Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja was developed and published by Success and Ninja Studio, the same publisher-developer team that brought us the wonderful must-play title Tactical Guild. Luckily for us all, the two games don’t have anything else in common. For one thing Izuna is actually pretty good. I’m going to borrow the plot description from Wikipedia to save myself some time:

Izuna and her ninja clan are looking for a place to settle down after their old master Mugen decided that ninjas were obsolete, and booted them from his castle. Upon arriving at a village that’s suitably out of the way for their “Grandboss”, Gen-An, they decide to stay at an inn when Grandboss wanders off. While trying to find Grandboss, Izuna manages to offend the gods of the village, and everyone in the area starts behaving strangely. Now Izuna has to descend into the various shrines for the gods in order to set things right.

And that’s all the plot any rogue-like ever needs. Izuna is similar to other rogue-likes in most ways: randomly generated dungeons, enemies make a move when you make a move, item drops galore in the dungeons, lose all items and money when you die. However you get to keep your level, which goes all the way up to 99. Higher levels mean more HP (my Izuna had 7000+ HP) and ATK, so you’re not really starting from scratch every time. You can also attach talismans to your favorite weapons that will send them back to the storehouse any time you get wiped out. It’s like the tagging system in later Shiren the Wanderer games, but much, much cheaper. This makes the most dangerous enemies and traps in the game not the hardest hitters but rather the ones that destroy or remove your talismans or seal your ability to use them.

How could I possibly say no?

Apart from the levels, Izuna also has very small dungeon floors. It’s not uncommon to find yourself right next to the stairs for several floors in a row. It’s also very sparing with the traps, and enemy density isn’t very high either. It’s very easy to power weapons and armor up to superhuman levels by sticking cheap talismans on them. There’s an SP stat but no hunger stat, so you can keep going pretty much forever as long as your HP holds up. And no matter how poorly you’re doing, the game will always refill your HP and SP back to full when you reach a boss floor.

Beneficial drops also outweigh hurtful ones by quite a bit, so you’re never too far from the next healing item. ‘Kikan’ talismans that take you back home are a dime a dozen as well. In all the hours I played I only saw an enemy level up from another once, whereas it happens all the time in Shiren and is terrifying when it does. tl;dr this is a very easy game. Thanks to that I just finished my second rogue-like ever, yay!

Although it’s easy, Izuna is not as bereft of challenge as Sakura Taisen Dramatic Dungeon was. I still got killed a couple of times, mostly when my Kikan talismans got burned to a crisp. I tried to solve this by carrying two Kikans and warping out whenever something happened to one of them. But there was this time in Singularity when I was close to the end and got cocky. I stepped on a Fire trap and one talisman went poof. Whatever, I’m almost done anyway. Two steps later another Fire trap, another talisman. Then a Sacred Lantern burned all the talismans off my weapons and a ghost sucked all my SP so I was doing only scratch damage. Then I ran out of healing items and died. =_= Farewell my lovely Musou Blade and Orochi Arm! Luckily I had well built-up spares in the storehouse and finished the game in my very next run but man, that wasn’t cool.

Taking all that into consideration, I think Izuna would make a good introduction to rogue-likes. It’s much more forgiving than Shiren but still tough enough to give newbies a good workout. Izuna herself is a bit of a jerk (she didn’t seem so bad in Rondo of Swords) but there are some amusing villagers and little skits to see and the story isn’t hard to follow at all. The only potential turn-off is that all the talisman names are kept in Japanese. Maybe this was done to make the game feel more ‘ninja-ish’ but it’s probably confusing to fans who don’t know that much Japanese. How hard would it be to make Kikan = Return, Fukugen = Repair, etc? Or at least provide an in-game glossary to explain these things.

Minor nitpicks aside I still had fun. Not enough to play the bonus dungeon, but enough to press on and finish after I’d lost everything once. If you’ve tried other rogue-likes and found them too hard, or you’re just looking for another one to add to your collection, definitely pick up Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja and its sequel.

Related posts:

Dramatic Dungeon Sakura Taisen – A roguelike for people who don’t like roguelikes Fuurai no Shiren DS 2 – I’m not really into postgame content Dungeon of Windaria – Sometimes simple is good Why I put Izuna 2 on hold