Editor’s Note: This is a review coupled with a video review. You can watch the video review above, or read a transcript of the video below.

This is Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate. Shiren the Wanderer is actually a spin off of the Mystery Dungeon series, a long running rogue-like RPG series that’s first entry dates all the way back to 1993, with the release of Torneko no Daiboken: Fushigi no Dungeon. Since that games release Chunsoft has split the Mystery Dungeon series into many different franchises, including Dragon Quest, Pokemon, Chocobo, and Shiren.

As I stated before the Mystery Dungeon series is a series of rogue-like games, in which you play an adventurer who must conquer randomly generated dungeons in a turn based combat system. As you progress through the game, you will gather items, weapons, and other gear to help you kill even stronger enemies as you make your way through your adventure.

However if you die, you must restart the game from level 1 with none of the items you were carrying with you. This means that you as a player must learn to play smart when you play a rogue-like, and Shiren isn’t any different.

Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate is actually at least, according to Chunsoft, the fifth game in the Shiren franchise. This is kind of like how Call of Duty 4 was the fourth Call of Duty game if you ignore all the other Call of Duty games that didn’t have numbers in the title.

In the game you play as Shiren, a silent wanderer who seeks adventure where ever he goes. While he doesn’t speak on his own, he does have a traveling companion that follows him around and does the talking and the wise cracking for him: a talking Weasel named Koppa. So basically imagine they were the Japanese equivalent of Jak and Daxter.

As the game begins, Shiren and Koppa wander into a small town and find a young man whose childhood friend has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. As you listen in on his conversation with an elder from the village, they discuss a place called the Tower of Fortune, in order to meet a God who has the power to change anyone’s fate with the cast of his dice. The young man storms off and Shiren follows after him.

From there you will be able to see what Shiren is all about: the player moves around on an invisible grid and must fight to the exit or stairs of each dungeon floor in order to move onto the next stage. While you’re in dungeons, you must worry not only about your health which regenerates as you walk around, but also your hunger meter. If Shiren becomes too hungry, he will begin to take damage that he won’t be able to regenerate.

As I stated before, if you’re HP hits zero you lose and must restart from your last checkpoint. For example, if you have made your way to the Tower of Fate and conquered the first of three dungeons only to die in the second dungeon, you will have credit for finishing the first dungeon. So you don’t need to worry, but you will have to restart the second dungeon and try to find all new gear or return to an older dungeon to gather gear from there.

Shiren also has the ability to require a plethora of followers to aid in him his adventures, each character with their own motivations for traveling and fighting style. Alternatively, Shiren also releases with co-op play which allows you and a friend to work together to take on dungeons in order to finish the game, which is a genuine surprise for a game like this.

I’ve never been much for rogue-like games, but there is something about Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate that kept me coming back for more and had me more and more excited every time I completed a dungeon floor.

At first everything the game has to offer may feel a little overwhelming. I mean to be honest I haven’t seen a game with so many items, rules and scenarios since I started playing Space Station 13. The game helps you along with a training building in the first town that has a whopping 45 training trials for you to finish, allowing you to gain a near perfect understanding of the game before you even enter your first dungeon.

While this review may be a little on the shorter side, let it be known that it’s not the game, it’s the genre, there are only so many ways you can talk about a rogue-like game that’s pretty basic, which is not to say that’s a bad thing, it just is what it is.

To close this out, I just want to say that while I’m new to the Shiren series, playing through this game has made me a fan of the series and I’ll be going back in my free time, what little I have now, to play through the other games as well.

Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate was reviewed on the PS Vita using a digital copy provided by Aksys Games. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here.

The Verdict: 9

The Good:

• Randomly generated dungeons are Mystery Dungeon’s bread and butter, and they do it so well
• The sprite-work is awesome, even as small sprites every character has the ability to express themselves in a way that the player can understand
• The combat is simply, but never feels like it insults your intelligence,
• A MASSIVE amount of items in the game that can really overload you if you’re not prepared
• The soundtrack is as simply as the graphics but it works well with this kind of game
• All around just a simple game that sticks with what Chunsoft know best and delivers a nearly flawless experience

The Bad:

• While the sprites are good, it feels like Chunsoft really skimped out on the character portraits, while certain characters like Koppa don’t have to worry, others feel really out of place.
• Certain rules in the game don’t make sense to me, seriously, no one told me that a monster that does 118 damage was going to show up at night, had I known that, I would’ve ran!