It began on the Super Famicom, progressing to almost all of Nintendo's and Sony's home and handheld consoles, WonderSwan, Dreamcast, Windows, and mobile devices.

Despite the moderate popularity of the franchise, there have been numerous manga, anime, and novels published under it, whether they are coming from the company's original series, Shiren the Wanderer, or across many crossovers.

Though it is relatively inspired of older roguelike games, like NetHack, the franchise had a few unique gameplay elements that would appear in future titles; one such is rescuing other players online via a generated password.

Since its debut in 1993, the franchise maintains a strong cult following for its challenging yet rewarding difficulty and how it appeals to hardcore RPG fans as a whole.

Other games who are not developed or published by the company but uses the same moniker would also appear throughout the years, namely the Touhou Project series with its spin-offs titled Fushigi no Gensokyo.

An effort has also been made to expand the series' gameplay features, such as adding job systems to some games, and giving each dungeon a different feel and goal.

[4][5] Features distinct to the Shiren the Wanderer series include the "Melding Jar" which allows players to synthesize items and weapons into more powerful ones.

[8] Seiichiro Nagahata, who supervised and planned the development of Shiren the Wanderer DS, explained that the Mystery Dungeon series is all about "tension" and "reasoning".

[9] During the 1990s, the computer role-playing game genre became famous in Japan due to the successful hit of the Dragon Quest series.

Two of the earliest-known attempts were Sega's Fatal Labyrinth and Dragon Crystal, both games released in 1990, but which lacked the depth of a typical computer-based roguelike.

Koichi Nakamura has asked Yuji Horii, scenarist and creator of the Dragon Quest series, about the possibility to add characters and items from the franchise, including Torneko, the merchant appearing in Chunsoft's previous work Dragon Quest IV, only to have the permission accepted soon after.

[13] The company wanted to work on the new features and gameplay mechanics added in NetHack, a variant of Rogue, one of them was being able to steal items from a shopkeeper.

[19] Starting in Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon, some of the more difficult game elements were removed so that it would appeal to "small children and female" players.

[20] Tsunekazu Ishihara has worked previously with Chunsoft with Tetris 2 + Bombliss as the producer, and met Nakamura, who was the game's director.

The game's development started after Nagahata and Tomie approached Ishihara and agreed to work on an easier version of the genre for the mainline Pokémon fans.

[22] The widespread success of the first game helped creating a spin-off series, with it selling over 10 million copies four years after its first titles were released in Japan.

[26][27] Sugiyama made use of East Asian elements for the Shiren the Wanderer series, compared to his more European-styled Dragon Quest compositions, using instruments such as a shakuhachi flute.

[37] The Mystery Dungeon series can be seen as moderately popular in Japan, whereas the overseas community has a smaller following of dedicated fans.

The Shiren the Wanderer series has been both praised and criticized for its difficulty, and generally noted for the uneven quality of the randomly generated levels, or "floors", the games produce.

[43][44] The massively multiplayer online role playing game Final Fantasy XIV added a randomly-generated Deep Dungeon that was inspired by the procedural generation of roguelikes.