Obviously I didn’t update the site much in May, for a few reasons.

1) With the term coming to an end, work at a bit of a high point, and a trip to Japan coming up later this month, “crazy busy” is a good description of May.

2) There’s been a bit of a return to the EQ addiction in the household. This is a bad thing, and will probably all end in tears.

3) I normally post something whenever I finish a game, and after abandoning Princess Peach, starting Yoshi’s Island DS, and giving up on that as a bad cause, I hadn’t finished anything until today.

I’ve spent the last two weeks in the enjoyable company of a certain young ninja girl. That being the titular character of “Izuna, Legend of the Unemployed Ninja.”

Honestly, if you’re my kind of person, you’ve probably already played it. Failing that, if you haven’t played it, hearing that there IS a game called “Izuna, Legend of the Unemployed Ninja” has probably made you decide to play it. If at this point you still need to hear me say anything more, I’m questioning whether you’re really my sort of person.

I’ll mention one more point: The banker NPC, who you have frequent occasion to visit, is a cute shrine maiden with glasses.

If you’re not already checking eBay for a used copy, I’m done with you.

But I’ll continue.

Izuna is often described in terms of being old school and uncompromisingly difficult and in general people say bad things about how it’s nasty and unforgiving.

This is true, to a point. See, it’s basically a graphically spiffed-up version of the old Unix game “Rogue”, and that game is crazy nasty and unforgiving: you’re thrown into a dungeon, you have to survive against heavy odds, and you’re probably going to starve to death if the monsters don’t kill you first, after which you start over again at level 1 with no stuff.

Izuna, on the other hand, doesn’t need to eat, and if you die in a dungeon you don’t go back to level 1. It’s practically easy!

Yeah, you lose all your stuff and all your money, but after you finish the first dungeon, you have access to the aforementioned incredibly cute banker who is happy to keep your spare gear and cash on hand for the next time you slink back to town, naked and bankrupt.

So it’s hard, yeah, and the game does tend to pick the worst possible moments to throw vicious chains of enemies at you, but you’re always able to pick up and head back down into the dungeon for another round. This time around, you’re probably a couple-three levels higher and it’ll be easier; you might even get down to the boss – and if you’ve fought all the way down to the boss, you probably won’t have any trouble with them. I only had to fight one boss more than twice.

The dungeons are randomly generated, but all the normal things you’d expect apply: as you get lower, enemies get harder, treasure better, traps more frequent. You have seven dungeons to get through to finish the story, with an optional 8th dungeon that actually IS just as nasty and unforgiving as Rogue – which is, I assume, why it’s optional. If you’re crazy, it’s there to give you a challenge.

Getting through the seven not-optional dungeons and seeing the extent of the story was really challenge enough for me, so I’ve stopped there. I understand there’s a sequel coming out, which will probably be more of the same.

If that “more of the same” includes more cute girls in glasses, consider it a day one purchase.