|
Picture the following scenario if you will. A huge tower filled with myriad monsters. They're hanging out, doing what monsters do (maybe the monster mash! Ha!), but never traveling outside of that tower. Because it's sealed! That's right. And you'd imagine that seal, by its very nature, is powerful enough to withstand even a decent magician's magic. Alas, the poor schmuck who slapped that puppy on forgot about good old Mother Nature. Long story short, a huge bolt of lighting breaks the seal and sends these depraved monsters sprawling across the land.
They even manage to attack a remote island holding a group of magicians called Air Spellers, who despite being an ancient race of powerful magicians, get smoked (well actually turned to stone) within seconds. What happens next? Of course, our hero, a young boy named Tao, must travel to the tower and procure a magic egg in order to break the stone curse put on his villagers.
Excited yet? How about now? Truth be told, there is very little to be excited about in this average dungeon crawler with monster collecting on the side. Besides the generic story and characters, the interface is unnecessarily clunky. We all know the big selling point of the DS is its touch screen capabilities, but this can also be overdone, especially in an RPG where basic actions like talking to townspeople requires using the stylus to click “talk” on the screen. Even if you bump into someone with no intention to converse with, you have to use the stylus to back out of the conversation.
The action takes place in the upper screen, where Tao traverses the town surrounding the monster tower. The lower screen is used to make commands, look at the map, and attack. Get this though: try looking at the map on the bottom screen, while moving around on the top screen. For whatever reason, you can't. So, this means you have to check your location, leave the map and then you are free to move around again. This may seem minor, but it is a basic element of RPG navigation. Thankfully, you can see a transparent map overtop the screen once inside the tower (in battle mode).
So what exactly is the point of Tao's Adventure? The point, like other dungeon crawlers, is to do just that—move through level after level of enemies while powering up and in this case acquiring monster companions. There is actually quite a lot to do in town. You can buy weapons and shields, herbs and other medicinal items; identify eggs at the monster shop (so you can hatch them later in the tower); make medicine using eggs; upgrade weapons; and learn a bunch of spells. But will you end up wanting to spend that much time in town, or will you decide to pack up and move on to greener pastures? That really depends on if you enjoy a stylus heavy interface and a lot of repetition.
Spells are cast like Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, where you draw the spell to cast it. Once in monster tower, you are immediately in combat and enemies you encounter will have to be engaged with strikes or magic. You'll find eggs and other items and that's about it. Rinse, lather, and repeat and you have the fundamentals of Tao's Adventure.
Though developed and published by Konami and sporting somewhat colorful polygonal sprites (think late generation PSone or N64), Tao's quest is one that fails to engage the player across the board. The story is lacking, action is repetitive and boring, and though the monster collecting part of the game can be fun, it doesn't in any way make up for the shallowness of this RPG experience. If you simply must have a dungeon crawler on the DS, don't mind extensive use of the stylus, and are interested in collecting monsters (perhaps to battle with a friend in the coliseum) then Tao's Adventure might hold you for a few hours, but actually sticking it out until the end will be a test of patience that really isn't worth attempting. |
