Shiren the Wanderer 2: Oni Invasion! Shiren Castle!

 

This is a classic dungeon crawl game with the ‘you move they move’ type of system. It’s a basic one at that but it works. Along the way you’ll collect herbs, scrolls, staffs, food, weapons and building materials, but more of that later. Weapons come in a huge variety since you can combine their magical properties, the seals, using a special item called synthesis pot. The weapons you have are the most enduring aspect of your character since everything else you carry are consumables. Even your levels reset at the end of each run. That’s how it works in this game; there are 16 floors with one stop at the middle of the path. Once you enter the dungeon you can only return to the village with your stuff if you beat all the floors. You can choose to go back before that but you’ll lose your items by doing so. At the end of the run your level resets to 1 again, making your weapons particularly important and valuable.

 There are over 160 types of monsters lurking the corridors and rooms of Shiren’s world and they really make the crawling varied and interesting. They go from your basic slime that in this game kinda looks like a cat, all the way up to magic users, demons and heavily armored spiders. They can also evolve and gain levels and even the slime can become pretty tough if you find them in their more powerful forms. The monsters are not the only thing you have to worry about while adventuring. Often you’ll find traps on the ground and here’s my only complaint about this game.

 

Traps are plentiful, interesting and some have very cool animations. The problem is you’ll have to step on them, even if you can clearly see where they are. This game happens in a grid and sometimes you’ll have a trap right inside a corridor with no way of walking around it. Shiren can’t jump tiles and the only way to deactivate traps is by destroying them, but you need a particular weapon for that, a mallet, and you only run into those very, very, very late into the game. To add salt to injury, they eventually break, so even mallets are not a permanent solution to this. Basically you’ll be walking right into traps that you can clearly see and that always makes me a little annoyed. The other problem I have with the traps game is how to detect them: you swing your sword in front of you and if there’s a trap there, it will show up. Sounds simple enough, but swinging your sword takes a move. That means the game gets twice as slow if you’re swinging your weapon after every step you take, making trap detection a very dull, time consuming chore. There are some spells that reveal the location of traps but I felt those spells are rare to come by. Best solution is to just walk right into them and take the damage. Only a few traps are truly dangerous so you’ll be able to deal with the damage 99% of the time.

To help you on your quest you’ll find companions along the way and they add some interest to the gameplay, but their main function in the game, I believe, is how they’re involved in the story. You’ll find a total of 5 buddies to join you as you progress to the game. Some of them have their own special abilities, some are pretty much like you and you can even give them equipment. The only really useful one in my opinion is the walking drawer that can help you with carrying items. This is a major aspect of Shiren 2: what to carry and what to leave behind. To talk about your inventory I have to explain to you the plot a little bit.

 

So you’re Shiren, a type of wanderer warrior that goes around helping people. One day you and your friend Koppa, a talking weasel, end up in a village at the foot of a mountain. You go in for a nice bowl of udon and while you’re enjoying your meal demons attack. Apparently this is going on for a while and after a little bit of talking to the local prophetess and the mayor, Shiren receives the task of building a castle to protect the villagers from the attacks. Due to plot convenience, at the summit of the mountain there lives a group of castle builders… bear with me here. Those guys can make really good castle parts, but they need building materials, more specifically, 5 of them, that would be soil, water, wood, rock and iron sand. And, you guessed it, you can find that stuff by going inside the mountain where the dungeons are, and collect all that stuff as you go up the mountain. That’s how the story justifies the gameplay and it’s done rather well. Not that you needed a particular excuse. It gives you enough reason to keep going inside those dangerous places and it’s satisfying to reach the end with lots of building materials for the castle. You give them to the master builder, he builds the castle parts you need and toss it downstream back to the village, where a nice spot is ready to do some castle building.

Your inventory has very limited space, so you’ll be constantly struggling with it. Should you take a risk and toss that herb or food in order to bring one more iron sand? That’s the type of decision you’ll be making all the time and it adds some difficulty to the whole thing. It doesn’t end there. Building materials are not all made equal. Each of the 5 materials come in 3 varying degrees of quality: regular, good and perfect. This is important because the demons will be constantly attacking your castle and the quality of the materials you use have an impact on how sturdy the construction is. Only parts built entirely of perfect materials will be indestructible.

 

 

When going up the mountain you can choose what trail to take. Easy, mid or hard. The easy trail will only have normal quality materials, mid will have good and sometimes perfect and hard has more perfect and good materials. So you have the monsters, the traps, different items that you can combine, trail difficulties, the companions and different types of materials you should find and bring up to the top to the builders. All of this makes for a very entertaining dungeon crawl experience.

To add to the experience you have the plot itself that helps to give you a sense of progress. As you build this castle, you get to know more about this village, your companions and the demons themselves. It’s nothing extraordinary but the little stories that play out as you interact with the villagers are really nice and dare I say, quite endearing sometimes. It’s all done in this optimistic, lighthearted, whimsical manner that makes for a very soothing game. Speaking of soothing, the graphics are charming and add to the atmosphere perfectly. The characters have this blend of 2D and 3D aspects to them. It works. The music is truly excellent and it shows the producers knew the grinding of going up and down the dungeons works best with relaxing tunes.

Each individual aspect of Shiren 2 is nothing really new and maybe not done inventively or extremely well but when you put everything together it makes for a very excellent game. It took me about 17 hours to complete and I very much enjoyed all of it. It just felt very nice to traverse the dungeons with your friends, specially the walking drawing Mamo, while you gather some building materials, deal with colorful and varied monsters, step right into clearly there traps and at the end of the day, build decorous fortifications against not-really-evil-but-clearly-misguided demons. It’s optimistic, lighthearted and a perfect game to spend the afternoons with.

As it turns out, once you complete the game, a whole new gameplay becomes available. One of the villagers wants to create a monster zoo, so a new dungeon opens up where you can find a special item known as monster pots. Basically they are pokeballs and now you can go on in these monster capture runs and use your captured monsters to fight for you. They gain levels and everything and it plays very differently from the main game, since inside this dungeon you can’t use any weapons. That was a very nice surprise and it gives a lot of replayability. This is a game I would play once a year even without that part.

 

 

 

On a personal note, it took me a long time to play this one. I knew of its existence for years and the visuals always attracted me but forgot all about it for years at a time, for some reason or another never getting in the right mood to play it. Now that I have it’s one of my favorite Nintendo 64 titles. I quite enjoy games with this mood and atmosphere and a dungeon crawl game where you can grind on in a relaxed and lighthearted environment is right up my alley, though it gives me an intense sense of waste and depression when I step out of the game and realize sooner or later, you have to come back to reality, and reality looks particularly uglier and cruel when you step out of the world of Shiren the Wanderer 2: Oni Invasion! Shiren Castle! I even had nightmares the night after I finished the game, which was odd. I can’t remember what they were about other than they were nightmares. This is all particular to my own psyche of course and I very much recommend this game.

Now, on the technical side of things, make sure your video drive is vulkan if you’re using retroarch. I have the original hardware and can compare it side by side when it comes to n64 games. The other drivers give you a very crisp image and for n64 in particular that’s not how you want, since you’ll be looking at the “seams” of the graphics in many parts of the game. The way it looks on CRT with the original console is better since it makes the perfect amount of blending, giving a more uniform look. Maybe if you never played the original stuff you’ll be fine with that very sharp look but since I got so used to how they look in old TVs that it really bothers me when it’s sharp and crisp.

All that said, I still don’t feel I was able to capture how nice of an experience it was for me to play this game. Shiren 2 is filled with quiet moments where you just stop there for a moment and enjoy the fact you're in a quiet place and that is all there is to it. It's a colorful, immersive little world and I've grown very fond of it. I guess the only way to find out if you'll like this is to try it out for yourself.