I have been trying to write this review for over a month now. This is, quite possibly, one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever had to write.
My original review started like this…
[quote]The world is a strange place. You know this because you’re reading this review and I have a dead fly and a piece of stale macaroni on my desk.
The world is so strange that a feeling of peace has over taken the world and there is no need for heroes. All of the Gods and evil creatures have had a sit down at the UN and decided that there is no need for violence and mass… well… violence anymore.
And that makes you, a ninja, unemployed.
And boy, does it suck to be an unemployed ninja.[/quote]
…but that doesn’t do it much justice anymore, because I have travelled the long roads of unemployed-ninja-dom, and I have seen the signs that the Gods have put forth and now I know…
[b]IZUNA MUST DIE.[/b]
[img]https://www.leighlo.com/uploads/random/2007/04-Izuna-01.jpg[/img]
[i]It’s times like this that I wish ancient GPS’s were far more detailed than a blinking red or blue dot.[/i]
That’s not to say I hated the game. For a time, I was actually enjoying myself.
That was before I started the third dungeon at which point I realised… this game never changes.
You see, Izuna tells the story of a young female ninja who upsets the balance of things in a nice quiet peaceful town where she might settle down. She does this because, well, she’s actually a spoilt little anime brat. Yes, you’ve seen them in Sailor Moon and Ranma 1/2, and now thanks to the magic of interactive gaming, you can see just how much a pain in the arse these anime brats can be first hand. She’s vain, cheeky, and while you might be inclined to jerk off to her if you were that way inclined, you’ll also just want to strangle her because… she’s useless.
Izuna sets off the Gods being angry at the town and, as a result, causes all sorts of weird crap to start happening around the town which only she — the unemployed ninja — can fix.
But fixing a problem you’ve created comes at a cost… you must traverse hundreds of dungeon levels and beat the same monsters and bosses over and over again.
And this is Izuna’s biggest problem. I mean the game, not the girl. The girl can get bent. She’s an irritating twat and whoever decided to only program her with the barest of Japanese vocal sounds is a twat too.
Izuna (the game) suffers from being excruciatingly consistent.
It’s like being told you’re going to have meatloaf for dinner tonight. And tomorrow. And for the next week. And for the next three years afterwards. It really is like that.
You enter a dungeon. You kill a few levels and then you get a boss. You leave with an orb that makes a few people happy but overall gets pretty similar mundane responses with the same bland music each time.
Then you have to go to another dungeon. Tack on a few more levels and a slight scenery change plus another boss.
And again. And again. And again.
All throughout this, you’re gaining levels and I’m making it sound easy… [i]but it’s not.[/i]
[img]https://www.leighlo.com/uploads/random/2007/04-Izuna-02.jpg[/img]
[i]I have to fight a kangaroo AND a hairy porcupine? Who the hell thought up this…?![/i]
The difficulty is just bizarre. It’s hard. Too hard at points. It’s the strangely over-hyped difficulty that makes this game so addictive, mind you, as you’re going to sit there telling yourself that you’re better than this so you have to beat it.
By the time you get to Level 99 on the last (sort of) dungeon, you’ll have to play through 41 dungeons BEFORE you hit the boss. And there is no ending.
Really, nothing happens. I’m sorry to spoil it for anyone but I played through this game for a month to get no ending. Nothing special. No big animation. No naked Izuna. Nothing.
Now that I’ve gotten how the game works out of the way, let me tell you about gameplay.
You arm yourself with weapons and armour, tack on pieces of paper that give you magical abilities, and kill crap. It’s really that basic.
Oh, and when you die, you get sent back to the town with nothing of what you had collected, including money, weapons, items or armour. You keep your experience, but that’s not that big of a deal.
Fortunately for Izuna, the graphics and animations are so simple that there’s nothing really to complain about. Yes, they’re pretty crappy by today’s Final Fantasy-esque standards, and even a Shining Force game on the old Sega systems looks better, but it’s not all that bad.
[img]https://www.leighlo.com/uploads/random/2007/04-Izuna-03.jpg[/img]
[i]It’s not you, Izuna… it’s me. I just can’t keep seeing you if you’re just going to go off day after day and fight the same monsters again and again. I’m sick of the stories and the long nights waiting for someone to find out unconscious outside of a forbidden cave. Just… go do a gangbang or something and get it over with…[/i]
The sound is bad, however, and if you’re going to get yourself addicted to this game, turn the sound on your DS down and pump whatever else you’d normally pump through some headphones or speakers. The music is mind-numbingly dull and the voices are in Japanese (even though they speak in English) and always say the same thing.
Further, I’m not sure what the programmers were doing when they programmed the interactivity for these characters but it damn sure wasn’t anything logical. When you go and talk to a character, you have to listen to some sort of spiel. Now, if you move off of the screen into another loaded area, say a mountain top or you’ve just come back from a dungeon, if you haven’t progressed to another level, you have to listen to the same spiel again. And again.
In fact, the problem of repetition seems to be the most consistent thing about Izuna, but it doesn’t work in its favour. You play the levels again and again, you listen to the same sounds again and again, you fight the same monsters and see the same beaten screens again and again, and it’s all that “again and again” that makes you want to violently beat your Nintendo DS console again and again.
It’s just insane but also sad as Izuna is little more than a weak Nethack clone thatÂ’s trying to be held together by a poor structure and story.
If you’ve ever looked for a way to simulate the experience of being addicted to an illicit substance but didn’t want to fork out the brain cells or the hundreds of dollars then Izuna: Legend Of The Unemployed Ninja will do it for you.
[i]Screenshots taken from [url=http://au.gamespot.com/ds/rpg/izunalegendoftheunemployedninja/images.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=tabs&tag=tabs;images]Gamespot.com’s review of Izuna[/url].[/i]