Izuna 2: The Unemployed Ninja Returns for Nintendo DS Reviews by Gamers

Play this game for an hour, and that's the way it's gonna go for as many more hours as you can stand it.

Maybe I'm just not a fan of the genre. Randomly generated dungeons sounds great on paper because it seems like you'll be able to play again and again and always find something new. Mostly though it means fending off the same enemies over and over while level grinding, hoping to find rare items, seeking out the stairs to be able to continue, and praying not to die or you'll lose all your items.

This formula doesn't seem to change much throughout the game. Some vaguely humorous cutscenes along the way do little to break it up and the story certainly doesn't help, not when your quest is to find your friend's long lost sister. The gal's not kidnapped or in danger or anything, she's just always a town ahead of you and you're looking for her. I really couldn't have cared less. The story gets more involved later but it's too little too late.

After the first dungeon you can bring two characters into the dungeons with you and switch between them. As soon as this becomes available all your allies other than Izuna are terribly underleveled so have fun level grinding. All your partners have more or less the same abilities apart from what weapons you choose to assign them, so it doesn't matter much who you pick... except in one way, and I got cheated on this one. You see, one character - the one I had chosen to train alongside Izuna - leaves the party. So I'm left with all the rest of my party at level 1 and I'm just like, I've got to spend hours training up someone else just to get to where I was before? No thanks!

Maybe your awol partner comes back and this game might have started to redeem itself but it still would have taken me significant effort to get through the next dungeon with that piece missing. Aside from losing my partner this game was at least playable as a timewaster, but it didn't stand out for me in any area. For fans of the genre only.

I've never played a game like Izuna before. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. Yes, it was a little hard. The whole losing everything you had when you die thing was a bummer, but it didn't ruin the game for me. The dialogue was pretty funny and so were the weapon descriptions.

The only problem I had was near the end. I already beat the main story and didn't know that I was going through an extra dungeon. I worked my butt off. Even leveled my characters to 99 lol. I had no idea. Oh well :P I still liked it.