Shiren The Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and Dice of Fate is an isometric rogue-like and the 5th game of the series. It features a rather whimsical story involving you and a talking ferret stumbling upon a village with a terminally ill girl. Okay, so maybe not that whimsical after all but other than that the game is very light hearted and tongue in cheek every step of the way. A local villager that is deeply in love with her rushes towards the tower soon after you arrive. You are then instantly tasked with climbing the Tower of Fate in order to revert the dying girls fate to succumb to her illness and keep her admirer alive throughout. A task easier said than done as this game is not one to take lightly, contrary to what the colorful graphics may have you believe.
When you are finally given control of your character you will be in a small village and will soon make your way to the main hub-world where you can buy plenty of various items, play a few mini-games (really addictive) and store your hard earned cash in the bank. With this being a rogue-like where you drop all your money and items on death, the bank will be your best friend. A bit later in the game you will unlock the ability to buy from a “Point Dealer” that sells you a “Undo Herb” which will allow you to return to the hub-world upon death with all your money and items intact. That may sound like it makes the game much easier and it in fact does. Before heading out it should also be noted that you can change your UI colors and a few other things to customize it to your liking.
You are at last let loose to make your way to the tower and must cross a vast meadow full of hostile creatures. This is your typical “everything moves when you move” type of rouge-like fighting system with a dash of Legend of Zelda thrown in. Positioning is very important and your best bet is to think before you act instead of just hitting the attack button, only to get surrounded. There are no special abilities to get you out of a jam, just your melee weapon, items and ranged items such as arrows if you are lucky. It is unlikely that you will meet your demise in this meadow, it’s mostly just to introduce you to the game. Well considering you fail to notice the hunger bar and starve to death before you reach the tower.
Food will be laying around the floor if you are lucky and carrying some with you at all times is a must. Given enough time they will rot and become toxic to your health if eaten. Your inventory is quite limited so it is important to think about what you need and don’t need. Interestingly enough this game has a huge focus on vases. Some vases will allow you to store several items in them though to retrieve them back you’ll have to break the entire vase, spilling all of its contents out. There is also a vase to keep your food eternally fresh which is more vital than you may think considering how many traps laying around will rot all of your food. Traps are unforgiving to the player, some can rust your weapon making it weaker, others can lower your max health or simply teleport you into a room full of enemies. Needless to say you don’t want that happening.
Annoyingly enough, the one of the only ways to uncover these completely invisible traps is to attack the square in front of you to reveal it. It is a complete pain to move, attack, move, attack all throughout the game so I just ignored that mechanic. The other way to is to equip a bracelet that shows traps or to read a magic school that reveals all of them on the tower level you are on. This game is all about properly using your items since even if your character can level up it just effects his max health, nothing else. You are only as strong as the sword in your hand and the intelligence of your decisions. As well as luck of course, a bad run can do even the best of players in.
Unfortunately, there are no powerful swords to be found or bought. You have to use a certain vase that allows you to mix two weapons to create one strong one. You rinse and repeat that until you have a decent weapon which pretty much forces you to use the Undo Herb I mentioned early. That makes it the type of game where you bash your head into the wall until you are strong enough to conquer it instead of the rouge-like way of being able to win on your first go if you are lucky/skilled enough. It doesn’t make it a bad game, just something fans of the genre should be aware of.
With that being said there are three towers to choose from. An easy, medium and hard tower you must all conquer that contains different types of enemies. Conquering these three is not the end however, there is much more to conquer. Remember that villager that wanted to conquer the tower to save his crush? Yeah, you will have that dead-weight with throughout the entire game. If he dies you have to use one of your valuable health items to restore him and he will die a lot. A rather big flaw of this game is that you can’t control your companions (up to two at a time) in the slightest. They will occasionally run towards a group of enemies we have no chance of defeating and they will not back off until either the monster or them dies. If he dies and you ditch him, you will be teleported to the hub-world upon completing the tower and be forced to redo it again then revive him in the exact spot he died last time.
In a game where you can barely keep yourself alive and you have very little room to take much of anything in your inventory this becomes incredibly irradiating. It’s such a shame too, despite not having any special abilities for combat, it is very a deep and intricate fighting system. You have items that switch your locations with the enemy you shoot it at, throwing a drained staff at someone will still active it’s effect one more time, money can be thrown at foes for serious damage, etc etc. You’ll be fighting tooth and nail with whatever you got while trying to keep yourself from starving in a dark, abandoned dungeon and I absolutely love that. Where it really gets interesting is when you have gone far enough in the game that it introduces a day/night cycle that spawns extremely powerful monsters at night.
You may as well be carrying around a giant piece of beef jerky for all these monsters care, you will not survive a direct fight with them. Trading out your sword for a torch is your best bet as you do not want to accidentally bump into one. Your only ways of disposing of them is to use your night time abilities that can only be used once per floor level. Eating a radish will refill all of your skills if you are prepared enough to be carrying some. Hiding out in a corner is not feasible, the monsters are very active and constantly searching for things to fight. Even if that thing is another fellow monster they will viciously rip each other apart, making the night full of noises of battle and death. Monsters level up as well so if they win fights they become more powerful which is terrible news for you. It is a terrifying experience to be out in the night and an awesome feature.
Your companion will die though and you’ll waste valuable resources in such a situation where every move or action may spell your death. The decision to include an essential AI with no control over his actions is one the game suffers a lot from. Enough to turn what would be an amazing game into just a good one. It is not until the post-game content where you have to completely abandon your possessions and go it barehanded each time you return is it that you are finally free from him. With all the negative mentioned in this review it would be easy to assume I despise this game but that is not the case. Shiren The Wanderer is much more than your typical rouge-like game that it appears to be at first glance. There are so many small details and ways to play the game that even if I was brought down by the AI, you could bet I would be back in that tower immediately for another go and each time would lead to creative new views on how to use certain items. If you can handle Resident Evil 4 like babysitting of an even worse AI partner and you like Rouge-likes then this is a title you should consider.
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