i decided to man up,i armed myself with a handy guide
http://shiren.wetpaint.com/page/Shiren+4and decided to tackle shiren 4 even if the whole thing is in japanese,having to play checking the guide for when i don't recognize one of those stupid japanese letter is annoying and sometimes i keep forgetting some of what the items do and i have to check the list again but overall i am being able to go trough it and was able to reach floor 20 out of 30
problem is... i don't like this very much,i always envisioned this as some great sequel but this really feel more like a rehash,the addition feels barebones and some of them are really annoying,one of the biggest addition is a day/night cycle,when it's day the game plays like normal but when night comes,you can't damage monsters anymore,worse yet,the monster start to attack and kill each other and by shiren rules that means some monster get crazy strong,to complete the trifecta of badness when it's night you can only see one step ahead of you,which translates into easily missing the stairs for the next floor and risking ending up into more monsters or worse yet,getting one shotted by a monster that leveled up and you didn't see,this can be solved by equipping a torch which improve your sight radius but even with a torch you can only still see 2 space ahead instead of 1 so it's still sort of annoying
now i can sort of understand why they did this,this add a lot of tensions because you are dead afraid of running into a monster that's gonna kick your ass,but then they gave shiren special moves that he can only use at night which totaly murders any monster you run into,which kinda defeat the purpose of the system anyway,of course there is a limit to how many special moves you can use but it's pretty big and i don't think i ever ran out of special moves
another incredibly annoying system is the banana one,since the game takes place on a tropical island they replaced the riceballs with banana and to add more flavor to it,they added a system were banana keep's maturing in your inventory (so a green banana becomes a yellow banana and such) the problem is if you leave a banana for too long,it spoils and become rotten,this is EXTREMELY annoying as you have to keep checking your inventory to see if one of your banana is going to spoil soon (tough one neat addition is that when you eat a banana,you get a banana peel that you can leave around and if a monster steps on it he start slipping all over the place
)
the lack of new stuff is what i find most disappointing,most of the monsters are still from the original game even if they have new big colorfull sprites that are so awesome to look at,some of the new one are amusing... there is a serpent monster that for example move in a L fashion (like a knight in chess) and a bunny in a top hat that has the ability to warp everyone in the same spot (very annoying when you are in a big room) most of the items are the same,you still got the same pushing staves,the same confusion scrolls,the same power up herbs (tough at least this makes the game easier to play) it's really hard for me to not think "why i'm not playing the original in english instead of bothering with all this japanese when there is so little new stuff to see?"
