Finally bought a copy of the original SNES Shiren the Wanderer after a lot of casual runs "elsewhere" for probably over half a decade now. It's an extremely common game here in Japan, so it wasn't at all an issue of supply so much as just finding one that was in decent shape at a respectable price, which this one definitely is.
In any case, diving back into it while I listen to podcasts in the background, as I tend to do, I still find a lot to tremendously admire about it. The minimal writing and sprite art are charming and lovingly crafted. The sound design, as I've written before, is exquisite, its repurposing of Dragon Quest sound effects a brilliant way to introduce Japanese players to the combat and movement system using aural grammar they were very likely to be intimately familiar with. And, most importantly for me, its depth is self-contained. By which I mean, there's plenty of meat to chew on for sure. Just several new runs in, I'm still discovering new items! But the amount of raw stuff to learn in terms of item varieties and systems feels manageable. You can certainly benefit from a guide or a wiki today, but it's by no means essential. The depth comes much less from the sheer volume of content as it does from the extent the items, systems, and characters, friend and foe, can interact with one another using a limited, defined pallette.
In theory, I very much like roguelikes, but I tend to bounce off of a lot of the most popular contemporary ones because they compulsively go for that excess in order to engender that wiki and guide culture, in turn fueling engagement and communities. I won't say it's an invalid approach, but it's also one where, because other people get involved and are documenting and dissecting things, an undercurrent of backseat playing tends to develop in the surrounding culture where if you're not playing the "canonical" optimized way, you're playing it wrong. Maybe the devs themselves aren't actively trying to foster such an exacting mentality, but players being what they are when given a big game with a lot to document, they're prone to trying to make more sense of it than is perhaps healthy in terms of that game's long-term approachability.
Shiren, though, even if it takes you a while to consistently get anywhere with it, I feel like does a better job of helping players grasp the scope of the mechanics and the tools at their disposal a lot faster, which allows you to spend less time just learning those fundamental and more time poking and prodding them, seeing how you can creatively solve different problems as they come up. It's a roguelike where it can just be you and the game (and a podcast, if you're me) and I feel it's much better and more relaxing for it, even if it's still tough as nails.
And if that sounds like your cup of tea and you can't read Japanese, as much as I think this original game still holds up sublimely, 5 on the Vita, Steam, and Switch is available in (slightly wonky) English and it's a brilliant introduction to the grandfather of the console roguelike in its own right, even if it definitely is denser with Stuff than what I prefer out of this series.
Whatever you do, just go play a Shiren. They're worthwhile and very, very unpretentious. 