By Anthony Swinnich on April 8th, 2006

Tao’s Adventure starts out on an island. The main character, aptly named Tao, lives on this island. The villagers on the island are named the Bentel, and are comprised of a small society of mages. As the children grow older, they are trained in the arts if they have the skills to do so. Tao is not only the son of the island’s teacher; he’s also the most gifted of all the Bentel children. After playing through a small tutorial for spell casting, the island is attacked by demons. As you could probably have guessed, all of its inhabitants, including Tao’s family are turned to stone, aside from Tao and the village elders. Even more predictable is what happens next: the villagers place their faith and the salvation of the village in a child with limitless potential (Tao, of course), though he has no experience whatsoever. Tao then ventures out into the world to figure out how to reverse the petrifaction of his hometown.

It isn’t exactly the most original story conceived but the main problem comes in how the player experiences it. Instead of leaving the island and exploring a vast world filled with adventure, which is a key word in the title of the game, the game shows a brief segment of the journey through a cut-scene; Tao is then immediately in the game’s main town -- so much for adventure. The game is pretty much set entirely in this town, which wouldn’t have been a problem if the town was exciting, or had things to do, or had a clearly labeled map with important details; sadly it has none of these things. What it does have is an abundance of buildings you can’t enter, and a large amount of open fields and blown-out and abandoned houses, but these things do nothing but make the town feel extremely empty and dull.

The way things are set up in Tao’s Adventure make this game comparable to (though not as good as) the PC classic Diablo -- not only in the respect of having a single town, but also because the game has a single structure with multiple floors where the actual RPG action takes place. Just like how Diablo gave you a single dungeon that kept going downwards, Tao’s Adventure instead gives you a single tower with many floors to climb. Combat takes place in this tower and in this tower only, so if you were looking for some amazingly in-depth or open-ended world to explore, look elsewhere. This probably wouldn’t be a huge problem if combat was fun, but quite frankly it’s half-assed, basic, and usually broken.

After going through the game’s totally unnecessary fetch-quest beginning -- complete with awful dialogue you can’t skip -- you’ll enter the tower. The tower has multiple floors, and each floor is broken up into several boring and nondescript rooms. Once inside you’re tossed into the fray with no tutorial on combat at all. The system feels kind of like a strategy RPG, though it’s faster and less fun, and instead of epic battles with fifteen or twenty combatants, there are only two per room. Your character and the enemy run towards each other, and when they meet they’ll trade blows and magic spells until one of them has been eliminated.

In the beginning, you don’t have enough magic points to cast spells more than a few times, so if you rely on magic for offensive purposes you’ll run out and die. If you didn’t realize you should have bought a sword at the weapon store for melee combat, you’ll probably die as well because the staff is practically useless for physical attacks. Switching between weapons makes sense seeing as how logically a staff would do less damage than a sword, but switching is an overly complex process that could have been assigned to a shoulder-button. Instead you have to wade through two touch-screen menus and confirm that you’re equipping it. This will also give your enemy a free attack since it uses your turn.

To use magic you draw spells on the touch-screen similar to how the touch-screen is used in Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow when sealing a boss, but since this feature is two menus deep, makes you select which square on the map to target, and requires the pressing of a confirmation button to actually make something happen, it’s more irritating than it is either fun or innovative. Simply put, it’s too slow and overly complex. Sure, your library of spells grows throughout the game, but when they’re this difficult to access, who wants to bother? Melee combat fares almost as poorly. In order to attack you must make sure you’re facing your enemy since there is no lock-on targeting. This wouldn’t be an issue if turning to face your enemy didn’t take up your turn. Selecting "Strike" from the touch-screen attacks, and that’s pretty much it for melee combat.

Tao’s Adventure fails in the combat department not just because the system is terribly designed, but also because it forces the player to use the poorly implemented touch-screen elements with no alternatives. Had other functions besides walking been mapped to the face buttons, besides advancing dialogue or making the character run, the system might have been a little more digestible, but no such feature is available. Maybe if the touch-screen elements weren’t such a pain in the ass to use the game would have been more fun to play. Of course, the boring dialogue, hackneyed story, and awful combat don’t help matters either, but any tiny positive changes to the gameplay would have made this game better. At least the 3D graphics are fairly decent and the sound won’t annoy you, but that’s really all the game has going for it.

If the DS is supposed to open the doors of gaming to new experiences, Tao’s Adventure Curse of the Demon Seal is nothing but a giant streak on the clean linen worn under the pants of Nintendo’s vision. Even the most hardened dungeon-crawlers will rise up to two feet and walk promptly away from this game after an hour of play. Under no circumstances should someone pick this game up because it doesn’t do a single noteworthy thing; save your money and wait for an RPG that uses touch-screen spell-casting well to grace this system because this will probably just make you mad.