Draft:Shiren 5 2020:The Pinnacle

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Key Parameters
Initial Goal Floor	10F
Final Goal Floor	99F
Day / Night	Day
Bring Items In	No
Take Items Out	Yes
# of Allies	0
# of Rescues	0
Pre-ID'd Items	All? (confirm)
New Items	No
Shops	None? (confirm)
Monster Houses	None? (confirm)
NPCs	None? (confirm)
Spawn Rate	Normal
Winds of Kron	Normal (slow)

Aksys Challenge, known in the PC and Switch rerelease as The Pinnacle, is a bonus dungeon in Shiren 5 focusing on the better part of valor. Virtually every monster can kill you one hit, so you must run away and try to find the stairs. You can't take items or allies into the dungeon, nor can you request rescues, but you can keep the items you have on hand if you win. The dungeon is daytime only and the initial goal floor is 10F. After first victory, the goal floor becomes 99F and stays there permanently.

Gaining Access

You can access this bonus dungeon from the Dungeon Center in Nekomaneki Village. Access is not restricted; you can play as soon as you can reach the Dungeon Center.

Unique Features

This bonus dungeon uses a small subset of the capabilities of the game to create a radically different experience:

• Almost every monster can kill you in a single attack.
• Only the following items appear in the dungeon:
  • Bracelets: Scout Bracelet, Can. Arm Bracelet
  • Scrolls: Navigation Scroll
  • Grasses: Perception Grass, Warp Grass
  • Staves: Swap Staff, Pinning Staff, Knockback Staff, Paralysis Staff
  • Pots: Hide Pot
• Shiren starts with 3 Hide Pots in his inventory
• All items are pre-identified for you
• It's possible that there are more pre-placed items than usual (needs more testing).
  • There are certainly more pre-placed items here than in sparse bonus dungeons.
• There are apparently no shops and no other NPCs (needs more testing)
• There are apparently no monster houses (needs more testing)
• The rooms may have water / ponds in them more commonly than in other places (needs more testing)
• You do not gain experience for killing monsters.
• The dungeon is daytime only.

Final Reward

The final reward from this dungeon is unique and clearly intended to be a secret. The initial goal floor is only 10F, and there are plenty of items you can try to collect to help you exit every floor, so you should probably just go beat this dungeon to experience the unique final reward yourself! Here's the secret, with spoiler protection:

If you want to know the secret, expand this box.

When you beat this dungeon for the first time, you get a unique item that doesn't appear in the Item Book at all! It's called the Aksys Pot (Developer Pot in the PC and Switch versions). It's an open-type pot, not an insert-type pot (if indeed it is a real pot at all, because it doesn't appear in the Item Book and thus is not necessary to complete the Item Book, but it does sort with the normal pots in your inventory). It has a capacity of 1. When you open it, the capacity drops to 0 and you get a lot of text. It's like the Drama Staff or Hilarious Pot, except the text is much longer and there are no character images included. The text is about how the company has great things planned for the next game, so tell all your friends how much you love Shiren, so more people will buy the game and the company will be able to continue making games in this great series.

You definitely get this special reward once if you beat the 10F version of the dungeon. It is not yet known if you get it again if you beat the full 99F version of the dungeon.

Farming Opportunities

Farming in this dungeon is difficult since there are no escape items, meaning that you would have to beat the 99F version to get any item out of the dungeon.

The Scout Bracelet is an excellent item and appears more commonly here than in any other dungeon. Once you beat the 10F version, you can never play the easier goal again. So it is a good idea to collect at least one, and preferably more, Scout Bracelet before you beat this dungeon for the first time. You can then throw this Scout Bracelet into a secret pot to create a new item out of it (hopefully with all good attributes and no bad attributes), so you can buy more new item Scout Bracelets at any time. This is a good way to access Scout Bracelets very early into the game.

If you missed the chance to get Scout Bracelets from this dungeon, you can purchase Scout Bracelets from the Point Shop for 10,000 points. Once you have decent equipment, you can grind for points easily in places like Lost Well or Gorger's Manor.

Strategies

Be strategic and careful about how/when/where you use your items. If you can use 1 item to get 2 more, great, but if you have to use 5 items to get 1, it's very likely not worth it.

Navigation Scrolls can help a lot, but they aren't so common that you can afford to burn them wantonly. The best time to use them is when you start a floor in a tiny room with no exit stairs, as this is likely a dungeon with many small rooms and it may be harder to explore safely.

Be careful about using a Hide Pot to get away from a Pumphantasm, as they just wander randomly rather than leaving the room. If you exit the Hide Pot with any monster right next to you, the monsters will take their turn and kill you. Monsters can't walk over the Hide Pot with you in it, so you could theoretically use this to (e.g.) block an exit (for monsters other than rock phasing monsters such as the Pumphantasm).

Prioritize getting bracelets when you can, at least until you get a Scout Bracelet, as this helps your planning immensely.

Don't forget that most items can be useful both when used directly by Shiren or when thrown at monsters. IIRC, throwing a Hide Pot causes the monster to be sealed in the pot—re-confirm this. Another example is that you can throw the Warp Grass at a monster to send it away rather than eating it to warp away yourself. But of course if you throw an item it can miss.

Expert Badges

[TODO: confirm there are no expert badges.]

Monsters

The types of monsters that can appear in this dungeon have not yet been replicated to this wiki. Here are good external resources:

• https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1C1h9IRPQPLg9g7aE48wlyw8IudHIStawK4mR3kuggto/edit?usp=sharing
• http://seesaawiki.jp/w/shiren5/d/%a5%d5%a5%a1%a5%df%c4%cc%a4%ce%c4%a9%c0%ef%be%f5 (Japanese wiki page for this location)

Open Questions

• Do you get any reward item for beating the longer 99F version of this dungeon?
• Is it possible to kill any monsters or otherwise gain any experience, e.g. using a Knockback Staff on a low-level monster? And if so, does this mean you might be able to actually engage a few monsters now and then and actually gain levels?
• Are there any expert badges?