Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery of Serpentcoil Island is, at its core, the same game in 2024 that Fushigi no Dungeon 2: Fūrai no Shiren was when the sub-series debuted in Japan in 1995. Of course, there have been some diversions and changes to the formula over the years—for example, the second mainline entry, Shiren the Wanderer 2: Shiren’s Castle and the Oni Invasion, was designed around the idea of collecting progressively better materials to build a castle that could defend against the titular Oni invasion, and the franchise has bounced back-and-forth between sprites and polygons for a couple of decades now. What Shiren is at its center, though, is a dungeon-crawling roguelike—the dungeon-crawling roguelike, really—and its latest entry is the most refined and approachable title in the series to date.
The timing couldn’t be any better, either, but first, some background. When Chunsoft introduced the Mystery Dungeon series back in 1993, with Torneko no Daibōken: Fushigi no Dungeon (aka Taloon’s Great Adventure), it was meant to introduce the concept of roguelikes to a larger audience, by softening some of the brutal, unforgiving structures the sickos who had played Rogue and Fatal Labyrinth in the years before the term “roguelike” even existed were used to. Chunsoft, the originators and developers of the first five Dragon Quest games, had just struck out on their own in a post-DQ world, but wanted to be sure that people cared to even investigate what this Mystery Dungeon thing was all about. So, they got permission from Enix and series creator Yuji Horii to use Dragon Quest characters, recruited DQ mainstays Koichi Sugiyama for the score and Akira Toriyama for the art, then chose the shopkeeper Torneko from Dragon Quest IV (or Taloon, in the North American NES release) as the one doing the dungeon crawling. The idea there was that his whole deal was about collecting goods and treasure, not saving the world or anything so grand, and that would be his excuse for traversing this dungeon again and again—one players familiar with Dragon Quest IV but unfamiliar with roguelikes would pick up on and understand.
The inaugural Mystery Dungeon was a hit, selling over 800,000 copies despite being a Japanese exclusive in a niche genre that had only recently acquired a name. And it helped broaden the appeal of roguelikes and show that it was possible to make an “easy” game in the genre that was still unforgiving. You see, games patterned exactly after Rogue carried the same rules as that 1980 title: you would die, and that was game over. Rogue featured permadeath, and each dungeon instance would occur just the one time. You’d make a new character after dying, and they would traverse a new procedurally-generated dungeon, with absolutely nothing from the previous playthrough(s) retained in the process. Just like when Chunsoft came up with the idea of Dragon Quest as a game that would help broaden the appeal of role-playing games by streamlining them a bit and in thoughtful ways, they now felt it necessary to do the same for roguelikes.
An “easy” roguelike, however, is still capable of being brutal. Torneko wouldn’t lose everything when he died. Just almost everything. He kept half of his gold, as is the Dragon Quest style, and eventually had a vault built where he could store a few items in order to begin future runs of the dungeon with a key weapon, shield, accessory, whatever. In order to store something in the vault, though, you needed specific items to protect it upon your death, and you could only bring in a limited number of carryover items per new run, as well. So you couldn’t build an entire arsenal up over a bunch of runs and then bring it all at once. Easier isn’t the same as easy.
Items you found in the dungeon needed to be identified, either through magic or scrolls designed for that purpose, or else you might not know what their benefit was. Or, even worse, the item or equipment might be cursed, and detrimental to you: that sword might look tempting when all you’ve got is a fist for punching slimes, but when it turns out that it’s carrying a -3 rating and you can’t unequip it until you can remove the curse from it, well… it might be a long dungeon run. Or a short one. As every step you took or action taken was a turn unto itself, it was easy to get cornered by multiple monsters who would literally take turns beating you to death, or to be inflicted with a status effect that’d hasten your demise, or be trapped in a monster cave with no way out. You not only had to make it through 30 floors of a dungeon in order to secure the item the king was looking for, but you then had to make it 30 floors back out, and it was possible to fall through the floor to lower levels than 30 that were even more difficult than that one. If Rogue was unforgiving, Fushigi no Dungeon granted only the slightest mercies in comparison, but those were enough to begin the move towards making the budding genre less niche than it had been to that point.
The Mystery Dungeon games have been primarily known in North America for their licensed subseries, which is fitting given that’s how the series began. There was the partnership with Enix and Dragon Quest (that eventually became a partnership with Square Enix post-merger). There’s the Square-specific subseries, Chocoby’s Mystery Dungeon, that has seen a few of its releases overseas, and the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon titles are yet another crossover. The Mystery Dungeon subseries that (Spike) Chunsoft can entirely call its own, though, is that of Shiren the Wanderer, and it’s the one they can experiment with the most given they don’t have to worry about it fitting into any preexisting universe with rules they don’t control, and is the least-geared towards a younger audience (that is hopefully getting hooked on roguelikes for life by way of chocobos and Pokémon).
Refinement and tweaks around the margins to introduce some new wrinkles, some new quality of life features, and more reasons for more people to bother to try—that’s what’s changed over nearly three decades for Shiren the Wanderer, but as you can see, that’s all part of the original mission of the Mystery Dungeon franchise. The real difference now is that, in the over three decades since Chunsoft first launched Mystery Dungeon, roguelikes have not only branched out, but mechanics from those games are found all over the place, even in non-roguelikes or dungeon crawlers.
Calling FromSoftware’s Souls games roguelikes is a stretch, but the design that makes any encounter potentially a fatal one for you if you don’t take it seriously enough or approach it the correct way, that penalizes you by stripping you of your hard-earned experience, is at the least roguelike-adjacent. Games like Hades combined roguelikes and dungeon-crawling with a significant narrative arc that even utilized the structure of the genre for its story progression. The deckbuilding roguelike Slay the Spire has stolen thousands of hours from people you love. Metroid-inspired games have taken as liberally from roguelike structures as they have Souls games in the last decade—anyone who has browsed Steam’s storefront in the last few years knows just how many titles have the word “roguelike” or “roguelite” in its description now. Look at the variety of genres in this “best roguelikes” list! Hell, one of the sleeper hits of 2024 so far is Balatro, which is self-described as “the poker roguelike.” In its first 10 days after release, this indie game sold half-a-million copies: Chunsoft somehow does not get enough credit for all the wheels they put into motion with their “what if established genre was just a little more approachable?” plan—please remember that this is also the studio that helped define and popularize adventure games and visual novels, the latter of which they called “sound novels.”
Which is all a long way of saying that Shiren the Wanderer has never been better set up for success than in 2024. The very first Shiren released in 1995 for the Super Famicom, when the world was already obsessed with the Playstation, and before roguelikes were that well known as a genre. Spin-offs released in Japan alone on Nintendo’s portables. The first mainline sequel was an N64-exclusive once again only in Japan. Its console spin-off game, Shiren the Wanderer Gaiden: Asuka the Swordswoman, released on the Dreamcast in 2002 in Japan, after the system had already been discontinued by Sega, which had already moved into third-party publishing. The original Shiren was remade for the DS and published by Sega abroad as the first international release, and the third mainline entry, titled simply Shiren the Wanderer, released internationally on the Wii to a blue ocean audience that admittedly didn’t know what they had available to them. Shiren the Wanderer 4 was yet another Japan-exclusive title, and while that game’s DS sequel would eventually become an international release, it was first on the Playstation Vita in 2016—another Dreamcast situation, really—and then released on the Switch and Windows in 2020, a full decade after its original DS launch. It did so surprisingly well on Switch, however, despite it being a sprite-based re-release of a re-release, that Spike Chunsoft decided to make The Mystery of Serpentcoil Island as a system exclusive shortly after, giving the world its first completely new Shiren title in 13 years.
And it’s an incredible one. As I said, it’s the most refined and approachable Shiren to date. Dedicated series veterans might be able to get through the initial 31-floor dungeon with speed and relative ease, but for most players it will take time and experience to learn the ins and outs of the game, its items, its rules, and to build the muscle memory needed to see your way through the scenarios you’ll come across. You can send items back to the initial warehouse by way of a special pot or a merchant who makes that run—both instances being random—either putting an item you don’t need on this run in or attempting to salvage something vital from a doomed run before it ends. The game’s entirety is not revealed to you from the outset: you unlock new special items or features as you go by completing some optional story bits, which will be marked in the areas they’re occurring in with an exclamation point. For instance, if you want a magical staff that turns monsters into peach buns that you can then eat to turn into that monster yourself for the duration of a floor, you need to complete the quest with the Heavenly Maiden. Which will in turn also help you to unlock Asuka the swordswoman as a traveling companion in the dungeons—she really loves peach buns, and won’t be able to rest until she’s got access to a steady stream of them.
Companions add a completely different element to your dungeon-crawling experience, as they abide by the same turn-based, level-resetting-upon-death rules that you do, but having one (or two) with you at a time can change the flow of a dungeon run. Just like monsters can gang up on you by surrounding you on the invisible grid that is a Shiren dungeon floor, companions can flank enemies with you and take turns attacking them, speeding up the process and causing you to lose far fewer hit points per encounter. Which also means less time spent working up an appetite through your actions, which requires you eat onigiri so you don’t run out of energy and quickly waste away and die. It’s a more streamlined experience, but one you only get by completing the side missions and character-focused portions of the game as you go through repeated runs of the main dungeon.
The companions also have different attributes: Asuka is like a stronger version of Shiren, and you can toss her a sword and shield from your inventory to see how true that statement is. You can get a pirate friend who delivers critical hits, though, or a pirate friend who is also a pig who throws rocks that always do 20 damage but have excellent, varied range, or a third pirate friend—this island-based game does love pirates—who excels at throwing various status effect or curative grasses at you, or eating them for herself. There’s also a ninja with enhanced action speed and the ability to jump a square back after an attack without taking up an action: you can put together quite the crew on a given run, and if any of them die and it’s early enough in the dungeon, you might even find replacements later on. For someone struggling to complete the dungeon on their own, companions might make all the difference in the world.
Upon dying yourself, you can attempt to rescue that version of you by retracing your steps without any of the stops in towns or narrative points: you can successfully do this three times on a single run before you’re out of rescue attempts. You can also post a need for a rescue on an online board in-game, which is appealing to other players since doing so awards rescue points, which can be utilized for upgrades and protections on future rescues: I spent as much time going out on rescues to help strangers and build up points so I could attempt rescues of myself and whatever kickass equipment I had on when I died, only with a 20-level head start and twice the action speed to ensure success.
And that first 31-floor dungeon really is just the beginning: it’s the main dungeon, and much of the game’s narrative points and side stories branch off from there, but as you’ll see once you complete it, it’s also essentially an enormous tutorial spanning potentially a few dozen hours that teaches you the basics of how Mystery Dungeon works. The new dungeons that open up postgame have their own kinds of rules, and are far less forgiving. Now it’s not just some items that need to be identified, but all of them. Curses are now an ongoing concern, both in equipment you pick up and as something that can be inflicted upon you by enemies and traps. Keeping both your equipment strength and your levels high becomes paramount, as tougher monsters arrive in larger numbers sooner. Some of the dungeons have themes, like the food-heavy sumo one, or the dungeon that requires you test out every kind of item you come across to find out just what it is or does—given the existence of cursed equipment, and that some grasses are for improving your stats and others will make you go blind or poison you, that one is geared toward experts.
There’s something for everyone in The Mystery of Serpentcoil Island, though, which is the point. The main dungeon is just plain fun for series veterans even if it’s easier than some past Shirens, full of plenty of personality and character and its own little quirks and oddities to familiarize yourself with. And it still offers plenty of challenge for newcomers while also being welcoming and open to the idea of this being someone’s first true roguelike experience. The fact that it’s come out at a time when roguelikes are the least-niche they’ve ever been is great news for Shiren—which no longer finds itself in the situation it did in 2008 with the Wii—and anyone who decides to give it a whirl. If you have even a passing interest in roguelikes, then give the new Shiren a shot: it could open new worlds for you, in this genre and others.
Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.