Roguelikes Are Effing Awesome

Holy shit, it's been a month since I last posted here. I guess that's what I get for working a lot and not playing too many games.

I beat Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness, and for my birthday last week I got Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer for the DS. Since I didn't post anything about either game yet, I will compare and contrast them both.

I will start by saying this: I'm glad I played the Pokemon version first. I enjoyed it, quite a bit in fact, and will probably get Blue Rescue Team soon, but Shiren is better.

Anyway, so Pokemon Mystery Dungeon and Shiren the Wanderer are both RPGs based on the ancient computer based game called Rogue (which makes them roguelikes). When your character moves, your allies and everything else on the floor of the dungeon your on moves as well. In other words, its not necessarily real time because nothing else will act until you do. Basically, each time you move, attack, use an item, or cast a spell or whatever, you spend your turn, and then the enemies will all do the same: either they will move towards you, run away from you, attack, cast a spell, etc. and so on. And from what I gather on the ol' Internets, roguelikes aren't very popular here in America.

I can sort of see why not, because they are balls hard and sometimes can seem unfair. Shiren in particular is brutal, because when you die (which will happen, quite a bit), you lose all of your items, money, and (here's the kicker) experience points. That's right. All of them. Back to level 1 for you. However, you can store items and (in Pokemons case) money in warehouses in between dungeon runs.

I guess now is a good time to point out the differences between the two games, since I've already begun to. In Pokemon, when you die, you lose all your items and money, but retain your experience. In Shiren, you lose everything. In Pokemon, you can save money in between missions, but when you die in Shiren, you lose all of it, because you can't store it anywhere. In Pokemon, you can store hundreds of items (eventually) in your warehouse, but in Shiren, you can store probably no more than 15 items in each warehouse (they vary in size). In Pokemon, there are like 40 different dungeons with various numbers of floors in them (usually between 10 and 25), whereas Shiren's entire game is a single, 30ish floor dungeon. Did I mention that when you die in Shiren, you go all the way back to the town before the first floor? In Pokemon, when you die, you only need to restart the particular dungeon you were on over. Also, in Pokemon, you can keep earning extra carrying space for items (I had six pages worth of storage when I stopped playing, and I think you can get more), whereas in Shiren, you get two pages max. (Although the game has Jars, which let you pack more items inside them, so you aren't completely fucked). Also, in Shiren, you don't always know what item you pick up, because it could be anything from a Katana +5 to a cursed (which means you can't unequip it) Cudgel -7. Pokemon doesn't do that, however.

You are probably thinking that Shiren sounds extremely restrictive and difficult, while Pokemon is more balanced and easy, and you are partially correct. As you may recall from the beginning of this post, I said that Shiren is the better game. (Again, though, they are both fun as hell.) The main reason why is that when I finally do beat Shiren, I will feel like I accomplished something a hell of a lot more impressive then when I beat Pokemon, since Shiren is so much harder. I've read reviews of both games, and in a post on Jeremy Parish's website GameSpite, he put it perfectly: "...you never once feel like you've been screwed over by the game. When you die in Shiren, it's your own fault: you didn't play it right, you could have avoided failure. But no. You blew it." This is probably the truest statement about the game: every time I have ever died has been the result of me being too greedy, too ambitious, or just plain stupid. (The only possible exception to this rule is Monster Houses, which are basically rooms packed full of viciously powerful monsters, but really, you should be prepared for those with a Scroll of Sleep or Scroll of Confusion, anyway.)

In Pokemon, you get stronger by leveling your characters up, but you always have to worry about type advantages (like any good Pokemon game does). For example, my starting character was Torchic, a fire Pokemon. So anytime I saw a water Pokemon, I would let my partner, Bulbasaur (a grass type), take care of it, since he had type advantage over them. Conversely, when I saw grass type, bug type, or steel type Pokemon, I would send a quick Flamethrower their way, and watch as they died (usually) instantly.

In Shiren, you can level up by gaining experience, but since you can always lose that, you should level up your weapons. Right now, I am leveling up a Master Sword (no relation to Zelda, of course) and a Armor Ward. I found them both with no bonus attributes, and now, they are Master Sword +36 and Armor Ward +23, and also both cannot be rusted by enemies or traps (when a monster or trap tries to rust a weapon, it takes a couple of bonus attribute points off, and those are fucking precious, so I used a Plating Scroll on these weapons ASAP). They aren't complete yet, but boy, are they precious. If I died with these weapons, I would probably be pissed off for days.

...Thank god for a feature present in both games: the ability to rescue other Pokemon/Wanderers. Since Chunsoft made both games, they share the ability to let people go out and save other people who have died in dungeons who don't want to lose their precious items. I never used the feature in Pokemon, but I've used it once in Shiren, and although I had to wait a day and a half before someone finally rescued me, it was worth it: I was able to save my Happy Armband, which gives you experience points while simply walking (as you could guess, this is a pretty goddamn awesome item). So you better believe that if I die while toting my precious Master Sword +36 and Armor Ward +23, that I will be sending out a request and waiting as long as it takes to get those items back.

Shit. I should explain how you level up your weapons in Shiren. You can either pay a blacksmith 1000 gitans (the money in Shiren) to level up your weapon, or use items called Air Bless Scrolls and Earth Bless Scrolls, which level up weapons and shields, respectively. For my two items, I've used both. Both of my weapons are sitting in a warehouse in Mountaintop Town, though, so I don't risk losing them because I'm not paying attention or something.

Jesus, I'll have to cut this post off. I haven't even discussed half of the things I want to talk about yet, and it's already like ten pages long. More to come.