"Good game, broken by paranoid progress zapping"

Well, first off, I'm really happy to see a "roguelike" on a modern system!

The characters are cool, and funny enough. The town contains the standard amenities like the inn, shop, blacksmith, item storage...

Dialog isn't that smartly written gameplay-wise - the innkeeper says she'll charge 300 times the normal rate to use the inn, and as a result I didn't save my game outside of dungeon autosaves for a long time since I figured a game like this would penalize me right out of having a chance of winning if I did. I can't guarantee it doesn't later.

The gameplay in dungeons is alright. Not great, not really new, but works well enough. Map sections are drawn as you explore, items and visible monsters are drawn as markers on the map, as well as stairways to the next level.

It seems you're basically expected to go into a dungeon, fight until you're killed by monsters that outlevel you, restart in town with no money or items, then go back into the dungeon, which is regenerated and refreshed with new monsters and items, and try to make it farther down the next time until you finally clear it. This is not a game that will do you any favors, but that's alright, it is a roguelike and you have to cut it a lot of slack difficulty-wise. These games aren't easy traditionally.

...speaking of which, I thought it was pretty funny and classic that you have items like sleeping pills or fire (bomb) pills that you can either swallow, or throw at an enemy - so if you misuse one you live with the results! Almost as good as the poisoned potions in Nethack! (Better, since this only gets you when you're not paying attention!)

So why the low score? I just finished a typical game session - I played the second dungeon for about 45 minutes, and actually made it to the boss without dying once. I spent about 10 minutes carefully managing my limited inventory (oh right - you can hold two screens of items and after that you have to drop or use them to make room), fighting the boss, and teleporting when she spammed her attack that - to avoid spoilers I'll just say basically crippled me for X turns every time I saw her. The fight was getting really interesting - I'd done a lot of damage, taken a lot, and was wandering the dungeon repelling hordes of monsters when the bus I was on stopped. So I closed my DS to put it in sleep mode, walked over to the next bus, and opened my DS to resume - and it was off. The power switch was NOT touched - I briefly touched L after putting it to sleep and it played a note of the background music. The previous time I'd tried sleep in Izuna it just crashed. Either way, that nukes all of your progress in that dungeon, and strips you of all items and money because it assumes you died if the DS is shut off or interrupted for any reason. This game isn't any good for portable gaming, and you can waste vast amounts of time only to have it throw away all of your progress to prevent you from possibly cheating (somehow???)

It's almost as good as the nasty copy protection on PC games that assumes you're a pirate - this game assumes you're a pirate and annihilates hours of work on a whim instantly and irrevocably. So maybe if there's a PSP version of this game, or one that doesn't punish you for not being able to game nonstop, it would be good - no, I'd actually love to see a game exactly like this. Not this one though, it's punitive for the worst reasons.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 04/22/08

Game Release: Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja (US, 02/20/07)