaking for the silent protagonist. Shiren is already considered a handsome dude by everyone who sees him. With Dragon Quest’s Slime now missing, Chunsoft came up with another adorable and bouncy mascot foe in the Mamel. While there’s no Asuka yet, you still have a real cast of weirdos to recruit, which is appreciated. Take Oryu, for instance. She has a title like “Shiren the Wanderer” does, and it’s “Oryu the Blinder.” Because she temporarily blinds people. Why? Because it’s funny, mostly. Shiren ends up recruiting her as a traveling companion after rescuing her from a couple of dudes who were not thrilled about being blinded by her after she had pretended to flirt with them, even though she had pulled that trick with Shiren himself a couple of times before this.

Even better, Oryu agrees to join him… and then blinds Shiren again, anyway. She can’t help it, she’s addicted to doing this to men. Somehow, she’s not even the weirdest of the bunch. There’s another guy who pretends to be blind — what was going on in the Chunsoft offices in 1993, by the way? — and offers to give people he meets in the dungeon massages, which have the potential to boost your stats or harm them, if the massage is not done well. Considering the other NPC ally mentioned above and their penchant for blinding you for kicks, guess which of those two results ends up happening to you a bunch? Kechi the Masseur will offer to join you once he’s forced to reveal he isn’t blind, as a bit of penance for whatever weird scheme he had going on. Then there’s Pekeji, who claims to be Shiren’s long-lost brother without ever offering up any proof of that sort of thing or looking even remotely like him. You can help him by lending him a non-trivial amount of money so he can achieve his dream of opening up his own shop, a dream that will last until he’s cheated out of all of that money and decides to join Shiren as a companion.

You’re probably noticing a theme here, where a bunch of NPCs you should be wary of because they keep ruining your life in one way or another are the ones you should engage with the most, in order to recruit them as allies and have them spawn in the dungeon in future trips. You can use the help, especially given the way Mystery Dungeon games work: you take a turn, be it moving or attacking or using an item or whatever, and then every enemy on the map also takes a turn. If you can corner a foe with the help of an ally, that’s two attacks to every one of theirs. If there are two enemies who corner you, then you’re not outnumbered if you’ve got a pal, and you can also maneuver yourself around the map in such a way that you can avoid having both of those foes trained on Shiren.

Since your allies recover health the same way you do — simply by walking around and not taking damage while you do it — they’re able to absorb some hits and keep on going, just like Shiren. These are all things you need to keep in mind as you walk around: like anything in your bag, allies are a resource to be leveraged in the most efficient way possible, so as not to die in the dungeon. The game wants nothing more than for you to die in every trip through the dungeon, and only through careful strategizing and expert use of everything at your disposal will you avoid that fate. Even then, sometimes that’s not enough. Mystery Dungeon is kind for a roguelike, sure, but it’s still a roguelike. It’s like Nagahata said in that same interview: "The core of Mystery Dungeon is ‘tension’ and ‘reasoning.’” Until you’ve resolved the sources of the tension with superb reasoning, you’re going to die again and again. And also after that, too.

Mystery Dungeon 2 initially released in Japan, and only in Japan. It would take 13 years for it to reach North America in some form, well after the era of the Super Famicom and Super Nintendo. Chunsoft, with publishing handled by Sega, would release the game as simply Shiren the Wanderer on the DS in 2008. The marketing would make mention of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, which makes sense: that’s what was known outside of Japan at this point, and there was no reason to avoid the connection at all.

It is, in essence, the same game it was when it first arrived on the scene, but there are some notable changes that fit in so seamlessly that you’d have no idea that it was any different unless you had a deep familiarity with the original release.

A discarded scenario written for the original game was incorporated here, for one, in the same way that Square’s remake of Final Fantasy IV on the DS added in story parts and dialogue that weren’t new so much as had to be removed from the final product due to time and space constraints. Since the DS had Wi-Fi capabilities, the ability to put out a call for another player to rescue you when you die, allowing you to continue on in your quest, was also incorporated here — this is a standard part of the Shiren experience at this point, enhanced in the age of social media where you can see Sam Barlow, developer behind the likes of Her Story and Immortality, posting about needing a hand in Shiren’s sixth mainline game. And, as previously mentioned, an initial training area was introduced: you go through the basics of Mystery Dungeon-ing before you ever get to the initial town, whereas in the Super Famicom original you’re just thrown right into the proceedings. This was a change in approach that Chunsoft had made in the interim: the “training” area for Taloon’s Great Adventure had been a 10-floor dungeon that was meant to just be an easier version of the game you were able to play, one that the developers expected you to die in a bunch as you learned on the fly. By the time of the DS remake of the original, the training setup was more tutorial-like, but also shorter.

What’s a little funny about the decision to remake Shiren the Wanderer on the DS is why Chunsoft made the call for that game in particular. It wasn’t to start at the beginning of things, as you might imagine, but because they believed they wouldn’t have to redraw all of the art from the Super Famicom game, whereas with the Game Boy ones they would have very obviously run into that problem. But then it turned out that the SFC game was so old from a tech standpoint compared to the DS that they had to redraw it all from scratch, anyway. Thankfully, this didn’t deter them or cause them to just make a brand new entry, because to this day, the only way to (legally) play the first Shiren the Wanderer game in North America is through its enhanced DS edition.

The original has received an unofficial translation, so you can emulate it, but like with the first Mystery Dungeon you have to hope it plays nice with your emulator of choice: the stock emulator on the SNES Classic, for instance, registers your save states as deaths since you backed out of the game. Spike Chunsoft, as they were known by the time of this release, also put the games out on iOS and Android, but only in Japan. Considering the script was already there from the DS edition, it’s a wonder that those still haven’t received a localized release on iOS or Android or even just the Switch, but maybe the fact that Shiren 5 and 6 are out there is enough for the studio at the moment. It’s not enough for us, though, put out the rest of that back catalogue.

There is still, to this point, more Shiren that either isn’t localized at all, or is simply not available on modern platforms. There is the original and its remake(s), which are a little of both, then the N64 sequel remains a Japan-exclusive (though, it is also unofficially translated in the present). Neither of the Game Boy releases, nor the Asuka spin-off on the Dreamcast, have been localized either officially or unofficially, though, the latter is in progress. Shiren the Wanderer 3, originally released on the Wii, remains there, with the Playstation Portable edition exclusive to Japan. Shiren the Wanderer 4 received DS and PSP releases, but neither left Japan. This is a real problem for those of us who want to experience all of these games, and it’s not like Shiren can easily be played without being able to understand the language it’s in: even leaving aside that the goofiness is part of what makes the package so enjoyable, you need to know what items are and what they do, what requests NPCs are making of you, and so on. All of this is vital to the experience, and so, the need for these games being available beyond just emulation is key.

Maybe someday Spike Chunsoft will be all caught up — Shiren the Wanderer’s popularity continues to grow, after all, and I’ll just be annoying about the lack of Shiren’s back catalogue until we get it. Doing my part and all that.

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