"Where is the challenge?"

I was pretty excited for this game before it came out. I'm a fan of dungeon crawlers and the prospect of using the stylus to cast spells and swing your sword seemed like a cool idea. It's the first game like it that I am aware of for the DS.

Story:
The story in this game is actually not that bad. A teenage boy on a trip with his parents and his dog get a flat tire near a suspicious mansion. I won't go into too much detail here, but the mansion ends up being a portal to another world where memories of humans are kept. The boy must find his way through this world to find the memories of his parents that are mysteriously scheduled to be destroyed.

Controls:
The controls are pretty simple, and they work for the most part but could have been better. The D-pad moves the character forwards and backwards, and turns him to the left and right. Double tapping left and right makes the character do a short strafing movement, though it doesn't work well enough to do any good. In general the movement of the character is stiff and sometimes frustrating.

The stylus is implemented pretty well. On the right side of the screen are 5 icons: a sword, a spell, a shield, a bag, and the menu button.

While the sword icon is active, you can use the stylus to make different swiping motions on the touch screen to perform a slashing attack in one of eight different directions.

While in spell mode, a 3x3 grid is displayed in which you draw runes to cast spells, much like the game lost magic, except that in Lost Magic it was easier to get away with shoddy drawing. And more fun.

The bag icon opens up your "pockets" where up to 5 items can be stored and touched to instantly used.

The shield icon while held down will put up the characters shield, minimizing damage.

Graphics:
The graphics aren't bad, they were about what I had expected from this game. Unfortunately, the textures and design of the levels become repetitive and cheesy. There were virtually no parts of the game that really impressed me visually.

Gameplay:
The bulk of this game boils down to you running around the maps trying to find doors, and killing everything on the way. Some doors are locked and require either a key or a spell to open them. Spells are found on stone slabs throughout the game, and to progress, you need to find pretty much all of them. Some of them, however, can be obtained by leveling up.

One thing that really annoyed me with this game was the lack of customization. There is no stat distributing, or leveling up spells, or different attacks. There is also very little equipment to choose from. You could decide whether you want to use primarily spells or your sword, but you are left little decision at all because...

This game has very little challenge whatsoever. The biggest challenge you will face is finding the exit to the levels. All the enemies you will face however, are easily disposed of with one or two slashes of your sword. Rarely will you ever have to face more than two enemies at once, but even in those few instances where you might have to, the enemies aren't aggroed easily enough to even have all three of them on you at once. Not like you couldn't just run through and *smack smack smack* be finished with them anyway.

Another thing about the combat- when you hit an enemy, they have to recover from it. This leaves them open for another immediate hit, so even if it took 20 hits to kill an enemy, you wouldn't get hit very often and maybe not at all if you are quick enough. But like I said, one or two hits. Three tops.

Even the bosses just plain suck. A couple of them literally took four or five swipes. Just plain horrible.

One more thing- you run into save spot every five minutes, or less, and these save spots replenish your health and mana. Completely unnecessary.

Story- 7
Controls- 7
Graphics- 7
Gameplay- 4
Average- 6

In conclusion, I think that the idea for this game was pretty good. The use of two screens is very good for a game like this, and the use of the touch screen was a nice touch as well. If it wasn't for the lack of depth and challenge to this game, it would probably be a popular game. I hope that any future games like this coming out on the DS will put a lot more time and thought into the project.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 08/22/06