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Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja Review
Written by Ryan Morgan on Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Kudos to Atlus for yet another solid translation. "Old-school" difficulty.
Dated gameplay + steep learning curve and cheap deaths = little entertainment for those not in the market.
Since the days of the SNES a company named Chunsoft has been making dungeon hack games based on other franchises. The series name, "fushigi no dungeon," translates roughly as "mystery dungeon," which should sound immediately familiar to anyone who owns a DS or GBA as Chunsoft's most recent offering was Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Blue/Red Rescue Team.
Izuna was not developed by Chunsoft, but you wouldn't know it from playing. It feels like copyright infringement, the design is so similar. The majority of the game is spent wandering through randomly generated dungeons in a very strict, turn-based method. For every action you take, be it walking or using a spell, all the enemies on the floor make one move in response. The result looks somewhat unnatural, especially when combined with movement that is so grid-based it seems less like controlling a ninja and more like driving a tank. Even walking feels awkward; technically it's possible to move diagonally, but only by holding down the right trigger. Hitting B speeds things up; yet not by making Izuna sprint. Instead, everything goes into super-speed and she becomes nearly impossible to control. If any of you have used an emulator and tried to play while holding the turbo button, you know exactly what I mean. Expect to run into a lot of walls this way.
Battling is generally as simple as hitting the A button when a foe is in range, trading blows until one of you goes down. There is certainly some room for strategy, like bottling up enemies so that you only face one at a time, but lack of attack variety means things get dull quickly. Fortunately, talismans and other items tack on some depth, with a plethora of scrolls and items to choose from and a number of ways to use them. Reading a spell causes teleportation, elemental attacks, and more. "Sticking" a talisman onto a weapon or armguard adds modifiers to your attacks (like increased attack power or a chance of switching places with the enemy). Your enemies are also stupid (in a fun way) - they will immediately use anything you throw at them, paving the way for tricks like making your adversary run itself into a wall at top speed. Unfortunately, while there is a certain glee inherent in this, the excitement dulls by the twentieth time you use the tactic.
The harsh tone of this review thus far is not the result of anger, simply frustration. Izuna is a title with so much promise that falls quite short thanks to a few bad design decisions. The primary problem is the nearly insurmountable learning curve. You can expect to die suddenly and often throughout the entire game, but the fact that all items and money are lost every time really dampens the desire to soldier on. You can technically store items gained from a successful dungeon run, but only one item at a time and only through a specific character in town, making storage and retrieval a chore. I understand that this is called being "old-school" in certain circles, but it ultimately feels like a cheap way to make the game seem deeper and more challenging than it really is. The only upshot is that experience gained is never lost, so one can simply level grind until powerful enough to breeze through a dungeon. Old dungeons can also be repeated, allowing for easy item collection, but one death later and you lose everything all over again.
The second major flaw lies in the execution of the talisman system. The potential for depth is buried under a formula that takes a very long time to work out with nowhere near enough reward once you do. For example, while sticking a talisman onto a weapon can add extra effects to your attacks, the weapon breaks down very quickly if its SP rating can't handle the spell. Figuring this out isn't terribly easy, and it is followed quickly by the discovery that the weapons from the first few dungeons aren't capable of handling any of the spells you have collected. Making things even more complicated is the fact that the scroll names were not part of the localization process. I'm all for keeping the spirit of the original Japanese, but it's asking a lot to make the player memorize a vast number of foreign words along with the spells they represent. Firaga, avada kadavra, ban kai... those are somewhat memorable. Ten'i, kikan, and fukugen? Not so much.
That being said, the one part of Izuna that truly doesn't disappoint is the localization. The story proves to be a bit weaker than hoped, but there is quite a bit of quirky humor to be found in conversing with the townspeople, and much of that humor can be attributed to a localization team that respected the source material.
In the end, Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja feels like an SNES-era game that has aged badly over time. It's not broken or low-quality, but the interface and gameplay feel constricting and the learning curve makes it inaccessible to the casual gamer. While the characters are funny and there is a definite old-school/hardcore edge to the design, only those in the market for a tough-as-nails dungeon crawler are likely to find enjoyment here.
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