Shiren 5 is the latest iteration of the the Japanese roguelike dungeon crawler franchise known as Mystery Dungeon. A classic style roguelike dungeon crawl, Shiren 5 is an extremely elegant game on nearly every level, keeping the spirit of classic Rogue but boiling away any and all bloated stats or unnecessary items.
The Mystery Dungeon franchise is the bedrock of the Japanese roguelike dungeon crawler. Almost every Japanese roguelike owes something to the design conventions established by this franchise (Elona and One Way Heroics for instance). Just to see 20 years of Japanese iteration on a typically western genre is worth the price of admission alone.
I draw these distinctions because the game really is that different from the western roguelike. Stats are boiled down to Atk and Def. There are no character classes. No magic system. Status effects have real gamey impacts and cannot be resisted outside of immunity gear (For instance a paralyzed enemy will never move again unless acted on by someone else. This can be used to block off hallways among other things.). Much of the game is using these powers with clear, board game style rules to manipulate fights and get ahead. Unlike many other roguelikes, Shiren tends to get comparatively weaker as he levels, mostly in that enemy power levels and gimmicks will always outpace his growth in stats, so the late game will always rely on item trickery over combat. Knowing when to explore for more loot versus when to start dashing for the stairs is an important skill. Endgame tier enemies get utterly broken abilities such as being able to attack you from anywhere on the map sight unseen or being able to control you into using your items randomly just by sight, and no amount of stats can outplay those. That said, the game will not get that rough on you starting out. Shiren 5 opens with a story dungeon that, despite being almost a lengthy tutorial, remains fully featured. You have allies, good level variety, several towns, and even a throwdown against a boss or two at the end and a good ending. You can even, with a bit of elbow grease, keep your gear between runs and continually upgrade it. Not normal for roguelikes and it won't carry you through most post game dungeons, but it gives you a way to scale the story dungeon difficulty down or experiment with item combos and enemies before entering the higher stakes post game dungeons. There is even a considerably long (and terribly paced but thankfully optional) series of tutorial dungeons demonstrating the game's mechanics. The polish is wonderful too. You can pull open a knowledge base of any item or enemy you have seen before, and if you are in a dungeon where items are unidentified, you can use this as a checklist against the items you have positively identified or just "named" from your deductions.
Not everything is perfect. Since this is the fifth game in the franchise, the developers have insisted on some CREATIVITY and this manifests in the night phases. Certain dungeons cycle from day to night. When this shift happens, the dungeon is wiped clean of monsters and the night enemies spawn. At night, you can't see and the monsters are practically immune to normal attacks and can almost always kill you in one hit. They don't see very well and they attack each other as much as they do you, but unfortunately in MD rules, a monster that kills something levels up. Your only defense are magic abilities that you can equip that can only be cast once per floor, which can typically kill the night enemies in one hit but can't be cast during the day. It's a terrible, tedious system that renders so much of the normal play useless and subjects you to 5 minutes of status messages about monsters attacking each other at the opposite ends of the map. Mercifully most post game dungeons do not have this mechanic.
Shiren 5 really feels like a game system being presented to you in countless ways in the post game. You can pretty easily get a classic roguelike style 99F no items identified dungeon with no night phases (and with a bit of grinding you can get one that includes night if you're insane.) but there are many other dungeons with different gimmicks. Hunger drains in real time, you can use traps on enemies, you can befriend enemies, you can't level, enemies drop items but the map doesn't. If you enjoy the core Shiren gameplay, Shiren 5 presents it to you in so many different ways almost every imaginable twist is accounted for.
Unfortunately some of this post game nonsense is dreadfully tedious. Now, make no mistake, if you just want to play a roguelike you can clear the story and jump straight into a pure 99F no items identified no night mode classic experience and just throw yourself at that for hundreds of hours until you beat it like your misspent youth playing Nethack. However, if you want to see everything and, even worse, if you want to complete all the cheevos, you are facing some nearly insulting tedium, as in collecting several sets of dragon balls, manually leveling every weapon through gimmick scroll reuse engines. If you are playing this game for completion you are going to have a bad time. That said, as a roguelike, it's still phenomenal. The western roguelikes are complicated and crazy where Shiren is elegant and clever. If you are looking for a take on roguelikes you might not have seen before or just want a really solid, polished system, you can't go wrong with Shiren 5.
