After putting in about 11 hours with Shiren the Wanderer over the last few days, I'm left pondering how it might be the video gaming epitome of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of rogue-like structure [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze#Metaphysics] of the game is expertly and cleverly integrated with -- or subtlely modifies -- just about every RPG convention there is, and ends up being a game that truly plays out on both literal and meta-gaming levels. This is because death is not "the end" in Shiren, but the fundamental mechanism of the game itself.
The narrative, for example, foretells of an endless stream of wanderers looking for the pot of gold at the end of the dungeon. Townspeople don't treat the wanderer as theworld-saving hero as much as they do the latest misguided victim, and each re-play is punctuated by new random NPC encounters and permanent global NPC evolution that impacts the development of the avatar differently with each round.
This is the first indication that Shiren very consciously displaces the linear "accumulate and conquer" ego-centrism typical to RPGs. The Shiren avatar is not "The Hero" who will level-up to dominate the static and knowable world placed at his feet like its some kind of Hegelian sandbox. The game instead reverses the relationship between avatar and world by making the ever-shifting dungeon the game dynamic rather than the avatar. It then becomes imperative on the gamer himself to "level-up" his knowledge and understanding of the dungeon dynamics and by gradually learning to play the meta-game that occurs between the life of each iteration of the avatar. In this sense, Shiren is a very adult game of managing resources and apprehending risk. In Shiren, the avatar hero is not God -- randomness is God.
it follows then that the death of the avatar is not simply an interruption in a linear narrative like it would be in Final Fantasy. It is instead at once a learning experience and opportunity to "game the game" in the space between the life and death of the avatar. The whole premise of Shiren is on gamer himself accumulating experience and knowledge of the game across each iteration of his adventure and learning to exploit the "meta game" between life and death. The embodiment of this experience is preserved in the few items of equipment that the player can keep in permanent storage facilities throughout the world. These pieces of equipment keep the next adventure from being a completely blank slate that would too harshly punish the gamer and allows him or her to conceive of the game in terms of multiple instantiations instead of just one. Death is empty in this world unless you make sure to upgrade your sword one additional increment and get it back into storage. It's about permanence and legacy. Shiren is stitched together by the operation of this meta-continuity rather than to narrative continuity that unites most other linear RPGs.
Where Shiren really shines however is in the pacing. For a "turn-based" game there is a lot of tension in every movement. To a certain extent this is because the fatigue system makes every step a consequential balancing act between development, exploration, reward and exhaustion. But it's also because the game is constantly introducing novel challenges that place demands on tactical thinking and inventory management. The gamer may have seen X level 10 times before, but that doesn't mean that one particular instantiation might not end up full of monsters, or that one monster hasn't leveled up to be a powerful "boss" (monsters can level themselves up in Shiren by killing eachother), or that fate finds Shiren stuck in a recursive sandwich with three mobs helplessly beating him to death. No matter how routine a situation is, the gamer is always in a state of preparedness and is imbued with the feeling that taking the easy route now could well make life more difficult (or impossible) later. When you never know when your next lunch might be, every riceball is critical.
This tension carries over into the randomization of the dungeon and its contents. The game introduces heaps of equipment, scrolls, wands, food types, potions and NPC encounters that can have every conceivable effect on the avatar, enemies and the dungeon itself. The result is that encounters very quickly become very puzzle-like, and the gamer has the pleasure of combining and chaining together the resources at hand to get out of otherwise mortal situations. At the same time, they are obliged to remain conscious of the demand formulate and execute these plans as efficiently and parsimoniously as possible or suffer later consequences. This flexibility also extends to the weapon system, wherein the gamer can experiment with a "melding jar" to combine and recombine equipment together to blend the best properties of each together.
The only gameplay criticism fairly leveled at Shiren is in the relatively uncomplicated "granularity" of each dungeon. Rooms are rarely particularly big, only connected by featureless narrow passages, and there isn't much dynamism in the architecture such as little niches, hidden passages, alters, or other features. It would also seem as though some fairly logical and rewarding object interactions have not been included. For example, pulling a monster back to a floor trap won't cause the trap effect to trigger on it (that said, some floor traps, when triggered by the player, will effect monsters in the room). Finally, the user interface could also have used an update. While the DS remake of Shiren is appropriately faithful to the classic SNES original of 1995, there's no good reason that organizing items remains cumbersome, or that the player shouldn't be able to easily scroll through status screens without clicking through multiple nested menus.
All in all, it's tempting to label Shiren as a console game and not your father's Angband [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angband_(computer_game)], but what it lacks design detail it more than makes up with a solid ass kicking. The game is brutal, random, and unforgiving. It is about managing items, making hard decisions, and mastering risk. Diablo, by comparison, looks like a guided tour through a doily factory. Everything that can possibly go wrong will go wrong in Shiren. You'll starve for a lack of food, it'll go rancid, random holes will land you in a monster swarm pit, your weapons will rust, your levels will be drained, or you'll die a few pennies short of affording a rejuvenating nap at the inn. Even the "meta game" isn't sacred territory; all the progress you've accumulated over the last few runs can be completely wiped out if you don't happen to find yourself with a Storage Jar or at the Warehouse before the reaper comes calling. If you ever therefore finish Shiren, you will feel mighty proud. It might also just make you think about death in a slightly different way. Not bad for a 13 year old SNES game.
