Nerd Mentality

Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja

Posted April 9th 2007 by J Edison Thomas.

It's common advice to avoid judging a book by its cover. Years ago, consumers had little choice but to choose the games they'd be playing based descriptions and screenshots on the back of the game's box, interest generated by the box art, and brand recognition. Today's endless rabble of previews and reviews grants most gamers a thick armor against eye-grabbing box art, but it's still hard to deny the draw of a curious title like Legend of the Unemployed Ninja.

The title isn't entirely deceptive, though anyone hoping for a game about a ninja having to run paper routes or paint fences will be disappointed. There's very little plot development and no gameplay centered around the idea of the main character or her band of ninjas being unemployed, but the quirkiness one might expect from the title runs fairly true throughout the game. Izuna is a young female ninja whose looks and personality resonate closely with Haruko from the anime series FLCL. She's headstrong, impatient and rude, and when she and her grandfather's band of ninjas enters a sleepy town protected by elemental guardian gods, hijinks so definitely ensue.

By touching a forbidden spiritual stone, Izuna brings wave after wave of incidental curses upon the village that cause such horrors as sleepiness, PMS, and the crippling fear of going bald. Izuna's quest to dodge the blame for her troupe has her entering increasingly dangerous dungeons to confront the local gods and retrieve Sacred Orbs that relieve the ongoing maladies. Her interactions with the villagers during these misadventures provide the strongest support for the title and often are worth at least a chuckle, either from the nature of the curses or just the characters' personalities. The entire game is silly to a degree that few development houses would allow, and it's easy to get the impression that this is the result of a translation team that had a lot of fun localizing the title.

It's fortunate that the writing is so goofy, because the game is otherwise a straightforward dungeon crawler that isn't notably ambitious in any other way. The entirety of the story takes place in one small village, which is comparable to A Link to the Past's Kakariko in size, but not in activity. The town serves to provide only the basest of RPG services: a bank holds money and items so Izuna doesn't lose them if she dies in a dungeon; shopkeepers will sell either items like health, shurikens, or magic spells in the form of talismans; smiths will repair worn-down weapons or strip them of talismans that might have been sealed into them; a hotel will save your game.

The game does make an earnest technical effort in creating a likeable atmosphere, and succeeds about halfway. The dialogue between Izuna and the villagers is played out in bright, humorous anime stills, though the in-game graphics are simplistic and unoriginal. They resemble every other top-down style RPG since the SNES, with plants, rocks, and most of the other surroundings suffering from a lack of variety. The music churns out upbeat tunes in traditional Japanese styles, and it varies more than the enviroment or gameplay. It's also simplistic and fairly forgettable, but given the production value of the rest of the game, the music is surprisingly pleasant. The rising cresendo of the battle themes carries more weight in adding excitement than probably any other aspect of the gameplay experience. It's funny how music has that power even in light doses.

Legend of the Unemployed Ninja follows fairly standard crawler guidelines and almost feels real-time, although in reality all action is based on Izuna's movement. For each step she takes (or if she attacks, equips a weapon, uses an item, etc.) villagers or monsters do likewise. It adds some strategy to her movement, especially when swarmed with monsters in a dungeon, but it also keeps it a slightly-veiled turn-based game.

When Izuna enters a new dungeon, the game saves, and she can only get back safely to town by working her way through the dungeon to the other side (or by using an escape spell, which requires starting all over). This involves finding staircases in each floor to take her deeper into the dungeon, until she gets to the room with that dungeon's elemental god. No, there's no indication of how many floors are in the dungeon, so there's no telling how much farther Izuna has to go. Just keep on trucking.

The maze-like formations of tunnels and rooms is random and changes by the floor, but these changes make a negligible difference in the way they're played. Each dungeon will feel almost exactly the same as the first, although the later dungeons limit Izuna's vision of her surroundings to just a few squares outside her own position. There are no puzzles or even any kind of tasks required to advance to the next floor other than finding the next staircase, and often Izuna enters a new floor only a few tiles away from the one she's looking for.

In the dungeons, Izuna can find all the items that she could buy in town and more, and in only a matter of floors she'll have filled her two-page list of items she can carry. Soon you will have to start the agonizing (for an RPG pack-rat like me) task of swapping out less desirable items for something better. Is it better to carry more than two weapons (the maximum equipped at any time) for the high price they'll fetch back in town, or more spells in case Izuna gets backed into a corner? Decisions, decisions.

The difficulty of the game is tricky: it has both the frustration inherent in hard games, and the boredom associated with easy games. If Izuna is backed into a corner and surrounded by monsters, only a good spell or luck will save her, but otherwise the game is a breeze. So it all becomes a game of "Press Your Luck", as it's easy to pass through a dungeon and even defeat a god with a modest amount of items, and the only real danger is lingering too long on any given floor to search for more items.

Once Izuna faints from defeat, she loses all her items and money, making the next attempt at the dungeon that much more difficult, rather like Diablo. The difference here is that none of Izuna's items remain where she fell for retrieval, which means starting over either from scratch or from whatever was entrusted to the bank. The switch here is that Izuna's weapons don't drastically increase her attack power, so if it weren't for lack of health potions there'd be little difference between running through a dungeon armed to the teeth or charging in naked.

The magic spells and auxiliary items in the game are fairly stock: some burst flames onto surrounding enemies, others teleport Izuna to a random point in the dungeon, and some even duplicate enemies. There's a fun bit of strategy to their use, such as with the Fire Pill, which if "Used" will cause damage to Izuna for ingesting it, and instead needs to be "Thrown Away" into an enemy's mouth. The magic spells, called talismans, also have the added use of being able to be sealed into Izuna's weapons to give them abilities like heightened Attack or a chance of causing paralysis. Of course, adding talismans also increases the speed at which weapons wear down, so there's some light strategy in figuring out how to use which items best.

Slight Pulse - For the inexperienced or the overly curious.

There are very few original ideas here, and while nothing about the gameplay completely fails, nothing excels either. The best way to convey the essence of this game is to describe it as a high-end version of an RPG you might find for free somewhere on the internet, or a dungeon-crawler you might expect to play on a cell phone. For inexperienced gamers interested in getting into the genre, it provides a light crash course in the basics of turn-based adventure games, but it's not likely to be the smashing first impression that will hook them for life.

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