I'm really not getting through these at the rate I was expecting. Granted, I've been playing the Izuna games during downtime while working from home whereas my evening time has been dominated by such little-known titles as Hollow Knight: Silksong and Hades II. I guess it makes sense that completing these two relatively short games has been a tad delayed. Having said that, my slow pace is not a reflection on the games' quality. In fact, I enjoyed them quite a bit!
In previous writeups, I've explained a little about a wish list I made in 2011 comprised entirely of DS games. I always expected I would get to them eventually—and I was right, but I'm not sure I would have predicted 2025 for the year I'd finally do so. Better late than never, though, and the exercise of playing these games more or less blind has been a lot of fun. For instance, I had no idea that Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja was a roguelike. I'm not sure I'd ever even played a roguelike in 2011, and if I had, it would have been one of the Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon games if anything at all. Izuna isn't entirely dissimilar.
Who is Izuna and why is she unemployed?
Let's talk about the basics here. Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja was originally released in 2007 in the US, meaning it's the oldest game I've delved into as part of this exercise so far. Oddly, it has aged much better than some of these other games, perhaps because it doesn't really leverage any of the DS's unique functions. Graphically, it wouldn't look out of place on the GBA—but it's colorful and clean in its presentation. Everything on screen is easy to parse, so it's never confusing to navigate or engage with combat. Your top screen is where you'll see dialogue and information about Izuna while navigating the game's dungeons, but the touch screen is where the meat of the gameplay lives.
As for the story, well, that's pretty simple. It's a time of peace, so Izuna's ninja clan is out of work. In a fit of boredom, Izuna steals a priceless artifact from the village they're staying in, which results in the villagers being cursed by the gods. Izuna must now fix the problem that she created by tracking down the various gods and beating them up. As she does, she slowly cures the various villager curses, some of which are pretty funny. One guy is cursed to just be afraid of going bald. The old man who can't stop hitting on Izuna is less funny, though.
Combat fundamentals
If you've played a traditional roguelike before, you'll know what to expect when you first enter a dungeon. Movement and actions are taken in turns and all enemies move with you. Positioning, making use of choke points, and managing your resources are crucial to success. You'll find randomized items and gear as you go, but if you die, you lose all of it for good. Your Experience is the only thing you're guaranteed to keep, but luckily, you can store away anything you find as long as you clear the dungeon or find a way to teleport out. Because Izuna features several discrete dungeons that mostly aren't very long, the tension of losing your items generally isn't very high.
Some games like this balance your time in the dungeon with a hunger gauge of some kind, but the way Izuna does it is pretty clever. You have HP as you would expect, but your other resource is SP, which serves a whole variety of different purposes. Izuna is a ninja, so of course she has access to magic talismans (found in the dungeons or purchased from shops) that accomplish various effects. You might clear a floor with a big fire attack from a talisman, or paralyze all enemies, or maybe just repair your gear. These talismans cost a certain amount of SP, which not only does not regenerate on its own, but affects how much damage you deal and receive. The closer to full SP you are, the better your melee capabilities. The game encourages you to make a choice between spending your SP for spells or hoarding it to be more effective in close quarters.
There are items in the dungeons that can restore your SP, but of course the amount of those you find comes down to luck. You could easily go through most of a dungeon and not find any SP-restoring items—or maybe you find a bunch when you don't need them. Fortunately, you can haul your gear back to town and put them in storage for another run. Preparing your loadout for any particular venture is a big part of what makes the game fun for me. Maybe I know there's a tough boss coming up but I can trivialize it by spamming several Gouka scrolls for big fire damage—but to do that, I need a lot of SP, which means I'll need to save up some restorative items and also conserve on the long journey to the dungeon's end. Maybe on the way you'll find a lot of valuable stuff that you don't want to run the risk of losing, so you pop a Kikan scroll and teleport back to town to save your valuables. Each trip still feels impactful and important in the long run because you're gaining experience and money over time.
Complexity lurking beneath the surface
Despite the mechanics of
Izuna feeling simple on the surface, there's a surprising amount of depth. At the end of the day, you're mostly just walking up to enemies and attacking them until they're dead, hoping that your numbers are good enough to outlast the damage you take in return. But you have more control over that process than simply leveling up. Sure, leveling up increases your HP and SP (which indirectly increases your offense and defense), but gear is also hugely important. Izuna has access to only a few different types of gear, but there are subcategories within each of these types that diversify your strategies. Izuna can equip swords, arms, and claws. Claws provide both attack and defense, whereas swords provide only attack, and arms provide only defense. Now, arms can only be equipped with a sword, so one wonders why you wouldn't just simplify and go with the claw option. For a while, that was also my take, but I learned over time that it wasn't necessarily the best answer.
Like most other roguelikes, Izuna has a limited inventory, which means if you choose to go the Sword + Arm route, you're limiting your inventory a bit just by default. What's important to consider here is that not all swords, claws, or arms are created equal. Each piece of gear in the game has raw stats that fall within a randomized range, but on top of that, they have a key attribute shared with all gear of that same name. For example, Cat Claws do more damage against Fish-type enemies. Dragon Claws shoot out a wave of energy when you're full HP, à la the Master Sword. The gear combo that I really came to rely on for a big chunk of the game was Shingan Blade paired with Enma Arm. The former cannot miss and the latter prevents SP loss on being hit. Since I understood that your SP pool was a big determining factor in your overall combat ability, it felt like a natural fit if I wanted to stick primarily with melee. Being able to hit every time and never lose damage potency made it feel like I never had to leave a dungeon early unless I really wanted to.
Speaking of depth though, I still haven't discussed everything that talismans can do. There are many talismans with various effects, but the spell or function they perform is only one use for them. They can also be stuck to your gear to boost their stats or impart unique attributes. For example, the Rekka scroll is normally a fire attack, but when stuck to a weapon, it increases base attack. The amount it increases attack is equal to the number in parentheses, so the higher you find, the better. However, each weapon also has a total SP capacity which determines how much in talismans you can apply to it. For instance, if you have 100 capacity available on your sword, you could put four 20 SP Rekkas on it, or you could simply go with one 100 SP Rekka. For a min-maxer like myself, I wanted to ensure I got the most bang for my buck, so I started hunting for Fukusei scrolls, which are almost always available in the 89-95 range and simply duplicate any existing talisman. By making use of these scrolls, you can duplicate Rekkas to match the capacity of the Fukusei you used. If this sounds a little complicated, it's because it kind of is! But it speaks to the depth of this charming little 2007 DS roguelike. I won't even get in to the various ways in which you can expand your gear's SP capacity because I've gone on long enough.
Humor is a double-edged sword In case it isn't clear, I'm an intensely mechanics-focused person, especially when it comes to games like these. But I mentioned Izuna is charming—and it is, but it's also important to note that it's a product of its time, and of Japanese culture. The game is not at all shy about acknowledging that our protagonist is a sexy teenage girl, and in fact is practically beating you over the head with that fact. It's generally played for humor, but this kind of thing usually skeeves me out a bit. A 16-year-old girl being hit on by old men or being called "just a child with oversized breasts" doesn't really get me to guffawing, if I'm being honest. There's also a random bit of an NPC dialogue that honest-to-god drops the R-slur. Even for a game from 2007, I was shocked that made it through the localization process.
Oh, right, there's a second game here
It is at this point that I realize I've done all this writing and I realize I haven't even talked about
Izuna 2. After I got through the first game reasonably quickly, I thought I might as well just do my writeup on both games together, but what I didn't anticipate is that the sequel really expands on every mechanic significantly.
The Unemployed Ninja Returns exemplifies everything a sequel should be by building on a rock-solid foundation and introducing a wide variety of new ideas. The most important and defining change from the first game is that you can now play more characters than just Izuna—and in fact, you now deploy two characters to every dungeon. At first, it's just Izuna and her ninja pals Shino and Mitsumoto, but later the whole pantheon of gods from the first game inexplicably join you, meaning you have access to a whole pile of characters who all have different aptitudes and special abilities. Some characters are good with swords, some are good with ranged weapons (new to the sequel), and many have unique tag attacks that can only be performed with specific duos. If Izuna might have worn a little thin near the end, Izuna 2 overwhelms with variety from the very beginning.
Remember how I said there were different types of swords, claws, and arms in the first game? That's still true in Izuna 2 and all of those weapon types return, but in addition there are new types of those base weapons and then a ton of completely new kinds like razor yo-yos, bows, different kinds of arrows, boomerangs that hit all 8 spaces around you, and even dolls that can be used as weapons. There are also many new talismans and a new Staff item you can use in conjunction with them that add a third unique function to every talisman. Having all of these options added to the pool of random gear to find in any excursion adds so much variety to each run. The big roster also means you can really experiment with your loadouts more than ever before. I liked Izuna 1 just fine, but Izuna 2 is a game I would legitimately recommend if you like traditional roguelikes at all.
The developers were also smart enough to build reasons into the game for actually tagging out in the dungeons. It might be tempting to just stick with one character all the time, but since these two characters have completely separate HP pools, many encounters are balanced around needing that extra bulk to survive. On top of that, you can instantly tag to your partner if you get hit with a nasty status ailment. You have three tags available at maximum, but they also recharge pretty quickly. It always feel possible to swap back and forth often. Building your duo to capitalize on their different strengths is a lot of fun.
I mentioned the loadout that I relied on for much of Izuna 1, so I'll shout out what I used in the sequel as well. I stuck as Izuna for my primary character with support from Utsuho, one of the gods that has great proficiency with ranged weapons. Izuna stuck with a Vampire Claw (drains 5% of damage as health) upgraded to the moon while Utsuho rotated between a bow and an insane ranged weapon called Wheel of Steal that hits all four spaces in front of you and has a chance to steal a random item. I'd swap him over to a boomerang with +Defense whenever he got surrounded.
There's a lot more I could say about these games if I wanted to get even more in the weeds about mechanics, but ultimately, I just want to say that I liked these games a lot despite some discomfort with the developer's sense of humor. Izuna 1 is a reasonably short, solid roguelike, whereas Izuna 2 is actually pretty exceptional and something I would consider playing again if not for, well, all the games I have on the docket as it is.
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