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I finished the main Table Mountain quest of Shiren the Wanderer DS about two weeks ago, while taking a little break when finishing up another assignment. I don't clearly remember exactly what it was at the moment, but my memories of the battle against Tainted Insect and the ending sequence are crystal clear. It says perhaps too much about my personal priorities.

I left myself a list of notes about what levels I was going through and what happened in them, but most of it before level 30 is was so sparse that I can't make any more sense of them. So, I'm just going to finish off the diary with my general impressions of how to survive the last Table Mountain levels, and my recollection of the battle with the final boss. Aren't you excited? It all starts behind the cut.

25. Table Mountain

This is the last of the "normal" Table Mountain levels, and tends to be very lethal. A level layout I kept running into here was what I call a "spring trap" level, where the rooms aren't connected to each other by tunnels. There is a Spring Trap in each room, so unless you have a good Pickaxe you can use for tunneling, you have to walk repeatedly onto Spring Traps and hope you're eventually catapulted into the room with the exit. Complicating this is a tendency for the more annoying Table Mountain enemies, namely Mecharoids, Hermits, and the various Bells, to show up on this level. The Bells are especially annoying because they resist damage and summon a monster every time you hit them. The key to taking them out is a Knockback Staff, which ignores their damage resistance and sends them flying from you. For whatever reason, the Bells won't register the Knockback as an attack, so you can spam it until they die.

26. Ravine of Illusions

The first and possibly nastiest of the three "trial" levels. The Ravine takes its name from the usual level layout, which is sprawling and open and full of looping areas and open spaces you can't walk over, but that Skull Wizards can happily fire at you across. The level's also infested with Iron Armors that knock away your equipment and Hell Reapers that can move and attack at double speed. The safest way to handle this level is to find the exit promptly and then make a break for it, which usually requires having saved a Scroll of Light for that explicit purpose. If you haven't, then all you can really do is inch along the level's outer walls, hoping to stumble across the exit at the end of the one of the winding pathways. A Staff of Paralysis or Postpone for making various battles a non-issue helps out your survival chances here.

27. Trial of Phantoms

Despite the name, this level always felt like a bit of a breather after 26. There are still Hell Reapers and Skull Wizards about, in addition to the usual selection of Table Mountain jerks, but you're back inside a more "normal" dungeon level. You usually didn't have to hang around long before finding the exit and rushing on to the next level. If you did have to do some exploring, winning battles was usually at least possible without incurring a heavy cost.

28. Dragoncry Trial

Now, this level is another place where you don't want to hang around for long. It's the first level where you begin encountering adult Dragons, and there are usually a lot of Dragon Heads wandering around, too. At this point you're probably going through your Scrolls and Staves more quickly than you're finding new ones, and your healing resources are likely to be running low. You can handle the various attackers more easily with a good Pain-Sharing Staff or just a strong shield, but you should really take the stairs as quickly as possible.

29. Final Trials

Another level with a scary name that came off as a bit of a breather to me. It's basically a typical Table Mountain level, but all of the new monster types introduced in the earlier Trials seem to be able to spawn. Sometimes if you're lucky you'll find some good pieces of loot here, but usually it's just endless resource-sapping fights. Fortunately, every time I ran through here I didn't have to stay long before getting to the exit.

Golden City

Despite the name, there are no real resources to be found here. The gold has been stripped from the city, and all you can do is read the sad history of its downfall on assorted tablets. This is a remarkably effective way of building up the final battle. After so many levels where death was lurking around every corner, heading into a level absolutely devoid of any life felt bizarre and genuinely eerie.

30. Cave Behind the Waterfall

This unassuming name leads to the one-chamber room where you encounter your final battle with the Tainted Insect. How dangerous this fight is depends more on what spawns in the Insect's entourage than anything else. If you get a lot of Hell Reapers and Skull Wizards, you're kind of screwed. I got lucky and got a group that was mostly Madremlas, an enemy whose only special ability is having an attack that inflicts Knockback as per the staff.

Tainted Insect has pretty ridiculous HP and damage output, by Shiren standards. The trick to beating him is knowing that he's not immune to the effects of any Staves, Scrolls, or even Meat. You can turn him into a Mamel and kill him that way to beat the game, or read a Scroll of Confusion to incapacitate the entire room. The tactics I took involved a Staff of Doppleganger I'd carried through almost my entire game, intending to use it on the Insect. This causes a monster to turn into a Fake Shiren that all of the other monsters were compelled to attack until the Fake Shiren died, or reverted back into its original form. After transforming the Tainted Insect into a Fake Shiren, I crawled into my Jar of Hiding and waiting out the carnage.

Since the Insect's entourage was relatively weak, he actually reverted into his true form at one point. I had to play around with a Staff of Switching to get within his firing range, and then transform him again with Doppleganger before crawling back into my Jar. This time the Insect's monsters defeated him, causing themselves to instantly de-spawn. After that, it was a simple matter of moving on to the next area and triggering the impressive ending cutscene.

After you defeat the Tainted Insect in Shiren, there's still a ton of stuff left for you to do. There are special items you have to unlock by doing sidequests, optional dungeons you need to defeat to bring more special items out with you, and a few ueber-dungeons that call for grinding up really high-level equipment. Right now I'm quietly hacking away at the Kitchen God's Shrine, a dungeon I really wanted to play through even before I bought Shiren. The gimmick here is that you can't take in any items (but can take in sidekicks), and start with a Bufu's Cleaver and a Big Riceball. Bufu's Cleaver creates a significant chance of any enemy you defeat with it dropping its Meat, which you can eat to become that monster. Getting through the dungeon calls for strategic use of meat and monster forms, and it's such a blast to play I don't mind that nobody ever rescues you when you die in it.

I might update the diary when I finally clear the Kitchen God's Shrine, but to be honest, this may be the last I write about Shiren for a bit. Oh, I'll still be playing it, of course, but I've got a growing backlog of other games I want to play a little and write about starting this week.

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