Fushigi no Dungeon: Fuurai no Shiren GB2: Sabaku no Majou, translated as Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer: Demon Castle of the Desert, is a roguelike game developed and published by Chunsoft, released back in 6/19/2001. The game follows Shiren the Wanderer, and his talking weasel Koppa. The game was also remade on the DS. It was also only released in Japan, and information is scarce about this game, with whatever out there likely being in Japanese. Luckily, there was 1 RTA run I was able to find of this game, which helped immensely with general strategy.

It's shit. And I don't mean due to a lack of effort, I mean this game is really hard to manipulate luck. The dungeon generation has a separate seed from general RNG, and only advances when needed. So dungeon patterns can only be manipulated by delaying the entry to the dungeon, and since the seed only advances when needed, that means I am manipulating the entire dungeon from the start, rather than being able to manipulate each floor separately. General RNG is also self contained for each dungeon floor, meaning actions in a previous floor will not affect the RNG in the next floor. And you can also expect that, surprise surprise, general RNG also only advances when needed. Thus it's often hard/takes time to manipulate favorable outcomes, and sometimes it's just faster to just accept less favorable outcomes like misses. I also don't really understand how the RNG works in general (it's two separate 32 bit seeds for the Gameboy, these devs really went overboard here), so for testing dungeons, I have to manually test a ton of dungeon seeds until I find one with a decent (and eventually just survivable) outcome. I also realized something; while manipulating for stairs next to me with needed items/enemies (for boss fights) would be fastest, it would take an insane amount of time to find (if possible), and would end of being a little less entertaining than the seeds chosen for this movie, due to the lack of actually playing around enemies and such, along with a long wait before actually getting into the dungeon, so I guess I can consider this slightly a speed/entertainment(/sanity) tradeoff.

I am not kidding you there is an Easter Island rock and it has a password system attached. It so happens that this game decided to have some Easter Island rock in some house that gives items based on some passwords you can give it. How does one obtain these passwords? Some are reportedly in the game, one would be in a Strategy Guide, but the vast majority would be obtained by cards that were packaged with promotional Shiren GB2 potato chips. No I'm not joking they had promotional Shiren GB2 potato chips and they slapped cards with passwords on them. Not like it matters so much anyways. This system can only be used once per dungeon visit. So this effectively limits use of this system for 4 times max, 3 of which are used in this movie. The first time gets a wand which transforms an enemy into a Shiren clone, which other enemies can attack, and the one who defeats this clone gets "leveled up." This is useful for leveling up some enemies which give a ton of exp leveled up (and thus a ton of levels). The second usage just gets some OP Sword, not much to say about this. The third usage gets some strange meat... I sure wonder how this will be useful ;)

The first dungeon of the game happens to just be a tutorial essentially. Run to the stairs, where the RNG is replaced with annoying tutorial textboxes. However, given the obscurity of this game, this is rather nice to figure out and understand the movement, along with other mechanics. Movement is best described as a ping pong table. You can hold B to go fast, but in this faster state you can't stop/turn until you hit a wall or an intersection (or an item or trap on the floor). This leads to rather interesting movement optimization, and sometimes extra steps are taken just due to the mechanics of going fast forcing me to take them. Should also note if you want to keep going the direction you were zooming towards after getting stopped by some item/trap/intersection, you can press another button to re-apply the input. Soon, I also get to understand the general mechanics of text. It's actually rather simple: when text prints, the game doesn't poll input (so you see lag frames), and once the game starts polling input, it waits for 1 frame of no input at all before accepting an A/B/Dpad press to close a textbox. Somewhat annoying as you can't just get auto-fire to handle textboxes... and oh there's a lot of cutscenes in this game, I probably should mention that eh?

You might however notice for the first room the ping pong movement I mentioned doesn't seem to apply? And when I get to town, it doesn't apply either? Well, this ping pong movement is only enforced when in the dungeon (the first room I'm in is technically before the dungeon proper, and the main town isn't a dungeon obviously), outside of a dungeon you can change directions at any time in a dash.

Stairs are next to me. I just dash to them.

Stairs are to the right of me, a simple dash towards them.

Some enemies are blocking the path to the stairs. This is a good time to bring up a nice mechanic with the Start button. The Start button essentially allows me to "aim" my attacks. And if I happen to be next to an enemy, it automatically locks on to said enemy, nice! After the first rat is defeated, I take a few extra steps on my way to the stairs, this to manipulate the enemy pattern to be more favorable towards me, and thus only fight 1 more enemy to get to the stairs rather than 2 more.

Also, a funny thing when entering Floor 4, you might notice a white spot in the transition screen. This is a minor graphical glitch that occurs due to the game keeping the timer interrupt enabled during its check for VRAM accessibility. If the timer interrupt fires after the check passes but before the tile is written, it could cause the tile to be written at a time when VRAM is locked, and it will keep the tile from before.

Yet another dash to the stairs.

This is an interesting floor. I'm too weak to fight the enemies in this floor, but when running towards the stairs I will be hit by them a couple times. I do some movement which takes more steps going towards the stairs, but this lets me get hit 1 less time, which lets me survive reaching the stairs.

Another interesting floor. I run in a circle in the beginning area so the enemies move away from the stairs, then I can safely get to the stairs without fighting any enemies.

go2stairs

boop stairs

I do some movement to manipulate the magician thing to face me while also having it not attacking me. I then proceed to fire off some Shiren clone wand at the magician? I let the green blob attack the Shiren clone so it "levels up." This thing pretty much kills me instantly, so I need something to kill it before it can kill me. Conveniently, there are 2 scrolls that are able to do so. Only 1 is needed for this specific instance, but I will be doing this technique again in the next dungeon, so I might as well grab the other one. The blob is killed, and I gain 12 levels from it for some reason? With these levels, I can now proceed to the next floor.

nice stairs

A little bit of a trip, but yet another no enemies in the way of the stairs.

I get hit on the way to the stairs, but I can shrug it off and dash over to the stairs.

This is an interesting floor. I need a sleep item for the boss, but the closest one here is in this room. It also happens to be past the stairs, and requires me to fight through 3 enemies. Still, isn't that bad as the levels make it so I take out two of the enemies in one hit, and one with two hits. After grabbing the item and fighting through the enemies, I can proceed to the stairs.

An enemy tries to attack me while I dash to the floor, but it happens to miss. A bit amusing.

This seems like a typical dash to the stairs without any enemies. But if I take the least amount of steps, I get blocked by the red guard. To avoid this guard, I take an extra step at the start so it moves out of the way when I pass by it.

I take an extra step here going towards the stairs due to the annoying ping pong mechanics. I also "step in place" (press A+B) to advance enemy positions so I can get to the stairs without being hit.

This is quite a nice example of ping ponging to the right spot; going straight left forces an extra step to get to the pathway, but going down+left then up+left happens to land right at the pathway. I take out an archer, pick up a sword on my way, and dash to the stairs.

I spawn right next to a ton of enemies. This isn't particularly good, but the stairs are rather close and the enemies don't block me outright from reaching them, so I just dash to the stairs while enemies attack me as I go.

beep boop stairs climbed

I take 2 slow steps on this floor to save 2 steps overall. It would be faster movement wise to just take the extra steps, but doing so would wake up an archer I pass by, and I don't want to do that.

This boos fight is a bit anti-climatic. I just equip the sword I got a little while ago, then use the sleep scroll I got. This makes the boss go to sleep long enough where I can do enough attacks to KO it. Which is pretty good considering this boss 2HKOs me even with all my levels.

I do the same trick as I did last dungeon to jump up some levels. I also snagged a double kill while I was at it, nice.

(insert dash to stairs joke)

I get throw towards a wall while dashing towards the stairs, this isn't particularly fast, but this only counts as 1 step in terms of advancing enemy states, and gives me some distance aways from that magician. I do a step in place before reaching the next enemy, so I can get the first hit off it (and just KO it right away). The monkey doesn't really care about me, so I can dash to the stairs easily from here.

Some enemies are in the way of the stairs, and while I could avoid them by taking a longer path towards the stairs, it is a bit slower than just KOing the enemies.

More enemies I have to deal with to get to the stairs, and there isn't really a way around it. I kill the magician too due to its tendency to throw me to the wall with its magic.

Yet another dash to stairs filled with enemies. These blue things in particular are quite nasty; they'll cast a spell which won't let you hit them, so I need to KO them first so they can't do so.

slash slash oh I've climbed up the stairs

hi minotaur thing can't talk got to take these stairs

Some ghost nicely leaves me alone to my dash to the stairs.

I need to conserve my health for the next room, so I take my time to kill the enemy here and take some extra steps before proceeding to the next floor.

The enemies aren't very nice here, but I get to the stairs with just 1 HP remaining while also grabbing a wand on the way.

Due to my low health, I use the wand I just grabbed to get by the enemies. The first usage makes the blue fire go to sleep, and the next use makes the next blue fire fly up? Yep, this wand's effect is random; the wand can cause confusion, sleep, or yeet the enemy to some other spot. My health is also still quite low, so I take my time to use a healing item (I don't know when this was obtained, some story thing?) before going towards the next floor.

A dash to the stairs with some blue wizard taking me to fairly low health.

I really shouldn't survive this floor. I have two enemy in the way of the stairs, and I need all the wand uses left for the boss fight. Seems hopeless? Not quite, I can back up behind some sword then proceed to attack the enemy nearby me. The backing up manipulates the enemy to miss its attack, so I can proceed to knock it out without taking damage myself. I still have 1 more enemy to defeat, and it can cast a nasty spell that causes my attacks to fail. To get around this, I take advantage of an interesting quirk items have: I can throw items at enemies! I do happen to have an old sword which throwing deals enough damage so the next attack KOs, so this is perfect! I'm also forced to take a step down so I don't just miss when trying to attack the enemy, but minor overall I guess.

the stairs are right next to me, ba dum tsh

stairs to dash but backwards

A dash with a single enemy attack on me.

This floor has a lot of enemies between me and the stairs. I can't take them on, and I can't just slide past them. What do I do? Well, I do have a freebie with my Shiren clone wand, and enemies target the Shiren clone rather than Shiren himself. So I use that to pose a distraction for the enemies while I slip by to the stairs.

This fight is a bit similar to the last fight, but I need to do some manipulation on the cheese. I go down to the corner and attack the boss with my random rand. It causes some turns of confusion which makes him stuck for a while. The boss eventually gets out, so I get to a better position to fight him and fire off the wand again. This causes some turns of sleep. Once he wakes up, I need to use the wand again. But it has 0 uses, right? Well, remember when I said you can throw items? You can do that with wands too, and it will inflict its effect even with 0 uses left! Assuming it doesn't miss anyways. This miss chance is actually interesting anyways, since this causes an RNG advancement before the random effect is done, so I get a potentially different effect compared to just using the wand typically. This happens to be another round of sleep, which is enough to finish off the boss.

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Samsara: Judging.

Samsara: Accepting to Vault.

feos: Pub.

feos: Changed emu version from 2.6 to 2.6.1 because 2.6 detects this game (and some others) as a zip, which was fixed in 2.6.1. If you really want to run it in 2.6, put the ROM is an actual archive and load it that way.