Games Revisited: Tao's Adventure

[Sk8teland85]

Now this is a game I picked up a while back when I was in the mood for a unique niche RPG for the DS. This may not be one of the better DS RPGs but it still is a fair amount of fun and will keep you entertained. This week I was in the mood for this kind of RPG so I decided to give this one a revisit and here are my thoughts.

An interesting fact abut this game is that it actually is a sequel to a old Playstation 1 game called Azure Dreams made back in 1998. Originally this was just going to be a DS remake of Azure Dreams but the developers decided rather than just doing a remake they would rather make a sequel so that is what we got.

Anyways on to my revisit, now the basic premise of this game is to go through a large tower dungeon that has multiple floors. So it is basically a dungeon crawler. Now the game play is turn based on a grid meaning the whole floor is divided up into a grid and you and the enemies move across it one space at a time one turn at a time. This is a simple concept and it does work nicely as a whole although it does get repetitive after a while.

One problem I noticed with my revisit which is kinda annoying are the controls. Now Konami the company who made the game tried to make this game use the touch screen of the DS as much as they could, the only problem is that this kind of game does not really benefit from the touch screen. The overall setup just seems to be not very well thought out. Movement is just a pain with the touch screen although you can also do movement with the D-pad which makes it a lot easier. But the problem is that this is about the only thing that can also be done with normal commands, the rest uses the touch screen and can just be awkward.

There is one use of the touch screen I do like and that is the casting of magic. It is done like in Lost Magic where you draw lines and such for your spells and this works very well. While the touch screen may be a pain to use it does not effect how the game plays which is a good thing.

Now the presentation is alright but not great. The game looks decent for a DS title circa 2005/2006 but still the environments while decent do seem bland as do the animations. The music is nicely done although nothing spectacular. There may not be any voice acting but overall the text in the game is nicely translated which is something games like this sometimes fall short on.

After this revisit I will admit this is far from the best RPG for the system but it still is a nice fun game overall. It may have some interface issues and the gameplay may get repetitive after a while but there is a fair amount of fun in this game. This is a good example of a niche title that appeals to a specific kind of gamer. So I would not say that this title is a buy even at the low price you can find it for now a days. But I will say it is definitely a title that you should at least look into.