Mystery Dungeon Franchise Wiki:Projects (Shiren 5 Vita Page of Youth)

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Project: Shiren 5 Vita
Proposal: Cleanup
Proposee: Jubilee
Date: February 14, 2025
Priority: Low

is a bonus dungeon in Shiren 5 focusing on the Nixer Scroll and monster licenses. You cannot take items, Gitan, or allies in, but you can request rescue up to 3 times and you keep the items you have on hand if you win. The dungeon is daytime only and the initial goal floor is 29 F. After first victory, the goal floor becomes 50 F (not 99 F) and stays there permanently.

Gaining Access

This dungeon is available from the Dungeon Center in Nekomaneki Village. Access is not restricted; you can play it as soon as you can reach the Dungeon Center.

Unique Features

  • You can only find 2 different scrolls normally, both of which are pre-identified for you.
    • You find about the same number of scrolls as usual, and in the same ways, but not the same diversity.
    • ~95% of the scrolls you'll find will be Nixer Scrolls.
    • All the rest will be Fixer Scrolls, and only then at deeper depths.
    • You can obtain Blank Scrolls via monster licenses—more on this below—but they aren't found on the floor, in shops, or dropped by monsters.
  • There are only a handful of common bracelets available and they are pre-identified for you.
  • The dungeon appears to only have common swords and shields, and possibly with less frequency than normal.
  • Synthesis Pots appear to have been deliberately omitted or at least made much less common to make crafting on the fly harder. (But Mixer monsters are available on some floors.)
  • The tilesets used differ from baseline, starting with the "pond" tileset (all regular walls are water) then moving on to the "volcano" tileset (with exploding magma tiles).

Final Reward

Each time you beat the dungeon, you get a few screens with Koppa acting woozy due to all the "strange scrolls lying around" and you're given a Lucky Pot, which is rare at best elsewhere. Having the Lucky Pot in your inventory apparently gives you good luck, though it's not entirely clear what that means or how specifically it changes gameplay, if at all. (Best information so far—needs confirmation: having a Lucky Pot in your inventory gives you a chance to have an item in your main inventory blessed when you change floors, and, a chance to have a pot in your inventory increase in size by 1 up to a maximize of size 5 when you change floors. This can actually be a bad thing, e.g. if you're trying to farm Fever Pots and keep them as small as possible. So far, it seems that an Unlucky Pot can curse items in your inventory, but it doesn't seem to be able to shrink pots, which again could be super helpful for Fever Pots. See the Fever Pot page in the Crafting section for more info.)

Farming Opportunities

It's easy to farm items out of this dungeon, given you can generate Blank Scrolls fairly regularly and use them as Escape Scrolls. (See Strategies below for info on how to do this.) There are a handful of items worth farming out too, such as Angel Seed, Cheery Grass, and Fever Pots can also appear. But there are likely better places to farm all of these items. (See the Fever Pots page for how to farm Fever Pots.)

Scrolls in general aren't worth farming, because once you've read every scroll at least once, it's probably faster to just farm Points Traps from (e.g.) Lost Well then buy Blank Scrolls from the Points Shop. But if you ever did want to accumulate a whole ton of Nixer Scrolls, this is definitely the place. Alternatively, if you're sorely strapped for points, you can generate Blank Scrolls here without too much trouble, but again, it's probably faster to just go farming for points in Lost Well or other dungeons that let you take uber gear in.

One thing you could farm here much more easily than in any other location is monster licenses. They sell for a pitiful 100 Gitan, so is there any reason to do so? Not much, but I can think of two possibilities:

  • After you've farmed out your favorite monster licenses from this dungeon, you could take them into other dungeons that let you take items in and control the monsters of your choice. E.g. maybe you could save up a single 5-space blessed Preservation Pot with the 5 most awful monsters and convert them to allies at will. (Which licenses would I try to save? Dragons, Tanks, Folys, Muddy monsters? Not sure.) OTOH, dungeons that let you take items in don't present much challenge once you've crafted uber gear and collected plenty of emergency supplies.
  • This is completely unconfirmed speculation with likely no basis in reality. But this is just the sort of thing that Shiren might do, so it's worth checking out and updating this wiki. Harvest specific monster licenses from this dungeon, then replicate them in Fever Pots if you need more of them. Then take them into dungeons that let you take items in, along with your standard uber gear + emergency supplies. Then throw the monster license at a monster to convert it into that monster??? (Does this work??? Odds are the answer is no, but this is precisely how monster meat worked in Shiren 1, so it's worth a shot.) Then use Glorious and Unlucky staves to level up/down the monster to taste. Then kill said monster to flesh it out in your monster book. This would be particularly helpful to flesh out night monsters, if it worked.

Strategies

The note before entering this dungeon says to use the "Complicated Scroll". There is no "Complicated Scroll" in the game, though it seems obvious this refers to the Nixer Scroll. (This is presumably just a bug showing an old name for the scroll that wasn't updated everywhere consistently throughout the game. Shiren 5 has several text or translation bugs like this but few bugs of other kinds. But game crashes are possible, so back up that super valuable run!) The Nixer Scroll is a bit more elaborate than some scrolls so could be "complicated" in that way, and it may also be used in the Facebook relationship sense, as in, Shiren has an "it's complicated" relationship with monsters.

Given the relative difficulty of crafting on the fly in this dungeon, you'll probably need to rely on the Nixer Scroll and monster licenses to win. Fortunately, they are quite powerful and perhaps underappreciated, and demonstrating their utility may have been the point of this dungeon. OTOH, if not managed well, you can rely too heavily on monster allies and start to fall behind the power curve, which may have been why the designers chose to cap this dungeon at 50F.

This dungeon will basically shower you with Nixer Scrolls, especially early on. When read, the Nixer Scroll has a chance to turn one unfriendly monster immediately adjacent to you into a monster license. If that fails, the monster will still disappear and you will lose half your hit points. Either way, the Nixer Scroll by itself can never be fatal and always eliminates one monster immediately adjacent to you, albeit without giving you experience points. Don't use it when you're surrounded by monsters, but it's a great way to get out of jams with individual, powerful monsters. More info about the Nixer Scroll:

  • If you were to use it with multiple unfriendly monsters around you, it's unknown if you can control which monster is targeted by facing it, but it's worth a shot.
  • If you read it with no unfriendly monsters near you, it gives some amusing output about how even practicing for a declaration of love is embarrassing, but otherwise has no effect.
  • It has no effect on friendly monsters, not even those adjacent to you.
  • It will definitely fail if the target monster is asleep, and it may fail if the target monster has other status ailments.
  • When the declaration of love fails, the game appears to round down the damage done, aka rounding up the HP you have afterwards. E.g., if you had 3 HP when the spell fails, you should have 2 HP afterwards.
    • BUT, this may be an illusion! It's possible the damage done is rounded up, but then you also heal with the passing of time, making it look like the damage was rounded down. So, there's a chance that a failed declaration of love could kill you if you only had 1 HP to begin with. This needs more testing.
    • There's good circumstantial evidence that having a Nixer Scroll failure when you had 1 HP to begin with would be fatal, as this would be consistent with many other game elements. E.g., a small explosion trap halves your HP but kills you if you had 1 HP to begin with. A large explosion trap reduces your HP to 1 but kills you if you had 1 HP to begin with. The Perilous rune can drop a monster's HP to 1 but you still keep the monster if it was already at 1 HP. So it wouldn't be surprising if a Nixer Scroll failure also killed you when you were at 1 HP. But Shiren is full of special cases and other inconsistencies, so it needs more testing.

Of course, the main, documented benefit of the Nixer Scroll is its ability to create monster licenses. Save up a bunch of Nixer Scrolls until you're on a floor that has a monster you would like as an ally. There is no perfect answer as to which monsters to choose as allies. One option is to consider monsters that have dangerous special attacks, such as Swordsmen or Slimes. Another option is to choose monsters that can travel where you can't normally travel, such as water walking monsters, flying monsters, or wall clipping monsters. (Why target them? Because you may not be able to kill them yourself easily, so you might as well have them as allies since you're not getting the full benefit of the experience for killing them anyway.) Or, if you're struggling to survive at your current depth, consider making an ally of any strong monster on the floor. Regardless, always keep a few Nixer Scrolls on hand as emergency supplies, as they can take out any single monster adjacent to you.

And yet another benefit of monster licenses and thus indirectly a benefit of the Nixer Scroll as well is that monster licenses can degrade into Blank Scrolls, which are of course super valuable. Thus, it helps to have unlocked the ability to write all possible scrolls before entering this dungeon, so you can use Blank Scrolls for anything you want. If you're in serious danger, pause, take a breath, and think through all the many possibilities Blank Scrolls offer. Remember, writing on them doesn't count as a turn, so you can write the scroll you want and use it before the monsters get their next turn.

Monster licenses only have a chance to degrade to Blank Scrolls if you exit the floor with the monster license in your main inventory, and, if at least one of those monster allies is on the floor you are leaving. Try hard to convert as many monster licenses into Blank Scrolls as fast as possible, by making sure you always have at least one ally of each type alive and well on the floor before you leave. Why? Because the alternative is that you end up with a monster license that becomes useless in a few floors, and they can begin clogging up your inventory very quickly. Worse, they only sell to shops for 100 Gitan. A Blank Scroll is arguably more valuable than even a monster license where that type of monster *does* still appear in the dungeon, and it's certainly a lot more valuable than a monster license where that type of monster *no longer* appears in the dungeon. And remember, the dungeon showers you with more Nixer Scrolls, so you can attempt to make more allies basically any time you want.

(IIRC, monster licenses work for an entire family of monsters. So, a monster license that has become useless on the current floor may become useful again when upgraded members of the same monster family start appearing.)

Besides clogging up your inventory, the other danger with monster licenses is that you may end up relying on them too heavily, whether you mean to or not, and start falling behind the power curve yourself. Make sure you and your equipment level up with reasonable frequency. Monster licenses only function when they are in your main inventory, so you can easily swap a monster between being a foe vs. being an ally simply by putting the monster license into a pot or taking it out again, or by putting it on the floor temporarily. If you find there are no monsters to kill on the current floor, and any foe monsters that do spawn get crushed immediately by your army of ally monsters, it might be time to cull the herd of allies by selective putting 1 or more licenses into pots. But again, make sure to try to turn them into Blank Scrolls by putting them into your main inventory and making sure at least one ally of that type exists on the floor before you use the staircase. (Anecdote: I once had dozens of allies in a great hall monster house. I was trying to spawn more Mixer monsters, to merge more runes and upgrade points onto my main equipment, but every time a Mixer would spawn, it would get immediately crushed by my army of allies. I had to turn my allies on one another to cut down their numbers considerably before I could get enough Mixers to use. That floor also had monsters that dropped Onigiri, so delaying was no problem, and I was able to complete all my mixing before the Winds of Kron started to blow.)

As you have more monster licenses / monster allies, the game really slows down. Beware of trying to play too fast, as the game may not process your input as quickly as you are used to, and you can end up making a critical mistake.

The Gen's Turf bonus dungeon also emphasizes monster licenses, so the tips on that page may also be relevant.

Monsters

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

Open Questions

  • Why is this dungeon called Page of Youth? Is the idea that only young people fall in love, or maybe that only young people make strange confessions of love to monsters? Is the "page" of youth the Nixer Scroll?

Discussion

Solution

Solution comments:
Solution provided by: Jubilee
Project finished on:
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