An insatiable appetite for more tower defense led me to Fu-un! Dairojo (Winds and Clouds! The Great Siege) for the Nintendo DS. You place archers, cannoneers, and spearmen with the touch screen and watch them jab passing troops. That’s tower defense for you.
Outside the Edo setting Fu-un! Dairojo is just another tower defense game with five kinds of troops.
Spearmen are the most basic unit. They’re cheap, poke enemies with spears, but can’t hit flying units.
Archers deal less damage, but unlike spearmen that haven’t figured out how to throw their spears can hit flying units too. Level them up and they gain fire arrows.
Riflemen can shoot further archer, hit air and ground units, but are slow as molasses.
Commanders are expensive ground only units. They’re worth the the bounty since they attack and boost the attack of allied units.
Cannoneers shoot cannonballs that hit a group of ground troops. These are the most expensive units, but if you have a few well placed cannons you can win most missions with these and archers.
All units can be leveled up and like most tower defense games it’s better to have a few powerful units than a line of weak, poking spearmen. When a unit is being powered up it is immobile for a few seconds.
The game has two single player modes single map and a set of three maps. Most of the maps in Fu-un! Dairojo have one path and a few obvious fork points to defend. Dispatching ground troops is a piece of cake in this game and I’m not a tower defense pro. Some of the unique enemies you meet are ninjas that dig their way past you (these guys can be hit when they pop their heads up) and ninjas that blink in and out of existence (guess when they’re invincible). The only group of enemies that *might* trip a player up are kite ninjas, the bane of my existence.
Most mobs walk in a single file line to your spearman jabbing death trap. Kite ninjas fly…. off the path and straight towards the structure you’re supposed to defend. The only way to know when kite ninjas are going to strike and ruin your game is to remember which direction they come from. This cheap trick is really the only way the computer can beat anyone.
Fu-un! Dairojo gives players a healthy supply of (too much?) gold and consumable random items like bombs which stun units and hammers which repair castles. All of these goodies make Fu-un! Dairojo easy, like My First Tower Defense game easy.
Food for thought:
1.) Every single player tower defense game should have a fast forward option. Fu-un! Dairojo does not so you have to stare at the screen while the computer troops slowly march into the death zone.
2.) Fu-un! Dairojo has grainy sprites and the depth of a DSiWare game, which is where NN System should have released it.
