What do you get when you take the company Chunsoft, a 13 year old game and the DS? A supremely punishing title is the answer.

Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer is a rehash of the original Japan only game on the SNES (or Super Famicom to them). Originally made and now remade by Chunsoft, the team behind the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series also on the DS, the game follows the tale of Shiren the Wanderer (bet you can’t guess what he does) on his quest to find great treasure hidden in the lair of the Golden Condor. To get there, Shiren must go through many randomly generated ‘dungeons’ which contain monsters to battle and NPC’s to take quests from.

This all sounds very similar to the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series already available on the DS yes? Well it pretty much is. Visuals and audio, which I’ll talk more about later, are nothing like Pokemon nor are the characters but the main core gameplay here is the same as Pokemon Mystery Dungeon but with a rather large and harsh twist.

I’ll say this now; Shiren the Wanderer is brutally difficult. In mystery dungeon games like Pokemon Mystery Dungeon if you die you start back at the beginning. That sounds fairly reasonable I mean you did die and all but in Shiren you don’t just die- you restart the entire game (no I’m not kidding). After my first 45 minutes of play I died trying to save a small girl from being assaulted and ended up dying thinking I would be taken back to the village to continue, instead I arrived back at the village at level 1 with no items or weapons at all and was forced to venture back in the various areas with nothing. If Shiren the Wanderer can claim to have one thing tied to its name, it would be ’so difficult you’ll cry’.

Now I’ve talked about how the game is a sadist’s dream let me talk about the graphics and audio. While the game is a port of the SNES game it’s presented well on the DS with crisp sprites and backgrounds, it has a definite 2D cartoon feel to the game which never makes it feel menacing, hiding the sadism even further. Audio is beautiful with distinct Japanese styling intertwined with what I can only express as ‘old skool’ military style music. It surprisingly fits well and makes the game feel very complete.

While the game has no real multiplayer to speak of, it does have Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection features which can aid in the single player campaign. After you have been trodden to death by a monster you can request someone comes to rescue you. this then evolves someone going online and helping you out so you don’t lose everything you previously had which is a massive help however the game only lets you do this 3 times which I find really strange, I really don’t understand why they would put a limit on something like this.

Closing Comments
While Shiren is an enjoyable and challenging adventure, it possibly takes the challenging part too far. It’s all well and good to have gameplay like this several years ago, but in today’s market, gamers expect a certain amount of leniency for performing badly. Aside from the punishment the game performs well in every other area with good 2D graphics, a fairly nice soundtrack, good attacks and weapons and clever enemies, I just wish there was an easier mode to allow players who don’t want the extreme challenge to just enjoy the game. Even though 99% of gamers will pick up this game and hate it for its belief’s there is the 1% of people out there that will love the obscenely difficult challenge this game can bring to the table and to those people I say enjoy. Everyone else? Maybe you should go play Tetris for half an hour.

Score 8.0

+ Good remake
+ Nice visuals
+ Hard difficulty

- Hard difficulty is sometimes too much
- Less punishing mode would have been good
- Wi-Fi could have been more fleshed out