The Shiren the Wanderer series is a spin-off of the Mystery Dungeon franchise, a series that has used multiple IPs throughout the years – although the latest two games (as of 2024) have also been Shiren the Wanderer games. These are games about progressing through randomly generated dungeons to achieve a goal, a style of game I personally hate that is often referred to as “roguelike” (with the original Rogue being a direct inspiration for Mystery Dungeon.

In Shiren the Wanderer, you get tasked with building a castle entirely on your own, to help defend a village from regular Oni (Japanese demon) attacks. It’s presented in a humorous way, and throughout the game, some fun characters crop up to help you out (a few even venturing out with you). In order to build a castle, you need to ascend the nearby mountain in order to collect the building supplies, discovering harder routes as you progress.

As you build the castle, the story will progress, with cutscenes and events happening at certain times. Every now and then the Oni will attack the castle, and if you used lower quality parts, you may lose parts of the castle, and need to rebuild. This does mean a lot of repetitive work in order to grind all the resources needed to finish the castle.

Once you do, you get a large final mission as you take the fight to the Oni in order to reach and defeat the final boss, using a limited amount of items you’ve found, and some of your allies to help you out. Combat is simple (you whack an enemy or use arrows, then they all attack before you can attack again), but there’s depth to your equipment, as well as having to keep a hunger meter topped up.

But the game isn’t over when you complete the main story, that’s just one part. After the credits are over, you’re introduced to a new underground dungeon, and a monster zoo – an empty monster zoo. There’s a new item called capture pots, which you throw at enemies to capture them (you can also have them fight alongside you), with your goal to catch-’em-all to get all 161 monsters into the zoo – quite a monumental task. It’s all very much like Pokémon, which is fascinating, as there were later Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games – although not about capturing Pokémon.

Fun

It doesn’t actually seem turn-based, as there’s no waiting for the enemy to think – once you’ve taken a step, the CPU moves almost instantaneously. You’ll only be reminded that Mysterious Dungeon isn’t in ‘real-time’ when you stop moving and see the assorted gribblies playing statues.

N64 Magazine #50.

Remake or remaster?

An officially translated collection would be nice.

Official Ways to get the game

There is no official way to get Shiren the Wanderer 2.