Tao's Adventure

Konami's Nintendo DS role-playing title tries to be innovative, but ends up being medicore.

Tao's Adventure: Curse of the Demon Seal is Konami's contribution to the rather empty role-playing game scene on the Nintendo DS. Tao's Adventure tries to take full advantage of the Nintendo DS's touch screen control scheme, but does so with very mixed results. Add to that a rather badly paced overall adventure and you have a run-of-the-mill gaming experience that only the most die hard RPG fan will be able to cope with.

In this role-playing game players don the role of young Tao, a fledgling mage thrusts into the role of "savior" in a formulaic storyline that sees him on the hunt for a powerful monster egg to save the citizens of his isolated island homeland of Bente Island. The game begins with exploration of this ancient Demon Tower. Besides housing hundreds of evil creatures, this tower serves as a prison for an ancient power, sealed with a magical ward.

One day a terrible storm brings lightning from the heavens, which strikes the tower, breaks the seal and unleashes evil monsters into the world. These monsters make their way to Tao's island village where they attack the townsfolk and turn them into stone. The last of the elders of the village decide that Tao, whose training as a mage is barely underway, must head to the Demon Tower and find an egg to restore the good folks of the island. Thus begins Tao's adventure, which will see him explore every inch of the Demon Tower, master powerful magics and collect eggs that he can use to hatch helpful companions.

Tao tries to take advantage of the system's touch screen controls to do just about everything in the game, and does so with limited success. The problem with the "touch screen controls" in this game is that they aren't quite as responsive as they could be and there is no alternative way to interact with the game. The only button that is useable in the game is the d-pad, which can be used to move Tao around. Everything else utilizes the touch screen controls. From drawing spells in the air with the stylus to moving and fighting, everything is done on the touch screen. Gamers that aren't comfortable using the touch screen exclusively and want a more traditional way of controlling the game are out of luck here. The biggest problem is that you will spend a lot of time attempting to click on small icons or navigating through menus and a lot of time it feels like it's all hit or miss. This can be prove to be a real pain in the butt as it waste time clicking on icons and missing them or trying to navigate through the game's interface in general.

One of the key features of this adventure is the ability to air casting spells by drawing shapes on the touch screen. This is one of the features in the game that works pretty well, though it's not anything we haven't seen before. Magic is elemental based and offers a myriad of spells that do everything from summon elemental attacks to healing the player. Tao can also capture monster eggs that can be hatched, trained and used for battles - though players never have direct control of these pets. Players can train these eggs after they have them taken into town and identified by an appraiser. After that they can be hatched in the tower, used in battles or taken back into town to fight against AI controlled opponents. Growing these creatures can be helpful to the player and players can also trade and battle them with other real world players via wi-fi if that's their thing. While these critters aren't the sharpest tools in the shed they are useful in battle and do their best to not get in your way when you have to take on the myriad of monsters in each level of the tower. And because they earn experience alongside Tao growth is a pretty easy thing to accomplish – the arena fights are more of a way to fast track their development..

Battles in the game are turn-based by nature making it easy to use some strategy in each battle. The bottom screen of the DS is used to display a grid which offers a myriad of combat statistics and data. Combat can be pretty tedious mainly due to the game's slow pace, loading times on menus, etc. All of the battles take place within the tower, which players will encounter as they explore each level, ascending to the top, exploring some more, collecting items and eggs and occasionally battling boss monsters (every fifth floor).

As we mentioned earlier everything is done with the touch screen including movement (which you can thankfully control with the d-pad), talking with NPC's, casting magic, etc. Besides this frustrating element of gameplay the game also doesn't offer a "save anywhere" feature. What this means is that players will not be able to save in the tower before an all important boss battle or other event - instead they have to travel all the way back into town, find an inn and save. This is one of my biggest pet peeves with any game on any platform. It is a cheap parlor trick that -in my opinion - developers use to inflate the challenge -- because if you die in a far reaching area you are punished by having to return to the last place you saved. And when that save spot is very far away players have to be mindful to stop, go back and save frequently. No matter the reasoning for it, it's just not a good way to handle gameplay..

In the end, Tao proves to be a role-playing game that is average, at times frustrating due to the controls, and paced so slowly that it isn't very much fun. To be fair, you can almost see why the developers of this title focused so much on the touch screen approach to controlling the gameplay. The problem is that the other elements of the game don't work very well with this control scheme - from small icons that are hard to "tap" to menus that take forever to load, Tao just doesn't work very well. If you must play this game, at least rent it and play it a few hours before you buy it - you'll be glad you did.

Review by James 'Prophet' Fudge - courtesy of Gameshark.com