Dungeon hacks. Dungeon crawlers. Roguelikes. Call them whatever you want; most people hate them. A roguelike is an overhead-view RPG that places you at the top floor of a randomly generated dungeon with no equipment, no skills, and no experience. You're tasked with finding your way to the bottom floor, using whatever randomly generated items you come across to fight monsters and gain experience. The odds are stacked against you, and if you die, you're placed back at the top floor and stripped of all items and experience points.
It sounds like a recipe for frustration, but because of their difficulty, depth, and replayability, roguelikes are greatly enjoyed by the more sadistic gamers among us. Last year's Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja sought to bridge the gap between hardcore roguelike fans and casual players by providing a gentler and more forgiving dungeon crawl. Izuna's recently released Japan-only sequel, Gouma Reifu Den Izuna Ni, brings many new features and improvements to the formula. Is it worth an import?
Legend of the Unemployed Ninja was a neat little game. You played as Izuna, a pink-haired ninja girl who found herself out of a job thanks to the fact that world peace had finally been achieved in the ninja kingdom. Izuna eventually bungled herself into a situation that required hours and hours of dungeon hacking, though, and along the way, she helped a village of people solve their problems by battling evil gods and making them promise not to be jerks anymore.
The original Izuna presented an interesting question: would a game in a genre most enjoyed for its difficulty still be fun if it was made slightly easier for accessibility's sake? Izuna played like any other roguelike, complete with randomly generated levels, weapons, and traps, but it had one key difference: if you died, you kept all of the levels and experience points you had gained. All weapons and items would be lost, but unlike other roguelikes, death in Izuna never felt like a total loss. In fact, it often felt like the game was becoming easier after every death, as your character would always return to the top floor of the dungeon stronger than before.
Roguelike fanatics turned their noses up at Izuna because of its relaxed difficulty level. I personally liked the approach. It put an interesting spin on a genre that, admittedly, can often seem impenetrable to outsiders. Unfortunately, Izuna met with the same mediocre review scores that any other roguelike typically earns among the mainstream gaming press, which just goes to show you that nobody knows what the hell they're talking about.
Oops! I mean, "...which just goes to show you that console-based roguelikes continue to be a misunderstood genre thanks to a lack of exposure and popularity outside of Japan."
(Which is still kind of a terrible thing to say, really. Roguelikes are awesome. You just have to be prepared to enjoy them for what they are. Giving a roguelike to your average critic is like putting me in front of a one-on-one fighting game and expecting me to say something insightful. In other words, if you've ever read a review of a roguelike that complains about the genre's intrinsic features like permadeath, you've wasted your time, and the review should have been handed to someone else.)
Anyway!
To put it mildly, Izuna met with a mixed reception among both casual RPG players and roguelike enthusiasts upon its U.S. release last year. Because of this, it's unlikely that its recently released sequel, Izuna Ni, will ever be localized for American release.
I played the import version of Izuna Ni for several hours, and it's an improvement over the original in many ways. There's an assortment of new weapons, items, and monster types, and the initial difficulty level seems to have been ramped up. Izuna Ni's biggest new feature allows you to explore certain dungeons with a party of two characters. This also means that there's more than one playable character this time around. Your initial party consists of Izuna, Shino and Mitsumoto -- the latter two of which co-starred in the previous game, but were never playable.
The two-person mechanic works tag-team style. One character hacks away at monsters until he or she dies, after which the second character steps in. You can also switch between both characters a limited number of times per floor, making it easier to share experience points and assist weaker characters. Each character levels up separately, so you'll need to use everyone equally if you don't want to end up with unbalanced parties later on in the game.
Izuna Ni never really sold me on the idea of a team-based roguelike, though. On one hand, it's satisfying to form a team that becomes more powerful together, but on the other, it takes a lot of tension out of the game. Roguelikes are often marked by a sense of dread, since their randomness means that death can come at any time from countless sources. Having a backup character in the wings takes the worry out of, say, using the wrong item or accidentally stepping on a trap. It's made even easier thanks to the fact that both party members share one inventory, and your backup teammate has access to all of your main character's items even after he or she dies.
A bigger issue for importers is the fact that all text and item descriptions in Izuna Ni are in Japanese, and the game is unlikely to be localized for American release anytime soon. This won't be a problem if you're fluent in Japanese, of course, but Izuna Ni is much more text-intensive than many other games -- including other roguelikes -- thanks to the series' more intricate features, like the weapons modification talismans that carry over from the first game. Item effects are immediately apparent when their descriptions are written in a language you can understand, but if your Japanese knowledge is lacking, a large portion of your inventory will be useless to you, since using items without knowing what they are rarely ends well in a roguelike.
You'll also be missing out on the storyline, which appears to be much more central to the experience here than it was in the original Izuna. There's a significant amount of voice acting this time around, too, and the cast of characters is much bigger than in the first game. The storyline might be interesting enough to make up for the questionable changes to the core gameplay, but I'll probably never know for sure if this is the case or not.
I still like it, though. As with the original Izuna, I enjoyed Izuna Ni for its interesting characters, unique boss battles, and solid dungeon crawling. The language barrier is much stronger than you might anticipate, though, and if you don't know Japanese, you'll be missing out on much of the game's appeal. It also makes the game much more difficult than it would be otherwise -- it took me over ten tries just to beat the first dungeon, mostly because I kept dying as a result of misusing items. If the game were in English, I probably wouldn't have eaten that bag of gunpowder.
Language barrier aside, Izuna Ni's gameplay really pales in comparison to Mysterious Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer, a similar but much more fun roguelike that's getting a U.S. release next month. Shiren is regarded by even the most fickle roguelike fans as being among the best in the genre, and it's an amazing, difficult, rewarding experience that greatly deserves its long-overdue official English release. If you don't like Shiren, odds are that you won't like either Izuna game, or any other roguelike, for that matter.
Shiren is a must-buy for any DS owner, I think. Izuna Ni? Not so much. Sorry, Izuna.
If there's one thing Izuna Ni boasts over Shiren, though, it's the fact that it comes bundled with a digital art CD full of promotional artwork and character sketches, some of which come across as softcore lesbian pseudo-porn. Don't get too excited -- all the developer notes are in Japanese, and there's no nudity or subject matter that's worth above a PG-13. Still, it's not something you'd want your mom to catch you looking at, mostly because it would require too much explanation. "See mom, they're sisters! Sort of. No, I don't know why that one's holding her sister's boobs. It's not for real, though -- they're just kidding around. Uh, I think."
I uploaded a few images from the CD below. Hopefully they won't get me in trouble with anyone's mom.
