Mystery Dungeon is a long-running and popular Japanese series, and US gamers will be treated to one of its earliest installments very soon in the form of Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer. Shiren the Wanderer will release on the DS this March, so we chatted with the game's producer, Keith Dwyer, about this new version of Shiren, the advantages and disadvantages of licensed characters, and how a man can go about getting a talking weasel.



GameSpy: Shiren the Wanderer is a DS remake of the Super NES game. What changes are we going to see?
Keith Dwyer, Producer: Due to the platform change, the developers thought long and hard about the game and what changes could be made to make the game better. Over the last ten years the technology has improved such that the DS can show more colors and over a larger area; and overall allow more be done visually for a game. For gameplay though, monsters actually evolve into a fourth "type" as they level up. There are new dungeons with some great tweaks to gameplay (like the all-trap dungeon), and the mechanics of the previous dungeons have been tweaked so that it's not just a carbon copy of the SNES version.

GameSpy: Why an original character instead of a license-focused game?
Keith Dwyer: As a designer, with a licensed character, you're limited by the constraints of what that character is normally capable of or how that character or world works. With an original character you're free to come up with new definitions.
GameSpy: What can fans of the games look forward to in Shiren?
Keith Dwyer: They'll find all the great little quirks and idiosyncrasies of the Shiren series with some new little twists on how everything is tied together. Overall, it's challenging with a neat storyline.