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A thread was started by a player who bought Shiren the Wanderer 6, praising the improved UI and overall controls while complaining that old-school mechanics — “item loss” (losing your gear when you die) and no-item-bring-in dungeons — remain completely untouched. This set off a clash between defenders arguing that “the loss mechanic is exactly what creates the fun push-or-retreat dilemma,” and critics countering that an abundance of absurdly overpowered, practically-free-to-exploit monsters has turned the game into a luck-fest. The debate spiraled out into the series’ entire design philosophy. Some posters also noted this entry is the best-selling in the series’ history, which raised the separate question of whether opinions on the mechanics and commercial success necessarily line up.
What people said
But the unnecessary "Heisei-era" leftovers like item loss and no-bring-in dungeons haven't changed one bit.
So many of their abilities are basically free hits — it's a luck-based game at that point.
It's ridiculous there's no free-save option given that.
They're not going to add a system that undermines the whole core of the game like that…
Isn't that just someone who actually prefers Musou-style or hack-and-slash grinders where you steadily level up?
Without it, you'd just push forward until you die — there'd be no decision to make.
That "retreat or push forward" feeling carries straight over to day trading or FX trading.
You should pick that up once the game stops scratching the itch.
Pure dopamine, dopa-dopa.
People who want to reset can just go do that themselves anyway.
If you could revive infinitely on the spot and your revive count got displayed at clear time, people could chase a zero-revive run on their own if they wanted.
The genre needs to drop the "this is just how it's done" dogma and show some flexibility.
That game you just "invented" — where you keep everything even after dying —
already exists, and has for ages: Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, plenty of others.
It's called the role-playing game genre. Never heard of it?
Let him land 20 bare-handed attacks across all 8 directions or something.
At that point just go play a Musou game lol
Minimizing stress to the absolute limit, even at the cost of actual fun, is what Reiwa-era game design is about.
The Showa-era approach was suffering through hardship for a cathartic payoff at the end.
The Reiwa way is "if it's going to hurt, I'd rather skip the fun too."
So what's the title of this wonderful game that's minimized stress down to the absolute limit?
The core fans barely touch bring-in-allowed mode anyway, right?
The level tables are built at the core-system level, so making progress persist there would make it hard to stay consistent with the other modes.
If they actually did that, they'd basically need to build the content of two separate games.
But Shiren 6 is the series' long-awaited comeback, so give it a break already.
Just getting this far was already close to a miracle. This series always gets trampled by bandwagon newcomers the second it gets even a little popular.
Even if there's some relief measure, it doesn't apply to the no-bring-in, 99-floor "Even More Mysterious Dungeon," does it?
Then it's pointless.
Shiren 3 really face-planted on that one.
They advertised it as having an "Anywhere Dungeon" made especially for longtime fans!
But it turned out to literally just mean you could enter the dungeon from anywhere — the despair of realizing it was still a dungeon built around carrying over your level and items…
Whatever you say, it just sounds like someone blaming everyone else after getting swept up in the hype and buying it — and now you're moving the goalposts on top of it.
Next time, maybe do a bit of your own research or put the brakes on your spending.
I played it for the first time in 20 years expecting the problems to be fixed, and I'm floored that literally nothing's changed.
How much longer is this series going to run on Heisei-era specs in the Reiwa era?
That's exactly why it's dying out.
Blaming others for your own failure is how you keep your ego intact, huh.
Seriously, when buying a game you should look into it yourself instead of getting swept up by other people's posts.
Far from dying out — the official announcement says it's the best-selling entry in the series' history. Don't throw a tantrum just because it didn't click for you.
That's only "best-selling" within the Shiren series (lol)
Come brag about sales once it's moving units like Elden Ring, Mr. Niche-Unpopular-Genre lol
By that logic Elden Ring is pathetically unpopular too, compared to GTA or Zelda!
…and that's exactly the point — there are games made for people with all kinds of different tastes, and naturally some of them won't click with you.
That doesn't mean you get to talk about it like it's a flaw in the game — it just isn't for you.
For its intended audience it's genuinely fun, and the parts "necessary for that fun" shouldn't be dumbed down to suit people it wasn't made for.
Do that, and you end up with a game that's fun for absolutely no one.
That's because 3, 4, and 5 didn't sell.
3 through 5 did come out on PlayStation too, you know.
But if so, bump up the item drop rate.
And balance those free-hit-level cheat monsters.
Even watching skilled players stream it, the only move on floors crawling with broken monsters is dive straight down and run.
That right there is proof the gameplay options are too narrow.
> I don't get it
Oh, so you actually do get it — that's the "knowing that you don't know" thing.
Given that a fair number of people can actually clear the no-bring-in runs,
all this amounts to is:
"I personally don't have the skill to clear it using only what I pick up that run and my own judgment,"
and you're calling it a game flaw just because you don't want to admit it's your own lack of skill.
> Even watching skilled players stream it, the only move on floors crawling with broken monsters is dive straight down and run
Even so, 6 is actually an improvement here.
There's a "sumo stance" state now, so depending on your gear and level you can actually trade blows instead of just fleeing.
The previous games, 4 and 5, had a brutal nerf to natural HP regen at high HP —
once your level got high enough, standing still wouldn't heal you at all,
so all you could do was farm the shallow floors, build up your shield, and just run the entire way through the deep floors.
Bluntly put, leveling up actually slowed your regen rate, so there was no point leveling much,
and fighting enemies on the deep floors just drained your HP for nothing — zero reason to engage.
It was literally "nothing but running until you clear floor 99."
Like, Kengou, who knocks your equipment off — he's trivial if you have evasion or presence-sensing, but without it you want to clear his floor as fast as possible.
Are you saying that choice itself shouldn't even exist?
The whole idea of trying to get the dopamine-chasing casual crowd to appreciate the game's fun in the first place is where it goes wrong.
You scatter some flashy bait just to get them to buy the game, let them go "whoaaa, I'm so OP!!!" for a bit, and send them on their way.
After that, you keep things so only the core users get to actually enjoy it.
In other words, the right mindset isn't "welcome them in" — it's "ride it out," the way you'd ride out a natural disaster.
You can save on every single floor, so you're safe even if you mess up.
Seriously?
Can you actually save in that "Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon: Every Buddy!" one?
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Shiren the Wanderer 6 is a flagship title in the Mystery Dungeon-style roguelike genre, and the series has kept “item loss” — losing your items the moment you die once — as a consistent core mechanic since the original game in 1995. While 6 modernized the UI and overall systems, it left this loss mechanic and the no-bring-in dungeons intact, and that’s exactly where the thread’s conflict centers. Defenders frame the “retreat or push forward” dilemma as the very source of roguelike fun, while critics argue that a design unwilling to let players opt out of death-related risk feels outdated for a Reiwa-era user experience. This friction isn’t unique to Shiren the Wanderer — it mirrors a broader design-philosophy split playing out across recent games more generally, over whether to permit consequence-free death-and-retry or to impose a real penalty. Note that the claim of this being “the best-selling entry in the series’ history” was a single remark made within the thread, and this article does not treat it as independently verified. A point readers can easily misread is that criticism of the loss mechanic stems not from “player error” but from “the existence of unreasonably strong monsters that even expert players can’t avoid” — it isn’t simply criticism aimed at beginners.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Hardware/Industry [Geha]) thread “I bought Shiren the Wanderer 6, but….”
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