"Help! An elephant took my memories!"

When the DS first came out, during the long, long gaming drought, screenshots of unknown games occasionally appeared. For example, screenshots of Deep Labyrinth. All that was known at the time was that the game was a 1st person game. The screenshots were shown off - the DS could do perfectly good 3-d! Take that! And now, that has been proved many times over, with other games like Metroid Prime Hunters and Mario Kart. However, Deep Labyrinth has remained on the minds of a few.

If you choose the first story - Shawn and Ace - you get a nice, anime-style movie. Shawn, his dog Ace, and his parents are out driving somewhere, when a tire decides to become a flat tire. When they stop, Ace jumps out of the car, the parents follow, and then Shawn, too, follows, leading him into the mansion where he's promptly sucked into a portal and lands on a floating island... And meets a pink, elephant-headed monster-person, who informs him that he is in Vimana, the airship of the gods where memories are sorted out and destroyed.

In the second story, a disembodied voice tells you of the uselessness of your struggle - what your struggle is against, you are left to find out yourself - and you immediately find yourself up against a skeleton about to destroy you, but for the good fortune that a sword stands nearby. After the battle, a figure appears, claiming to be your ally, and as sudden as your arrival, disappears, leaving you with a nice cliffhanger. Good ally, huh?

Either story, the controls are the same. Left and right on the D-pad turn you in those directions, while up and down let you move forward and back. Double tapping the left and right lefts you strafe in those direction. Tapping or slashing on the screen while in Sword mode has character slash to that area - tap the upper right side, and you slash from the lower left to the upper right; the same results from slashing the stylus that way. Magic is done in another mode. You learn kiries, then draw them on the grid so handily placed and press 'attack' to smite monsters with magic.

Combat is facilitated by the lock on feature. When you get near enough to a foe, you automatically lock-on to it - meaning that pressing left has you strafing clockwise around the monster; right, counterclockwise. Your attacks - magic and sword - are auto-aimed at the foe. Any monster, save for the bosses, takes only a few hits to die. There is no real strategy involved in defeating any, to speak the truth.

Does this overwhelm you? No worries. Helpful English-speaking mice populate the land, and will teach you all of this. As an added bonus, many are dressed oddly. And if you fear death, you can save often. Save points are manned by a purple-and-blue platypus, who like the mice, speaks English and is rather amusing, trying on occasion to crack jokes such as calling himself a "Plentypus". He also happens to sleep a lot.

The graphics, as mentioned in the beginning, were at one point shown off on the occasion - but now is not that occasion. They serve well, but they could have used polishing. Simple things to bring the player more and more in the game - perhaps the mice could have opened and closed their mouths as they talked, though they do gesture wildly. The graphics, when compared to Metroid Prime Hunters, are clean, not smudgy; but when compared to Mario Kart, they're not so great. However, the graphics are good enough for the game.

The music was done by famed video game composer Yasunori Mitsuda, who worked on Chrono Cross and Xenosaga. I'm sorry to say that I've played neither of the games, nor have I heard the music from either. As such, I must compare the music to other DS games and not the composer's previous work. And as compared to other games... It's rather good. It's pleasant to listen to, and I'm not tempted at any time to turn down the volume on the DS and turn up the volume on my speakers.

Don't go into Deep Labyrinth expecting a huge, epic story, complete with overly emotional characters with long hair - you won't find them here. What you will find is a game with a solid control scheme, amazing music, and excellent graphics - a good game.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 08/17/06