I have tried very hard to push through and get, “unstuck” and actually into Shiren 5 - and it worked! But whoa, do I have some problems with this game!
It’s been interesting playing Shiren after having played Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup quite a bit for the last several years especially since they are so philosophically different based on their platforms. Ultimately, Shiren’s new player experience and on-boarding is terrible. The game throws a bunch of systems at you all at once and you need to be fluent in them to make progress. The tutorial dungeons give you information that simply doesn’t apply for so long it doesn’t matter. I was initially all wound up about seals and curses when playing and they just don’t come up until the second half of the dungeon.
This is contrasted to Crawl where for the first six months of the game, I didn’t understand the game’s skill system, and it didn’t hinder my enjoyment of the game. The auto-skill system is turned on by default, you have to go turn it off to get manual skills and while it’s not optimal, I suspect you could collect three runes, get the orb, and win the game without interacting with the skills system in Crawl.
First, I think the digital manual is so insufficient as to be actively misleading. This may be unfair or par for the course with a remake of a remake of a 10 year old Vita game, but there are a lot of mechanics that aren’t explained in the manual.
I feel like Shiren’s on-boarding troubles are ironically compounded by the meta-progression in the game, something that Crawl doesn’t have in any way at all. I couldn’t progress for a while because Jirochi died in the game and I needed to bring him a healing item. But I couldn’t buy a healing item to bring into the dungeon (or I couldn’t figure out where in the village to buy said item). I also got stuck because I couldn’t break pots because I didn’t know I had a cannon arm bracelet equipped over several runs (because I couldn’t identify it).
Speaking of, I still don’t like, or I do not understand the item identification system. Some items are identified on equip, some items are not, and it’s not even clear to the player what the state of the item is. I am not sure if IDs persist across runs or not. New Items you craft all seem to be pre-IDed, but random bracelets don’t seem to be IDed on equip and need a scroll - which are very very rare.
So I’ve come to like Shiren a fair amount, or at least have been playing it quite a bit, but I don’t know if I would recommend it. On one hand, it’s an amazing and interesting rogue-like with all the fun emergent storytelling that the genre is known for with fantastic pixel graphics. On the otherhand, it’s infuriating to learn and you need to be a strange kind of stubborn to overcome what it asks you to do.
Finally, I’m in the top-20 of all English-language speaking Shiren 5 players. One of you needs to one-up me!