"A Shallow Game I'll Never Finish"

Tao's Adventure: Curse of the Demon Seal is not only a mediocre game, but it has mediocre concepts to back it up. Nothing about this game screams (or even quietly whimpers) originality. The story is bland, the concepts have been used before and in all cases, the concepts used by this game were done better (if separately) in other games.

Story: 4/10

If you told this story to a six-year-old, he'd feel insulted. This story is one of the most generic and bland stories in the RPG genre. And frankly, if they threw any twists into the end, I'd freely admit that I'd never find out. Frankly, I wouldn't have sat through as much of it as I did if I hadn't paid money for the game. Demons get loose from a tower, your island is attacked, you set forth on a quest to save your island in a place where no one likes you. I bet none of you have heard any stories even remotely like this.

Graphics: 5/10

The graphics aren't too bad. They're nothing special to look at, but they're not bad. They sort of remind me of the graphics in Lost in Blue. The problem here, however is that the frame rate in this game is awful. If you cast a spell or spend any amount of time near more than 2 or 3 enemies, you'll immediately notice the graphical lag. In a game that already moves fairly slowly, to have the frame rate slow down that noticeably makes the game somewhat painful to play. Without the graphical slowdown, I probably would have given this game an 8. The graphics aren't bad for the DS, but the slowdown makes it fairly unbearable.

Controls: 5/10

The controls are limited and clunky. When I read about the majority of the controls being on the touch screen, that made plenty of sense to me. However, when confronted with it in the game, I found myself wondering why they didn't also include a button to quickly pick up something or quickly cast a spell. In fact, the buttons do nothing at all, with the exception of the D-pad which allows you to move around. I understand the desire use the touch screen, but you have buttons. Why not use both? This is a problem that early DS games suffered from and now that a number of games have done it right, it's shameful for this game to do it wrong. It's functional, but it could be a lot better.

Sounds: 6/10

All in all, just boring. This is not a soundtrack you'd listen to any other time. Most of the music that you hear will be music that continues with you throughout the entire game. There are different music tracks for different buildings, but since you spend such a large majority of time in the tower, it really makes no difference what the 5 minutes in the shop is like. The sound is very bland and doesn't aspire to be anything more than that.

Gameplay: 4/10

Dull, dull, dull. The graphical lag makes the game unpleasant and it's hard to see any gameplay past that. However, one of the game's draws is the magic system that works by tracing the magic symbols. One of the first things I noticed was that magic is virtually useless. You run out of MP too fast to make the spells worthwhile and using a sword becomes the more practical option almost immediately. This is unfortunate because you won't be able to cast spells without a staff equipped. What this amounts to is a lot of tedious switching back and forth and makes you not want to use magic at all. By the time I got sick of this game, the only thing I was using magic for was to heal and move back to town. Attack magic has since gone completely unused. The first thing I noticed about drawing the symbol was that the system was very forgiving. If you screwed up a little bit or made a sloppy symbol, you'd still get your spell. However, it loses its charm when you realize that you can draw the symbol almost completely wrong and still get the spell as long as you do the correct movements in the correct order. It quickly goes from being forgiving to being entirely cheap.

The other gimmick is the monster use. With the spell casting being impractical and annoying, the monster use is the fallback to make this an interesting game. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen either. You get one monster that you always have from the start on and you can collect a series of monsters to use as a second monster. As you go through the tower, you can pick up eggs which you can then have appraised and you can choose to hatch or sell. And that's where the good points end. The monsters are not at all under your control unless you count staying a space away from you under your control. They each have moves that define them and they use those whenever the hell they feel like it. There is seemingly no rhyme or reason to the use of the spells and ultimately, you feel no better or worse for picking a monster with a particular spell. I often found myself hoping that my monster would use its sleep magic or another would use its thunder magic only to have them fly around. In other instances, I would have a monster that was completely intent on casting a spell like sleep when the enemy only had one hit left. As the monsters level, some of them evolve. It seems like the lesser portion of them actually evolve, however, which makes it a little less interesting. So as dull as the spellcasting system is, at least the symbol drawing was interesting hook. The monster aspect of this game is like a rip-off of any monster catching game gone horribly bland.

Another aspect that seemed important was what you're doing for the majority of the game. You have an inventory capacity of 38, or at least that's what mine was when I quit. As you climb the tower you pick up items, eggs and equipment. Then you take that stuff back and sell/use it as needed. However, you never pick up just money. Often you pick up gold and silver nuggets that you can sell for money, but there's still that intermediate step that fills your inventory and makes you go back out to the beginning. 6 of 38 inventory slots are filled with items that you can never drop. Some of them are inherently useful like the spellbook or the monster collar, but some of them, like your Dad's staff, are not useful if you're not going to use wind magic. Instead of making the staff storable, you have to carry two staves if you want to use a different one. There's no option to put it away. That said, the gameplay gets very stale. Go into the tower, fight until you're too drained to move or too burdened to walk, and then go back to town, sell your loot, upgrade your equipment and rest at the inn to heal and save. Then do it again. There's virtually no variability to this pattern and it gets old very fast.

Replay Value: 0/10

I can't imagine a reason why you would subject yourself to this once, much less again. There's virtually nothing in this game that you couldn't find the first time you play it. Collecting the monsters might provide you with some fun, but there's no real reason to continue past the storyline, near as I can tell.

Final Word: 4/10

If you're totally into collecting monsters you should pick a better game for it like Pokemon instead of tormenting yourself with this game. If you're digging the spell casting system, try a game like Black and White, which uses a similar concept for spell casting. While neither of these games are on the DS, they're both more enjoyable than this one. Ultimately, there may be no other game that has all the elements that this game has under one cartridge, but just because they've managed to cram all these aspects (poorly) under the same roof doesn't make this game a wise choice. There are games that do each of the elements of this game better than this half-assed game does. Do yourself a favor, look at whatever aspect of this game intrigues you and then find a better game for it.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 04/24/06