hey, woah now, I have a healt-
oh. you’re talking them. uh, carry on.
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Starting to think that Shiren SUCKS……
I think HP regen ruins it. My gameplay loop is regen carrying me through 15-20 minutes of easy as hell dungeoning + annoying item management, then it gets interesting for a few floors and I die
The easy / hard ratio is screwed up. Worse, the easy floors are not a learning experience: Shiren is all about items and I’m using none of them because I don’t need to and it’d just be a waste
I’m sure this would become less annoying as I’d put a few dozens more hours into the game. Fast forward to 3 months in a future where I’ve done nothing but playing Shiren and all I’m doing is micromanaging dozens of pots and making sure I’m carrying a sleep wand to counter the demon tigers on Floor 23 and I dunno man. Don’t think I want this in my life TBH
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I am playing Otogi, I have done half of the missions although I did only get some secrets.
After replaying some missions, I understand that what makes it difficult, as well as more compelling, is to play to obtain the various secret weapons/accessories and so on… Then the challenge and the level of engagement are much higher than just “surviving” a mission
Other notes: the art is really nice and even if the game is technically dated, it holds up well because of it… and it looks bleaker/more nightmarish because of the older graphics.
I am enjoying quite a lot the gimmicky bosses, for example the huge flying centipede, which I treated as much more difficult than it was… I was fixated in hitting it three times, and he was getting faster at each hit (after the second hit it was too fast for me), while at some point, after two hits in, I going around the level to get some powerups and the boss just decided to flee the arena, satisfied to have looked into the protagonist’s soul. It was quite cool and unexpected.
The water spirit fight in the volcano was also quite nice, at the beginning I was getting crazy pursuing it, while eventually I discovered that it was enough to spam fire magic to get rid of it. Going around to find secrets made the stage more interesting, though.
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Which Shiren is this one?
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Yeah I had this same realization going back to Shiren from Brogue. Shiren doesn’t really respect your time.
Or put another way, to enjoy Shiren, you need to both enjoy mindless routine (or be enough of a roguelike beginner to not find it that mindless) and not be tilted by sudden deaths (which involves maintaining a growth mindset, which can be harder for experts who may feel they barely learned anything from a given run)
I still think it’s probably the best introductory traditional roguelike. Especially because of the fantastic artwork, and because the main dungeon difficulty level is tuned to challenge beginners and make incremental progress satisfying. But is it worth playing more than one Shiren or bothering with any of the postgame, I dunno
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yeah, imo Shiren is on the list of 16 bit Japanese games that, had they been localized in their time, would’ve been objectively very good and inventive, but as a consequence of instead only having been localized circa the DS have always had a somewhat artificially positive reputation in the west – it’s good, but by its time, there were (mostly) better contemporaries
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I think this applies to all of them. I was going through 5 here, I’ve played 1 and a few spinoffs extensively before
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i think the original Shiren is a perfect game. i remember enjoying the DS version because it was more meat on a game with strong bones, but it did feel like all the extra postgame superhard dungeons tipped the balance toward using the main dungeon as a farming & grinding run to actually get to do the hard stuff. It just doesn’t ramp up much until you’re over halfway through and drops are absurdly generous. Dont even need to wait-heal if i have a half dozen chiropractic pots at any given moment
In the SFC release Table Mountain is difficult from the jump and youre always using every tool to survive, enemies are much harder drops are much less balanced and the meta progression requires a lot of investment (e.g. to properly unlock meat & the cooler pots you have to deal with their respective sidequests over many runs, and complete their dungeons – which are more gimmick/puzzle based than strictly difficulty fucks). Its more “unfair” in a way that is like… extremely key to the roguelike genre lol
Also the original has a better Shiren sprite he looks a little more serious and less cutesy
I think as far as post Shiren 1 mystery dungeon games go the other best one ive played is Torneko: The Last Hope, which feels like a comfortable midpoint. Unlocking dungeons and item gathering to power yourself up fits the structure + character better. And like, its Torneko!! Who doesn’t love that big guy
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Watching this happen has been incredible I must say.
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Even from a raw horniness perspective I feel like that lady is a big downgrade from 2B. Have gamers standards really slipped so low? gooning induced brain damage
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I’ve thought about this a lot…I personally feel like, at least for me, the appeal of the structure of a traditional roguelike, especially regarding permadeath and so on, is that it tends to eliminate the need for farming items or grinding. Like, it makes the game more arcadey—Pac-Man or Galaga or whatnot have permadeath too, if you think about it. A game like Rogue, Brogue, or NetHack has a similar kind of rhythm; when you die, you just try again if you’re in the mood like putting in another quarter, and it puts the focus more on what’s happening in the moment during play than some kind of long term slog to victory. You know that, at least in theory, in all three of those games you can start a new game and just win, straight-out.
When I tried the first Shiren, I eventually got tired of it before finishing because I realized I probably had to grind up items across several runs to have a realistic chance of winning, and I also knew that if I just did that a lot I could probably win easily, but it would be a boring chore (at least to me). I love that in Brogue or NetHack every playthrough feels really unique and a lot of skilled play is being light on your feet and adapting to the current circumstances. Carrying anything progression-related over between runs will tend to diminish that, I think, just in terms of the overall impact it makes on the game design.
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Yeah if you are going to make an otherwise challenging game easier with grinding there needs to be at least be a soft cap on the benefits of more grinding. Shiren does not have that across runs, your sword/shield just get linearly stronger with more upgrades.
But for what’s it’s worth:
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the main dungeon in Shiren 1 is 99% winnable from a fresh save file (not even unlocking all items, let alone carrying upgraded stuff across runs), and the most interesting postgame dungeons don’t allow bringing any items in from previous runs. So I don’t consider this one of the biggest problems with Shiren 1.
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Many roguelikes have a version of this problem by overly rewarding grinding within a single run. Which Shiren at least knows to avoid to some degree, because there is food, a steps-per-floor maximum and limits on walking floors backwards. But Shiren still does not disincentivize within-run grinding nearly as hard as Brogue.
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i don’t think shiren starts to really sing until every item you pick up might kill you and the monster tables are spicy from floor 2 instead of from floor 24, and that really only happens in “postgame” dungeons-- the folks who are like “the main dungeon is really just the tutorial” are correct.* the real fuck you dungeons make most of the last 15 years of “hit” “indie” “roguelikes” seem like a baby’s toy imo
i do find the completing side quests/unlocking dungeons phases of the games very charming but i can see how you might get to the point where it’s 25 mindless floors and then 4 interesting ones pretty quickly if you’re just doing the “main” dungeon
*shiren 1 sfc definitely an exception and maybe there are some others, i’ve only played like three of the things
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Yeah, I recognize that maybe I just didn’t play it for long enough to get that skilled. I haven’t played any of the postgame stuff and maybe I would find it more fun.
I think I would have had an easier time sticking with it, though, if each playthrough didn’t feel as much like a rehash of the last one to me. I thought it had beautiful graphics and music which definitely helped, but once I’d spent a lot of time with them I was really craving some greater variation in the mechanics from run-to-run. I guess like, I do feel like having any mechanic where you can preserve items across runs, and especially grind them up over time, does kind of constrain how much variety you might be inclined to present across runs as a game designer, whether or not the player takes advantage of this—like, in Brogue, no piece of gear has much worth in isolation, it’s all about synergies, so you wouldn’t necessarily even want a piece of gear from your last run. That adds so much interest to the gameplay for me; there’s this fascinating tension in Brogue with like, how long you think you can last in the early game before using your enchant scrolls, how good your chances are of getting X accessory by Y floor, whether your current crop of gear is sufficient to make such-and-such build type viable even if it’s less than ideal, if you can cleverly adapt an item that isn’t traditionally used to support a certain build, etc. etc. All of that is greatly facilitated by having your gear be totally specific to the current run, I think—it means that it’s okay if all the items are kind of hyperspecific and niche, as long as the game gives you a reasonable amount of choice.
Of course, maybe the cool postgame dungeons you’re talking about in Shiren 1 are more like this. I think that might kind of shore up this argument though if so.
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it’s always been more or less like this i think… like, ever looked at some horrible dudes selection of horny wallpapers and rather than any kind of explicit ick just felt how remarkably bland it all is?
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The Stella Blade discourse is so weird because so much of it seems to be someone posting a GIF of shiny butt cheeks clapping paired with talking about how it is pushing forward the artistry of the medium and how everyone should support this game so that we might get to experience greater representation of sexy ladies in gaming. Like they are some underrepresented minority group and not in like 90% of games from Japan.
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yeah ive seen this style in a lot of peoples like, 3d sculpts and concept arts and whatevers on artstation. i guess the fact that its jumped from someone’s portfolio to an actual game would be something except there are actually already a lot of games featuring said styles on steam. and they all arent very good.
its whatever that 3rd person game with the big ass (literally) robot all over again that i heard people talk about and looks terrible. harley or whatever. looks like just human legs attached to an unreal engine mannequin. terrible design
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and just like that game stella blade’s impact will probably just be the same, as background footage for a youtube video while someone reads you a wikipedia article.
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started playing sephonie, i’m enjoying it, i think i have a soft spot for both 3d games that try to step back from endless controller escalation (in this case running, wall running, double jump, air dash are all the same button and it works well) and also for games about something other than their main mechanics… idk it’s weird to think that “3d platformer” felt like one of the eternal Game Templates that could be used to support any kind of content not so long ago, and then i guess “action rpg” became the new basic template, which all those games seemed to morph into as soon as they started including more combat abilities than that one oddly vestigial mario punch. most attempts to revive the format seem to feel a lot more obligation to put the platformer part front and center as a result and are either self described collectathons (who wanted this??) or really technical movement things, so it’s been nice to play something that feels more like it’s drawing on the “background structuring mechanism” tradition while still having some toylike mvmt. however i’ve only played about 2 hours and am already starting to get some of that “now do it through Fifteen Increasingly Difficult Levels” premonition so maybe that’ll change
i still haven’t played any of the anodynes, i was glad to get to dip into their style in what feels like a more selfconsciously “minor”, focused project, as someone who can be slightly allergic to masterpieces. enjoying the writing, the creature models, there’s a long abstracted 3d space showcase taking the form of an extended disquisition of fish, which i loved. i will see how far i can get. excited to do a compare and contrast with Corn Kidz once that’s on switch this month
also in general: does anybody else find themselves pushing the l stick down by accident a lot in moments of High Octane Gameplay… i remember just finding this distracting w breath of the wild but its a lot funnier here bc it activates Photo Mode and so i get to see a nice frozen little camera view of my guy plummeting into the void of whatever jump i’d been trying to make
edit: i saw people complaining abt the controls, i like them but in general prefer slight castlevania style turgidness to really hyper bouncy responsiveness so ymmv)
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Checked out the Stellar Blade Demo. It’s clearly influenced by Nier Automata in terms of premise and butts, but the gameplay is actually more a loot-light Soulslike. There are little camps you sit at that respawn enemies and the moment-to-moment combat is quite slow a la Souls. It just looks flashy despite being sluggish. The general presentation is quite misleading as you are not agile, you’re often glued to the floor, and the devs are stumbling a bit. Some things feel very stiff and awkward in such a way I think some might mistake this for ‘challenging’.
When to dodge or block is not made very clear by enemy attacks. Dodging feels like it should be the go-to option but your ‘just-dodge’ slowdown only work for the current attack in a combo and dodging attacks in sequence is harder than blocking them in sequence. The result is you’re sometimes punished for dodging correctly. The game seems to want you to block for the most part and only dodge unblockables or combo finishers. The ‘combat assist’ mode basically makes each enemy attack a mini QTE where it straight up reveals what should or shouldn’t be a block or dodge. Very hard to intuit it otherwise except through trial and error. The game also has an auto lock-on feature that kept not auto-locking on or was very picky about the circumstances for it.
It also doesn’t help that environments can be quite dark and lack contrast making it hard to see what is and isn’t important. Enemy silhouettes (particularly smaller ones) are just messy bristling testicle monsters, so it often isn’t clear what is an attack when a very thin or lumpy appendage whips out. Getting surrounded is normal in action games like Bayonetta but the trade off is your situational awareness is heightened by good audio feedback and enemies off camera not attacking as often. As in Souls, getting surrounded here just means you’ll get buffeted from all sides and dodging/blocking become useless.
Voice acting, characters, plot are laughably bad/light, almost to the extent it becomes an enjoyable PS3-era kusoge. It even has a primarily brown palette (at least in this first level). It’s pretty telling how little Sony has going for exclusives that they’re pushing this game so hard. It has real launch title energy.
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