I won, I finally won….. After so many months, so many try, so many failures, so many frustrations, I have beaten Izuna: Legend of The Unemployed Ninja, a dungeon RPG game for the Nintendo DS.
I started playing the game around November 2007, I was beaten pretty bad and decided to play and finish other games that I got first. The hard aspects of the game that I found are:
1. The save points is only useful to take rest from the game, in other words, when you die in a dungeon, you’ll have to start all over again, not from the save point.
2. The “shut the game down when you almost die” tactic doesn’t work. Unlike many other games out there, where if you shut the game down when you almost die, you will restart at the last save point, Izuna have another gameplay rule. If you shut the game down, the game will automatically consider you commit suicide, in other words, the result is just the same as getting kill.
3. When you die, you will lose all the money, and the items that you are carrying with you. There is a way to save your weapons though, by sticking a Kikan talisman to it. This way, when you die, the weapon will be send to the storehouse (of course that is if the store house is available and not full at the moment).
4. The number of items you can carry is limited, and except for bombs, kunai, caltrops, and shuriken. Everything else is will take one place per item.
5. In the dungeons, there will be traps and monsters, there are traps and monsters attacks that will destroy your items or affect your status and weapon.
Well, there are more reasons I can put in as the game challenges, but I think these are the main ones.
After a while, I continued playing Izuna. This time, I got pretty far, finished almost all the dungeons and even defeated the last god (a dungeon boss), it was tough for me at that time. 21 floors of enemies, and there are also traps to watch out for. After beating the last god, I thought it was over, guess I was wrong though. There’s another dungeon, and another boss to beat.
A dungeon with 41 floors to go through, complete with monsters at their strongest form and many traps, the last dungeon was almost like hell to me at that time. After almost getting killed so many times, I became traumatized. I was afraid to play it again, and decided to finish some other games first.
Around end of May 2008, I have finished every game I got except for Izuna. So once again, I played the game with the aim of finishing it. I decided that defense was the main key (as I only focus on raising my attack and completely neglected my defense before), I started to raise my defense. After a while, I finally ready to challenge the dungeon again (or so I thought). With 3 swords with attack points of 300 something and 2 arm guards with defense points of over 600, I challenged the dungeon one more time. Sadly, not everything goes my way; I found myself again, at the edge of death and escaped the dungeon with frustrations and anger on my mind.
Finally I decided to go all the way; I decided to make the ultimate gears by raising my attack and defense points to 999. I started with my sword Zantetsu, after raising its base attack to 995 (after equip, the attack will be add to my own base attack of 5 points so it will still raise to max), I stick 3 Hayate talisman to it, so I can attack twice per turn. After that, I raise my Enma arm’s defense to 999, and stick 7 Mikiri and 1 Kikan to it. Now I’m ready to face the dungeon one more time.
After selecting the items that I will bring, I went into the last dungeon (of the story), Singularity. The hard works that I’ve done proved to be worth it, as also the 3 Hayate talismans that I stick to my sword. Everything was going my way; I decided not to explore each floor and made finding the stair my main objective. This is to avoid using the sword to much and break it, although I’ve brought many Fukugen talisman with me to fix my gear when needed, the talisman drain SP which will resulting in reducing my attack. But after halfway through, a monster burned one of the Hayate talisman leaving only 2. Unfortunately, 3 will be needed to launch the attack twice in one turn, and now, I can only attack once per turn. After that, every other thing was smooth and I was able to reach the 41st floor.
The fight started well, I finished other monsters first so they won’t disturb me later (during my fight with the last boss). When I saw the boss being close to me, I throw all the bombs I got at him, causing around 8000 damage. I went in front of him and attack him, but the attack wasn’t as high as I hope, seems like the boss also got a really high defense. As we were exchanging blows, the boss used his special attack that cost me half my HP and threw me all the way to the wall. I decided to heal myself by walking and ran from the boss. After healing my HP, I found myself being cornered and his special attack hit me again, unfortunately, the wall was right behind me and he was a step away only. After healing myself by using one of the 3 Orb of Divinity that I got, I exchange blows with him one more time and after that was hit by his special attack again and flown away across the room. I quickly used the second orb at tried to make space between me and him, but he was good at cornering me and hit me with that special attack one more time. Once again I was flying across the room until I hit the wall. I used the last orb and walk a few steps only to be cornered by him. Since that was the first time I’ve ever reach that far, I decided to go all the way and attack him, he return the favor with a normal attack. With fear in my mind I attack him one more time and suddenly, when I was expecting an attack I saw him falling, and at that time I knew I’ve won……
