Really fun take on the mystery dungeon formula that has you gathering materials during a dungeon run to build a castle for the town shiren has found himself in. It manages to pack a lot of interesting tension into that concept: do you stockpile loads of materials at the expense of more immediately useful items? Do you take the higher quality materials that take up more inventory space, or risk the castle getting damaged in an attack by taking multiple lower quality materials? And that's on top of all the materials having effects that can get you out of a pinch if you use them up! It's a lot more forgiving that the other Shiren titles and you can expect to clear most of your runs, the real issue is, did you clear it well enough to make progress on the castle? This aspect makes it quite a good intro to the series as you won't be completely failing runs nearly as often (given that in other shiren games the main game is over once you've completed a run).

The game honestly feels a little ahead of it's time, insofar as it more closely resembles a more modern "rogue-lite" game with it's multi run progression than it's rougelike contemporaries.

I played the fan translation and despite being overly literal in some places the game's humour still shines through and most of it's jokes landed for me. It's that very silly, often slightly slapstick, style of humour that you found in a lot of games of the era and for the most part it makes playing through the dialogue scenes quite charming.

The graphics are suprisingly nice as well, the 3d environments have that classic nostalgic N64 look to them and I found a lot of the game very soothing to look at. The music is by the Dragon Quest guy though which means there aren't really many standout tracks, maybe one or two I actually liked (pretty normal for DQ music).

My only real complaint is how fiddly the inventory management is, having to put everything it pots to increase how much you can carry.

Really glad to have given this a shot!