Y’know, I’ve been going nuts trying to find an excuse to use a certain title for an article. It’s the most bizarre, inexplicable writer’s block, only being able to assign a title to a completely theoretical work with no content to back it up.
So, I’ll settle for a little play-on-words tying an obscure old SNK game to an obscure recent NDS game. If only Izuna had a tag-team function to let you swap spunky ninja girls on the fly.
Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja
Nintendo DS, Ninja Studio/SUCCESS/Atlus
In a nutshell: I finally can brag about having played a Roguelike, which probably adds inches to my nerdsculinity. Oh, wait, this box is for a concise summary of the game itself. In which case, I say it’s a good time killer, that’s both amusing and unforgiving, though the official wallpaper is a little misleading of the content.
Our tale begins with a small band of ninjas wandering around looking for a new (presumably cheap) place to stay after the lord of the land stopped having use for them. Roughly five minutes after finding someplace nice to stay, the numbskulled but adorably plucky ninja girl Izuna manages to piss off the village’s gods and bring a Bizarro curse on everyone. Her adored ‘onee-sama’ Shino turns into a callous bitch, her old boss turns from a ‘cool, wise old guy’ into the more typical whiny, aggravating variety, and the other guy… is… I dunno. I think he gets cursed with paranoia, but then again he’s very purposefully not fleshed out.
Anyway, long story short, Izuna has to venture into each god’s elementally-themed dungeon to ‘negotiate’ cures with them. Through violence and ninja trickery, of course. In the tradition of Rogue, or probably the more widely known Chocobo’s/Pokemon/Ron Jeremy’s Mysterious Dungeon, each dungeon is made up of so many randomly generated floors lined with traps, monsters and fabulous ninja prizes. Win and you’ll cure your friends and walk away with loads of loot. Lose, and you lose EVERYTHING, which can lead to a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth when you lose that Zantetsu you’ve been trying to enhance into a boss-killer.
NOT THAT I’M NECESSARILY BITTER ABOUT IT OR ANYTHING
Adding a bit to the basic gameplay is that you can use various talismans either on their own or bond them to weapons to power them up. Many items (Pills, especially) have to be used a certain way rather than simply picked off the menu and consumed. I might suggest in the event there’s a sequel they call the “Fire Pill” something less edible sounding, for the record!
It’s a very simple game, in pretty much all respects. The actual graphics aren’t really much more outstanding than a (good) SNES game, and the whole random dungeon thing necessitates tiled, repetitive backgrounds. Its simplicity is a big part of its fun, as you gradually build up your levels and equipment. Of course, the cute character art and voice acting lends a lot of flavor to the experience and even kind of makes the aggravatingly unforgiving equipment loss an easier pill to swallow. As further proof of this, the game’s own artist has published a pornographic doujinshi of it already.
(That’s awesome on so many levels, but still pales before the story of how Godannar’s second season was financed in part by sales of officially sponsored nasty doujinshi.)
Wow, that was a weird tangent. Izuna was a game I was trying out with caution at first after hearing about its brutality. It’s a great time-killing dungeon crawl if you have the stomach for that kind of thing. As long as you keep your good stuff in the warehouse when you set out to grind levels, dying and losing everything shouldn’t be that big an obstacle since they at least let you keep that experience. Izuna seems to level up pretty quickly to boot, so you won’t stay hopelessly impeded for too long at a time. (The game is kind of giving me a hatred for frogs, though…)
6 Comments
I decided to check this game out because I recalled that two years ago, I read this article and the game sounded fun.
I am not. Having. Fun.
This game does only one thing, and that thing is to erase whatever progress you previously made.
Each dungeon is designed so that you’re underleveled the first time you enter, and only after traversing it several times will you finally be strong enough to beat it. But the only way to exit a dungeon is to die.
As a result, this is a game that forces you to lose over and over and over. It’s impossible to play this game without dying, because you MUST die repeatedly IN ORDER TO PROGRESS.
You could use a Kikan, but they’re not sold and sometimes you simply do not find a Kikan when you need one. So you go into a dungeon, you die, you go back in and progress back to the point where you died, then you die again and repeat the process until Izuna is so overleveled that she can’t be killed anymore.
So, the only opportunity you’ll ever have to actually store your money and items are those times when you kill the boss and arrive back in town WITHOUT dying, or if you get incredibly lucky and stumble across a Kikan by complete chance. But there’s a higher chance you’ll get sodomized by monsters after stepping on a Demon Trap.
And what is your reward for staying alive and keeping your weapons? They get damaged and BREAK. When a weapon cracks, one more hit breaks it. It cracks because either you hit an enemy, or an enemy hit you. If an enemy hit you, you can use your turn to de-equip the weapon. If you hit an enemy, the enemy will use its turn to hit you, breaking your weapon. 50/50 chance that if your weapon cracks, you won’t have enough time to de-equip it. Less of a chance the more enemies there are attacking you.
So what do you do, then? Make your weapon stronger? You are PUNISHED for doing that. Put talismans on your weapon and it becomes more likely to break. So you are not rewarded for surviving, not rewarded for powering up a weapon. You are ONLY rewarded for going into a dungeon and grinding through monsters, then dying / using a Kikan to warp out.
And a result of the way this game is designed, no progress is ever made until you’ve gone through the same repetitive dungeon a dozen times until you’re overpowered and godlike.
You can’t call going through dungeons progess, since you have to leave and start back from the first floor all the time.
You can never make any progress with weapons, since upgrading them just makes them break after a few hits.
And there is no saving unless you die or you’re ALREADY outside of a dungeon, even though the inside of a dungeon is the only place where saving would be USEFUL.
This. Game. Is. So. Terrible. I cannot understand why you enjoy it.
It was the first taste of Roguelike I’d really liked enough to sit down and continue. After playing Izuna 2, it’s really hard to go back to 1 again, simply because they give you more to do.
Sorry it wasn’t your cup of tea though. I guess it takes a masochistic streak to get into these kinda things. The grinding bothered the hell out of me until I got past the learning curve of the item-forging. (Which annoyingly, is something 2 felt the need to correct since Burn-In Flames are ultra rare and shops won’t burn talismans in until your second playthrough.)
What I like about Izuna, ultimately, is that everything is completely random and unfair, and you have to stock/synthesize items that suit your playing style in any situation. (2 really enhances that aspect with more diverse weapons than ____ Sword and ____ Claw.) You have to kind of shut off the part of you that cares when you bite the dust.
Some of these games don’t even let you keep levels! Instant restart from the beginning.
I know at least that his homepage and the Izuna H-Doujinishi are both called Romantic Fool, so that’s probably a good start to finding the guy’s name.
I’m Spartacus.
I notice the review is overall complimentary with undertones of contempt and frustration. Sometimes I wonder if there’s any other way to view roguelikes.
Should I have specified frogs that explode upon dying into three rabid tadpoles?
Oh, wait, sorry- you’re a “Forg.”
Hey, screw you too.