Izuna 2: The Unemployed Ninja Returns

Written by Kris Rosado  on October 16, 2008

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Our favorite bubble headed ninja returns being employed by Success and Atlus to entertain us rogue-like fans once more in this sequel to last year's comical, yet totally enraging dungeon crawler, Izuna: The Legend of the Unemployed Ninja. If you've read our preview of this game then you pretty much know what to expect. I mean hey, that was the finished product, only now we know how well the story holds up and we can officially put a score on it.

Safe to say, the story holds up well. True to the first game, this sequel increases the slapstick comedy and introduces a handful of new characters that are well constructed. It also gives Izuna the freedom to travel around more than one village and dungeons aren't restricted to caves. While the world is still small compared to something like a Final Fantasy or a Zelda game, the sense of traveling opens things up a bit which is an improvement over the first game's limited one town exploration.



What really makes this series fun is the unforgiving difficulty and Izuna 2 is no exception. The mechanic of losing money, items, and weapons when you die is still here and while the average depth of the dungeons has shrunk in levels, the difficulty of surviving the spelunking has increased. Since you'll be making use of whatever you find in a particular dungeon most of the time, it's always good to plan some sort of strategy because running in head first is not going to work. That's where the new Tag System comes in. Players can choose a partner character to take in the dungeons and even have the ability to switch characters on-the-fly. This adds a relief of sorts under the nightmare situations that an unlucky ninja might come up against.

While the game doesn't really make use of the DS's features, it doesn't really have to. Controlling the game is perfectly comfortable as-is. However, clever players will make use of the microphone at a Уspecial eventФ in the game.