Yes I'm double posting...
I'm posting my initial impression of Izuna 2 here until I get further into it to do something worthy of a full review.
Izuna 2: The Unemployed Ninja Returns.
My first impression is that this is REALLY easy as far as Roguelikes go, it borders on being Roguelite but I think it falls just short of crossing over into that territory.
Why it's a Roguelike:
If you die you lose your items and money, all of them, and return to town.
Dungeon crawling where each level is randomnly generated.
Turn based action.
Lots and lots of items, most of which are not identified.
Why it's a Roguelite (almost):
You can store items and money that will persist even after death.
You keep your EXP when you die.
You can choose to bring a party member with you while dungeon crawling and you can switch between the two, even if the primary character "dies".
Since it's a graphical Roguelike for the DS I keep wanting to compare it to Shiren so I'll make the followingn additional observations.
The graphics are good. Large handdrawn sprites are used for conversations while standard looking sprites are used for the dungeon crawliing. This is sort of unfair to compare with Shiren which is a port of an old Super Nintendo game or to Nethack which I still play in ASCII flavor but whatever *shrug*.
Unlike Shiren you can't retreat to previous floors in a dungeon but also unlike Shiren the Dungeons don't seem to be a linear progression. Town appears to act like a hub and there seem to be multiple dungeons.
Weapons in Izuna can break through use. This adds a nice bit of resource management and difficulty which brings me to the other thing Izuna does that I like.
Talismans are basically magic stickers you can find throughout the dungeons. You can either use them like a spell scroll by reading them, or you can stick them on a weapon to grant it some ability OR stick to a staff to make the staff magic. This seems to be how you would grind weapons up to uber levels of power through careful application of talismans, assuming you don't break the weapon.
The game also has a voice overs during most character conversations. I give it bonus points for using the original Japanese voices and not redubbing. The game also has a good sense of humor.
Overall initial impressions are favorable, if you like Roguelikes I would get it. It was well worth the less than ten bucks I spent on it
Now to find the original...
