Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

Izuna 2: The Unemployed Ninja Returns

1. Official Site
2. Platform: DS
3. Publisher: Atlus Software
4. Developer: SUCCESS Corporation
5. Release Date: 07/22/08
6. Genre: RPG

by Lee Evans

A strange thing starts happening as a popular video game system gets older.  Off-the-beaten-path genres start asserting themselves.  It's happening right now to the Nintendo DS, with games like Shiren the Wanderer and the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series.  Normally, you don't even get one Roguelike dungeon crawl on a system, let alone several (A Roguelike game is a dungeon crawling RPG with high penalties for death).

Izuna 2: The Unemployed Ninja Returns is the sequel to 2007's tongue-in-cheek Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja.  Izuna is a very irreverent, skimpily dressed ninja, and she frequently makes humorous asides to the audience playing the game.  It seems like a winning formula. If you're a fan of dungeon crawlers, is this a game you'll enjoy?  If you've never played a Roguelike, will you enjoy Izuna 2?

There's really nothing special about the graphics in Izuna 2.  This game looks like it could easily have been on the Game Boy Advance.  It's true that Roguelikes don't live and die based on their graphics.  Still, I'd like a little flash here and there.  The dungeons look pretty generic, the towns are fairly generic, everything seems generic.

The character portraits are really well drawn during conversation sequences.  Each character has a bunch of different animations, and they're all fairly humorous.  Still, it would have been nice to see more variety in everything else.

There are a surprising amount of voice samples in Izuna 2.  At the beginning of almost any conversation, you'll hear a snippet of conversation, which should be pretty cool except for one little quirk:  It's all in Japanese.  I love learning languages as much as the next guy, and I think it's neat that more games are not hiding their Japanese-ness.  But you couldn't re-record these lines for an American audience?  It smacks of laziness.

The music isn't anything to write home about, either.  It's generic, but it's not bad.  The best I can say is that it's forgettable and won't distract you from the task at hand.

I've often said that this style of game is closer to strategy than hack-and-slash role-playing, so if you've played Pokemon Mystery Dungeon or Shiren the Wanderer, you know how it will control.  Every move you make in Izuna 2 counts as a turn, and the enemies are only able to move when you move.  You can move in any of eight directions, and facing in a different direction does not count as a turn.

It's fairly easy to get around in these dungeons.  Sometimes there's some weirdness with trying to move diagonally, but it's not super-difficult.  They also have hotkeys for throwing shuriken, bombs, and other assorted doo-dads at your enemies, and it's all fairly intuitive.  Other than that, it's almost verbatim from other dungeon-crawlers.

First off, it's worth noting that Izuna 2 is funny.  It's rare to find a game that's funny without being annoying, but this game pulls it off.  It takes jabs at RPG tropes, like Izuna recapping to the audience what happened in the last game and telling people to buy the first game, and other characters asking who she's talking to.  There's also characters like Mitsumoto, who tries to hit on every woman in the game and gets shot down over and over.  It's a lighthearted atmosphere, and I enjoyed that.

However, Roguelikes are known for being difficult.  They reward strategic thinking over level-grinding, and good use of your items over just bashing enemies over the head.  In this sense, I was disappointed in Izuna 2.

Most Roguelikes have high penalties for death.  Some games take away all of your experience and dump you at the beginning, and some just take away items.  Death in Izuna 2 only removes all your items, including equipped weapons and armor.  This may sound like a really high penalty, but I wasn't upset. 

The dungeons are littered with so many items that you don't feel any chance of risk.  Thrown all over the floor in dungeons are a variety of items, from weapons to talismans to recovery items.  In fact, you would think there was an explosion at an item store, because they're EVERYWHERE.  One of these items that you'll find is a talisman that warps you back to the nearest town with all of your items, and I've had times where there are three of these in my inventory.  So, I can run around the dungeon, level up, and then bolt back to town with my stuff.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

And therein lies the problem:  This game doesn't behave like other games in the genre do.  Depending on your viewpoint, this is a good or bad thing.  I certainly didn't mind not losing levels, but it didn't really encourage strategic thinking.  I was just running around and killing things without thinking ahead, which isn't really how these games are supposed to go.  I felt like I was playing turn-based Diablo instead.

Compounding the simplicity is the ability to bring more than one character into a dungeon.  If you level the other character right, you'll have two powerful characters running around the dungeon.  When one dies, you automatically switch to the other one.  You also have the ability to perform special moves with the other character, provided that they're both alive and a special meter is full.  It's not a bad system, but it's an easy system, which is less than ideal.

There's also a deep, dark scourge which plagues many a game. It is called weapon breakage, and it can happen at any time.  I don't understand why people still make games with weapons that can break. It's never, ever fun and even less so in Izuna 2. Some weapons will last forever, and then some will break after one or two uses.  There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, but the kicker is that there are so many weapons littered around the dungeons that you can replace just about anything that's broken with an equivalent.

There are a ton of dungeons in Izuna 2, but they all feel somewhat the same.  The process is basically enter dungeon, kill some enemies, collect items, go to next floor until you meet boss/exit dungeon.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  However, I can't fault it too much for that, because that's the genre style.  If that's what you want, that's what you'll get.  There's also no multiplayer, but you can earn high scores in dungeons.

Some games may not have the best mechanics, but they have an underlying sense of personality that makes them feel different.  Izuna 2 certainly does have personality, and it does help to offset a lot of its deficiencies, but it's just not enough to push it over the top.

So if you like dungeon-crawlers and want to play another game in a genre that doesn't really have a lot of offerings, give Izuna 2 a try.  If you like the idea of dungeon-crawlers but don't like the difficulty, Izuna 2 isn't a bad game to start with.  Otherwise, skip this game and wait for Atlus to make Izuna into the total package that it could be.

Gaming Trend Score

69

1. Graphics: 65
2. Audio: 65
3. Controls: 75
4. Gameplay: 70
5. Value/Replay: 70
6. OVERALL:69