Izuna 2: The Unemployed Ninja Returns is the quintessential Roguelike RPG. The dungeons are randomly created, they're pretty dang tough and if you die in them, you lose all of your money and all of your items but keep your experience. If none of this appeals to you, then on your way with you, have a nice day and all that. If you're into this kind of thing, you'll certainly get more out of the game, despite the game's many, many attempts to make things as difficult for you as possible, but not so much that Izuna can be recommended over other games of the same genre out there for the DS.

In this latest outing, Izuna is back, and like the title says, she's still without gainful employment. Her and her party of fellow travelers is in town to take in the wedding of a friend when one of the party members goes off in search of her missing sister. It's up to Izuna to track her down and off we go, into the randomly created blue yonder. Before you can do so though, you need to speak to everyone in town, an annoying fact, given that there's no map to show you where all of the buildings are or who you've already spoken to.

Once you've made with the yapping and enter the dungeons, you'll get a map of the dungeon that uncovers more and more of your setting as you move around. Combat is turn based, with each action, be it an attack or a movement, affording the enemies in the dungeon an opportunity to attack. Izuna can attack and move diagonally this time, a nice touch especially when surrounded by enemies. When the time comes to go to toe to toe, Izuna can attack with her equipped weapon, use items or cast spells from talismans. After the dust settles, any lost health can be regained by walking around, but at the expense of stamina points. Losing all of your stamina points leads to underpowered attacks and the inability to cast spells. If you lose all of your health, it's out of the dungeon with you, with nary a coin or an item to your name.

Luckily there's plenty of stuff lying around the dungeons, and you can store items in storerooms for post death retrieval, however this doesn't change the fact that the gameplay is a serious grind, just a slightly less inconvenient form of grind. Oh sure, it's fun to hit a beastie and see them go down in one punch because you've leveled up so much in your efforts, but it still doesn't take away the sting of making it down to the bottom of a dungeon just to get ganged up on and killed, thereby wiping out the past hour you just spent traversing the various levels.

Izuna has companions with her this type around, and after a time going solo, you'll gain the ability to have one companion switch places with Izuna for an opportunity to throw down. On paper, this is a great idea, as it gives you access to weapon types that Izuna can't wield, but in practice it falls flat. Your companions don't level up with you, so now, along with working on leveling up Izuna, you have to level up her companions too. Switching to a companion because Izuna is on the edge of death doesn't really work when you haven't been leveling up the companions and they're too underpowered to be effective. On the plus side, Izuna and her companion can deal out team up attacks which change based on who you're teamed up with. It's a nice addition, but the companion babysitting detracts too much from the overall system.

Other aspects of the game also make your experience with Izuna more annoying than it needs to be. Your inventory can only hold 20 items, which, along with the die and lose everything style of play, forces you to use as much of your inventory as you can while exploring, but as a result, you spend a lot of time comparing what you just found with what you have, to see what to get rid of. Given that there's no rhyme or reason to the naming conventions, the only way to know if the sword you just found is better than your sword, you need to go to several screens to compare the stats. There are talismans you can use to warp out and sell or store your gear, but you can't warp back to where you came from, meaning you start the dungeon all over again.

At least the game is humorous, with Izuna written as a died in the wool slacker. The dialogs between her and the various folks you meet along the way are well written and quite funny and you can't help but enjoy Izuna even if she is a first class reprobate. The game looks like it was coded for the GBA with none of the graphical bells and whistles that the DS is capable of providing. The game does nothing to take advantage of the DS's features either. The second screen is used to show Izuna's current state of health, as well as the dungeon map, but that's pretty much it. There is minimal touch screen support, limited to picking which save game to load up.

The game repeats the same formula as you progress meaning that you'll enter a town, talk to everyone, be pointed towards the local dungeon, fight through said dungeon to the boss on the final level and then it's on to the next town and the next dungeon. If this kind of no-frills design, along with the textbook implementation of Roguelike dungeon crawling is your kind of thing, then Izuna might be worth a look, provided you can overlook the various annoyances. That's a tall order for all but the most patient of gamers though, meaning that this is one ninja who won't be dropping the "unemployed" part of her title any time soon.

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