Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja

[jkid101094]

So this is a game I saw years ago advertised in the back of a cheat code book or something. I always thought she was incredibly cute and held her series in the back of my mind in case I ever got the chance to play it.

...guess what I did yesterday?

Just look at how cute she is. :U

So basically the story of the game is that Izuna (being an immature ninja and all) decides to walk into a village, complain about how much it sucks and then steals a gem that just happens to belong to a bunch of Gods (they seriously left it out in the middle of a field. Who WOULDN'T steal it?). As you'd figure this pisses them off, they curse the village and her friends and now it's up to Izuna to beg the gods for forgiveness and set things right.

Well that's all fine and dandy...until you actually play the game...

See Izuna has to seek out all six Gods one by one and for each one I've faced so far the process has been the same:

1.) Ask around town until you find the one character that'll tell you where to go (even if you already know you can't leave until you talk to him).

2.) Go through a dungeon until you reach the God or Goddess at the end.

3.) Beat his or her ass.

4.) Lather, rinse, repeat.

"Well, jkid. If that's all there is to it why haven't you beaten the game yet?"

Yeah, about that...remember how I said there were only six Gods? Turns out there are only six dungeons too...and guess what this game does to make up for it?

IT'S UNFORGIVING AS SHIT, THAT'S WHAT.

Each dungeon plays like a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game. You get thrown into a randomized layout full of enemies and items and you have to utilize what you can bring in and what you can find to make it to the staircase at the end of each floor.

What makes this so unforgiving? How about the fact that, unlike Mystery Dungeon, you only get one character? One inventory. One life bar. One attack per turn. This really sucks when the game has a tendency to swarm you with three enemies every five seconds.

So what about those items, you ask? Oh, they help. Generally all you get are weapons and healing items so you'd think that's work, right?

Haha, no.

You can't kill enemies with anything but your basic attack from what I can tell. You can get an enemy down to 1HP but it won't kill unless you deal the finishing blow yourself. This means that even an item with an area of effect can't kill enemies, which also means that if you're fighting three enemies you have to attack them all one at a time which gives them not only time to strike back, but time to stall you until other enemies arrive.

And it doesn't help that enemies are tough as shit. Seriously, I've had to go through dungeons grinding on enemies several times just to die, do it again, level up so more and pray the drops I get can carry me through the bullshit.

Oh, and let's not forget traps. Starting in the third dungeon they introduce traps. You can't see them. You can't prepare for them. All you can do is step on them and deal with it. So what kind of effects do these traps have?

They can make you blind, sweaty, drop pans on you, throw you into walls, hurt your shoulders and piss you off from what I've seen. Blinding means you can't see enemies or items until the effect wears off, meaning you could have a swarm of assholes on your tail and not know a thing. Sweaty makes Izuna uncomfortable and causes her to refuse to equip items, including those already equipped to her. The pans do damage. The traps that toss you into walls throw you in a random direction until you hit a wall which takes almost half your HP. When Izuna has shoulder pans she can't fight as hard causing her attack to drop and pissing her off causes her attack to raise, but makes her take more damage. Not to mention that there are more than one traps on each floor. In fact, I hit three trap tiles in a row on two separate occasions, both of which resulted in my death IIRC.

So what happens when you die? Izuna faints, gets kicked out of the dungeon and losses all her items. This includes whatever you bring in so even if you by things or bring them from other dungeons you lose them if you die. This means that you could upgrade a sword all game, bring it to the final dungeon, die to the boss and lose it forever. It also doesn't help that not only will your weapons randomly break, but that the game saves automatically every time you enter and finish a dungeon, meaning if you soft reset to save your items you still lose them.

I challenge any of you to try beating this game. Right now I'm on rage quit hiatus because I'm getting my ass beat by boxing kangaroos and transformers. If Izuna wasn't so adorable I'd have stopped after the first dungeon.

[Hakudamashi]

[jkid101094]

Yeah, that one picture could be the entire review.

Hopefully the sequel is better.

[Hakudamashi]

It's getting one?

[jkid101094]

It's getting one?

It's had one forever on the exact same system.