Once again, a Shiren the Wanderer game has been fan-translated, so I thought it'd be worth covering, like I did with Asuka Gaiden almost exactly a year ago. Especially since I recently got the disappointing news that the translation for the first Game Boy entry in the series is on indefinite hold. I really want to see how such a complex game pans out on such low-powered host hardware! It also helps that I played a lot of this once it came out last week, finishing the main story dungeon in a couple of days.
Unfortunately, I'll have to start the review like the game does: with a negative. One of the first things you'll see upon starting the game is probably the reason why this one never got an official translation: some absolutely horrific racist caricatures of black people. This game takes a break from the series' usual old-timey Japan setting in favour of a tropical island (and, in a rare bit of male character fanservice, Shiren gets a very skimpy little outfit for the occasion, too.) Luckily, other than the way they're drawn, the locals all talk and mostly act like normal people and not stereotypical "savage natives". Except for the short scene where they think Shiren and Koppa are monsters and try to burn them at the stake.
It's really a shame that the game is soiled by the presence of these character designs, as in every other respect, it's great. It plays as you'd expect from the finest series of roguelikes there is, including the series' staple of improving the towns you pass through on your journey by helping and building relationships with the people living in them, and stuff like the in-dungeon day/night cycle wherein the nights have their own monsters that can only be killed with limited-use spells. Plus, once you complete the main dungeon, there's also the traditional wealth of bonus dungeons.
So far I've seen the monster cave, which is an old-fashioned 99 floor dungeon that doesn't allow outside items, and most of the items in there are unidentified until you use them, and the Two-Strike dungeon, which has its own special rule: any creature (including you) with more than one HP will be reduced to one HP if they take damage, and will be killed if they take damage at one HP. This makes for a fast and addictive game, especially since you still heal a hp by stepping away from an enemy once. You just have to avoid getting surrounded, or by momentarily forgetting the rules and making a silly mistake.
As well as the game itself, there's also an enjoyable little story, which actually has an evil villain, which feels like a departure from the series' norm, which usually sees the dungeons as forces of nature that have to be traversed to obtain some mysterious treasure that'll solve some other problem. Unfortunaley, I can't really go in to any more detail than that, since the plot does have a few twists and deceitful characters that'd be spoiled by any more information than what I've given.
I'm sorry to say that the racist NPCs make it very difficult to recommend The Eye of God and the Devil's Navel. In every other respect, it's an excellent game that stands well alongside its seriesmates as the pinnacle of roguelikes as a genre, plus I did really enjoy the plot, PLUS it's a fantranslation, and I always want it to be known that fantranslators are pillars of our community and their work is always values. But the NPC designs are a big, undeniable problem, and if you're like me, you're going to be playing this on a PS Vita anyway, so you might as well play that console's port of the fifth game in the series, The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate instead.
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