Tao’s Adventure: Curse of the Demon Seal Preview

What these people say you need to do seems rather easy. You must make your way to Mandominio and climb the tower from which these monsters came. In doing so Tao must search for the egg of the super rare straister monster. Then to make the game’s time frame a little more suspenseful, you must return to Bente with this egg by the next full moon. If you fail, those that are encased in stone will be that way forever. This obviously spurs Tao into quick motion to save those that he holds dear.

Curse of the Demon Seal’s adventure revolves around that very tower. It’s so huge that Tao actually has to progress through 40 different levels that increase in difficulty. As you scale this monstrosity, you must collect eggs along the way while searching for your end prize. Obviously experience and treasure is to be gained and found, and this is done through navigation and battle. Battles are all turn-based, and based on the demo it looks like you’ll be able to recruit a party of your own later on. Turn-based RPGs tend to turn off some people. But hey, you never know if you’ll like something until you try it.

Obviously this is a fantasy RPG, and with RPGs, you generally have special abilities or spells or some sort. Tao here is an air speller, and his specialty weapon is a rod. This rod is used in combination with a spell book to cast a variety of different magic. This is where the touch screen actually mainly comes in. You have to initiate and cast spells by “etching” little drawings and symbols into the air. At the beginning you start off with one spell from each of the five categories. These happen to be earth, wind, fire, water and lightning. Each spell type also has a generally specific use. For instance, fire and earth are usually used for offensive type casting. Others like the water and lightning categories are used to heal and teleport. Like stated, the touch screen is used to etch symbols. Thankfully these symbols are rather simple, and the game tends to be forgiving if you don’t match them perfectly.

Curse of the Demon Seal is clearly going for a lighthearted type of style in terms of the visuals. The game actually sports fully 3D characters and environments. They are bright and colorful as well, if not a little rough around the edges. The characters themselves have that stereotypical handheld “short and stout” kind of build. But during conversations, you will see a portrait of whoever’s speaking. They do look a little childish though, as they were all taken from an old Aquaman cartoon.

What makes the game pretty nice though, is almost all the control is done exclusively on the touch screen. The only part of it that isn’t is your movement with the D-Pad and sprinting by holding Y. Everything else requires the use of the touch screen and stylus. Unfortunately it seems like some of the features exclusively programmed into it weren’t necessary. For instance, buying items from a store or talking to other characters requires the touch screen. It would be just as convenient if not more to have those be simple menu choice selections via the D-Pad and face buttons. When you’re navigating certain areas, different actions will be display on the touch screen as well that you can choose. The spellcasting seems to work well for the touch screen use, although it is rather predictable.

Tao’s Adventure is actually already out in Japan. But it is slated for a North American release in March of this year. This seems like it might be a solid fantasy RPG overall, but we’ll have to see when we actually get it to truly judge. The style seems to be very charming and the core play mechanics appear entertaining. But whether it’s worth the top dollar that most DS games carry in price remains to be seen. Let’s just hope Konami doesn’t drop the ball too much on this endeavor because of their inexperience.