Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island Review

25.02.2024 - 19:13 / thesixthaxis.com

I owe you an apology, mister Shiren the Wanderer, because I wasn’t really familiar with your game before now. Sure, I’ve played a few mystery dungeon games in my time – your Pokémon Mystery Dungeons, and your Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon Every Buddy!, but while I liked them, they never really got their claws into me. Even with my growing urges to play roguelikes, I never found myself a good enough reason to dip into the franchise that started it all until now, with Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island. I’m so happy I did, because it’s my new roguelike obsession, and the game that finally made mystery dungeons click for me.

It wasn’t just about me, though, because a lot of Shiren the Wanderer games haven’t had official English localised releases. We’ve had plenty of the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon spinoffs outside of Japan, but Shiren the Wanderer has been absent for almost a decade (without counting ports and remasters). Thankfully, despite some very loose callbacks and continuity, Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island is a standalone game.

Silent adventurer Shiren and his talking ferret companion Koppa travel to Serpentcoil Island on rumors of ancient pirate treasure, but they soon learn about a devastating drought affecting the land, and a mysterious woman trapped inside a monster that lives at the top of the Serpent mountain.

Getting to that mountain requires navigating 30 floors of randomised mystery dungeons – each one full of unpredictable paths, friends, foes, gear, and items. Runs in Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island won’t take too much time, especially when you’re just learning the ropes. A slip-up and accidental death on floor 5 could take barely 6 minutes, and even wiping out near the middle of the 30 floor gauntlet can happen in barely half an hour. The quickness of these runs is what makes them so addictive, though – in defeat, all I wanted to do was run it back immediately and learn from my mistakes. Losing my gear and levels sucked, but I had accumulated it all so quickly that I knew I could make that magic happen again on another run. And that’s where the game really sinks it’s claws into you.

Of course, it hurt a little too much when I got an extremely lucky item find, only to have an extremely unlucky death. In moments like that, the Online Rescue feature in Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island was a godsend. If you die, you can request help from other online players, and wait at the Rescue menu until someone accepts your request. They then dive into the same dungeon seed you did to get to the location where you died and extract you safely. On a few occasions with early-floor deaths, I was