It's been easy to forget with these last couple of console generation transitions as the underlying architectures are standardized and game design itself overall has increasingly matured, but it much more often used to be the case that it was in a system's twilight years that you would see some of its most unconventional releases, ones put out towards the tail end of their platform's viability in an effort to capitalize on the audience one last time and stave off the impending budget increases of the next generation. It probably goes without saying to those who have been playing games long enough that the PS1 and PS2 in particular were perhaps the biggest examples of this trend, a testament to their mammoth install bases enabling healthy retirement years. In the case of the latter, hang around the retro gaming Internet long enough and you'll likely hear at least one of two people wax nostalgic about cult classics such as perhaps Chulip, Devil Summoner 2, and Yakuza 1 and 2, games that may have generally been released in a more timely manner in their native territory, yet are sublimely offbeat in the exact way that typifies the best post-gen releases. It probably won't surprise you to hear that Japan in particular was littered with such latecomers in those years, many of them forever unlocalized, and among those is, apparently, Doraemon 3: Makai no Dungeon, a game I recently discovered by way of a Japanese speedrunning event that takes so, so many pages from Shiren the Wanderer's book that you would be forgiven for mistaking it as an elaborate romhack of Chunsoft's seminal roguelike series.
If you've played a Shiren the Wanderer game, especially the original SNES game, in many ways, you might as well have already played this game. Semi-top-down viewpoint? Check. Turn-based dungeon exploration and combat? Check. Hunger? Check. Item throwing? Check. Shopkeepers that block the exit when you pick something up or eat it until you pay for it? Check. The list goes on and on. The difficulty is markedly gentler in an effort to make the mechanics and gameplay loop more approachable to Doraemon's target audience, but in both look (particularly its UI) and feel, this is a game that demonstrates a remarkably fluent understanding of its "inspiration" and what makes that game work on a moment-to-moment. I might even go so far as to say alarmingly fluent given Doraemon, beloved as he is in Japan and throughout Asia, isn't exactly the sort of license that always seems to inspire such considered games.
And yet considered this game is, as "competent" is perhaps how I would best describe the effort on a whole. I'm definitely not the game's target audience for a multitude of reasons, especially as someone with only a passing familiarity with the franchise as a whole, but while it remains compelling in a "by god, they actually managed to make a Shiren clone and give it some meat" sort of way, there's certainly still little things I find myself missing that I know I can always rely on a good Shiren to have. The quiet texture to be found in the dialogue and worldbuilding. The long and short-term decision making due to limited inventory space (Doraemon 3's is so generous, if a limit exists, I have yet to run into it). Personable AI companions that can be either a boon or liability. There is depth to this game that's revealing itself the longer I play it, particularly in the form of an extended base-building that actually makes you scores during runs matter in a way they never truly do in the old Shiren games. But, predictably, such twists are slower to reveal themselves than I'd like, which can make individual runs between major plot points feel especially repetitive, even when bracing for the sort of grind that's somewhat innate to games of this ilk.
Nevertheless, this game specifically seems to have a reputation for indeed being fairly content-rich online, so I'll likely continue to soldier on for at least a little while to see what other tricks it might have up its sleeve. It's not the first Shiren clone I've played, or even the first one I've played within this past year (I played a good amount of the Sakura Taisen DS roguelike while staying in Osaka), but the level of competence on display really does surprise me, which in some ways makes it the more novel offering to me and for now, that's enough for me to keep going.
That said, as my first real introduction to these characters beyond maybe reading a chapter or two of the manga years and years ago, the main kids are all lame goobers and Doraemon should some find some better friends to spoil with his fancy technology. 😤