Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja is a peculiar beast in that most of its weaknesses stem directly from the kind of game it is. A "roguelike RPG," the game prides itself on its hack-and-slash roots, unforgiving nature, and punishing penalties for failure. Why then do people enjoy playing them? Generally it's because of the exciting feeling you get by building your one character up and acquiring better tools and equipment—and it's the distinct lack of this that makes Izuna feel only slightly more than unemployed.
In Izuna you play the titular character, a busty female ninja who is out of work and racking her brain on how to fill the downtime. She stumbles on a boring little village with her band of jobless friends and ends up stealing a revered object of the gods, of course, causing everyone in the village to be rendered essentially catatonic. The only cure? Ninja your way through a series of dungeons and recover orbs that can be used to restore townspeople and your friends to their normal states—opening up new features like item shops, an inn, and a bank along the way.
It's in those very dungeons that nearly all of the gameplay takes place. Izuna's dungeons are floors upon floors of randomly generated top-down terror, with twists and turns and items being documented as you near their proximity on a handy auto-map filling the top screen. Also moving with you are enemies bent on kicking your ass—and kick your ass they will, repeatedly, until you have fought and died enough times to increase your character's level to a point that makes the dungeon manageable.
The main gameplay trick that sets that fighting apart from other games comes in the form of scrolls, little papers with symbols on them that can be attached to various weapons (also found at random in dungeons) to give the weapon different attributes. One might allow you to warp behind your enemy when you use the weapon, or attack with fire affinity, while others allow you more spaces to attach scrolls to. They can also be used separately at the expense of SP to create area effects like a random teleport out of a gaggle of foes or nailing the whole room with wind power.
This all seems like a completely cool idea until that roguelike staple comes into play: when you die, and you will die, you lose everything you have. All your items you've collected in that dungeon, all your weapons with your fancy symbols, everything. The only way to leave a dungeon with the things you've got while you're in it is to beat it—not an easy task if you're woefully underlevelled, which you will be without playing through previous dungeons over and over. You can save and leave the dungeon at any stairway between floors, but you also lose your items upon doing that, which kind of defeats the purpose of leaving in the first place. Any efforts to either simply turn the system off without saving or reload from an old file are moot: the game contains one save slot only which saves automatically upon entering a dungeon and instantly on death—turning the system off in a dungeon also counts as death and you lose it all just like you would have anyway.
And believe me, it would seem like a pretty futile game if it weren't for this one kicker: despite the total weapon and item loss, it ultimately really doesn't matter. Sometimes you'll stumble into a dungeon and find totally killer weapons right at your feet. In fact, most floors have so many items and weapons scattered around that you can't possibly hold them all (and your inventory fills up so quickly that you'll be throwing stuff away just so you can hold things like curative items, which don't stack). What this means to the player is that the main draw of a role-playing game is essentially defeated: aside from your experience-based levelling up, there is virtually no feeling of growing achievement or accomplishment based on the weapons and items you have collected, because you can just get new ones in the dungeon (and you'll probably lose them when you die anyway). Sure, items and money that you escape with successfully can be stored at the vault back in town, but to take them out of there and bring them down with you is just as much of a gamble as not depositing them at all. Will you leave the dungeon with them intact this time? Who knows.
In some ways it's almost a shame that a game this charismatic and spunky is saddled with such gameplay-related shortcomings. The dialogue is cute and irreverant, the graphics are old-school but crisp and colorful, and the story is almost inconcievably unpredictable. It's just too bad that the hard-core will likely turn to more fully-featured roguelike RPGs like the Japanese-only Shiren DS, and for the rest of us it just won't click: Izuna and her band of unemployed ninjas are likely going to be job-hunting for a little while longer.
In Izuna you play the titular character, a busty female ninja who is out of work and racking her brain on how to fill the downtime. She stumbles on a boring little village with her band of jobless friends and ends up stealing a revered object of the gods, of course, causing everyone in the village to be rendered essentially catatonic. The only cure? Ninja your way through a series of dungeons and recover orbs that can be used to restore townspeople and your friends to their normal states—opening up new features like item shops, an inn, and a bank along the way.
It's in those very dungeons that nearly all of the gameplay takes place. Izuna's dungeons are floors upon floors of randomly generated top-down terror, with twists and turns and items being documented as you near their proximity on a handy auto-map filling the top screen. Also moving with you are enemies bent on kicking your ass—and kick your ass they will, repeatedly, until you have fought and died enough times to increase your character's level to a point that makes the dungeon manageable.
The main gameplay trick that sets that fighting apart from other games comes in the form of scrolls, little papers with symbols on them that can be attached to various weapons (also found at random in dungeons) to give the weapon different attributes. One might allow you to warp behind your enemy when you use the weapon, or attack with fire affinity, while others allow you more spaces to attach scrolls to. They can also be used separately at the expense of SP to create area effects like a random teleport out of a gaggle of foes or nailing the whole room with wind power.
This all seems like a completely cool idea until that roguelike staple comes into play: when you die, and you will die, you lose everything you have. All your items you've collected in that dungeon, all your weapons with your fancy symbols, everything. The only way to leave a dungeon with the things you've got while you're in it is to beat it—not an easy task if you're woefully underlevelled, which you will be without playing through previous dungeons over and over. You can save and leave the dungeon at any stairway between floors, but you also lose your items upon doing that, which kind of defeats the purpose of leaving in the first place. Any efforts to either simply turn the system off without saving or reload from an old file are moot: the game contains one save slot only which saves automatically upon entering a dungeon and instantly on death—turning the system off in a dungeon also counts as death and you lose it all just like you would have anyway.
And believe me, it would seem like a pretty futile game if it weren't for this one kicker: despite the total weapon and item loss, it ultimately really doesn't matter. Sometimes you'll stumble into a dungeon and find totally killer weapons right at your feet. In fact, most floors have so many items and weapons scattered around that you can't possibly hold them all (and your inventory fills up so quickly that you'll be throwing stuff away just so you can hold things like curative items, which don't stack). What this means to the player is that the main draw of a role-playing game is essentially defeated: aside from your experience-based levelling up, there is virtually no feeling of growing achievement or accomplishment based on the weapons and items you have collected, because you can just get new ones in the dungeon (and you'll probably lose them when you die anyway). Sure, items and money that you escape with successfully can be stored at the vault back in town, but to take them out of there and bring them down with you is just as much of a gamble as not depositing them at all. Will you leave the dungeon with them intact this time? Who knows.
In some ways it's almost a shame that a game this charismatic and spunky is saddled with such gameplay-related shortcomings. The dialogue is cute and irreverant, the graphics are old-school but crisp and colorful, and the story is almost inconcievably unpredictable. It's just too bad that the hard-core will likely turn to more fully-featured roguelike RPGs like the Japanese-only Shiren DS, and for the rest of us it just won't click: Izuna and her band of unemployed ninjas are likely going to be job-hunting for a little while longer.