Nintendo's handheld systems, from the humble Game Boy all the way to the Micro have all been particularly well known for their RPGs. The Legend of Zelda, the Mana series, numerous Final Fantasy re-releases, Breath of Fire, Fire Emblem, the list goes on and on. Isn't it about time the Nintendo DS joined its handheld brothers? Konami thinks so, made obvious by the release of perhaps the most traditional RPG available on the DS outside of Japan - TAO's Adventure: Curse of the Demon Seal. The question is, can a game cursed by bad control issues and a disinclined pace rise up to become a great RPG?

The town of Mondominio may have a ridiculous and hard to pronounce name, but outside of that it's quite nice; using rare monster eggs to keep the town wealthy, it houses a gigantic tower creatively called the Monster Tower, which contains a bunch of rather nasty monsters. A demon seal on the very tip keeps all these beastly creatures inside and monster hunters from all around the world come by routinely to challenge the beings inside the tower in an attempt to procure a rare egg, or better yet, a monster of their own to train and use to wage battle in the Colosseum.

One day, right around the time our game begins, the city is victim to a huge thunderstorm that strikes - and destroys - the demon seal, holding the monsters inside the Tower. Surprisingly, they don't immediately attack the town itself, but migrate to a far off island of mages called Bente Island (I'm surprised it's not called Mage Island!), where every person there except our hero and the mage elders are turned to stone. As it happens, Tao learned the basic elements of air spells just moments before this occurred, and since the mage elders are particularly useless in this situation, it's up to Tao to head to the Monster Tower and secure a special monster egg that can restore his island's people, which include his own family - now it's personal, monsters!

Oddly the tower is still full of hundreds of monsters along the dozens of floors contained inside, so getting this egg is no easy task. The bulk of the game takes place here and within the small town surrounding the tower itself (which you'll have to return to often simply to save your game). Tao's Adventure is an interesting hybrid of real time fighting and turn-based RPG battles, but doesn't manage to bring out the best in either one.

Players wander around the tower's bizarre floating geometric shaped floors, most of which have a surprising amount of variety and complexity, battling monsters and collecting items. You're free to walk around as you please and a unique aspect of the gameplay is that there is no jump between exploration and battles. Instead of being sucked into a random battle, or having any sort of transition between exploration to battle, players simply walk up to a monster and wait for the menu commands on the touch screen to change to the battle controls.

From here things play out like a turn-based battle, but you can still move if you wish. The touch screen menu allows you to strike your foe or use air magic, which requires waiting for the new screen to load that allows you to enter them. To simulate waving your wand, players draw predetermined symbols on the touch screen to pull off everything from lighting and fire attacks to cure spells that recover player HP. The main problem with this system is that, with over 40 spells, remembering them becomes a mission in itself and most of the early spells just don't do enough damage to warrant loading up the display and pulling off the move - not to mention that they all use considerable amounts of magic power. When striking does away with most foes for a good while into the game, suddenly the biggest and most focused aspect becomes nothing more than a side-thought and alternative option.

Every five floors you run into a boss to mix up the gameplay and you can even capture numerous monsters throughout the dungeon by securing eggs and hatching them. These creatures can level up and gain experience, helping you crawl your way through the tower that takes up most of the thirty hours, making it much more enjoyable and giving the gameplay a very much needed extra element. Similarly to Pokémon, these creatures can also battle in the town's Colosseum, where you take part in a rock-paper-scissors style battle game. Two copies of the game unlock multiplayer battles as well, which is a nice addition.

Tao's colorful graphics and bizarre but addictive dungeon designs give it a unique look, but not one that will stand out above anything else in your DS library. The sound can be summed up with the same sentence, although the music is quite catchy and often fits the areas you're visiting perfectly - too bad you won't be traveling very far.

My biggest problem with Tao is not the delayed battle menus, the slow pace of the dungeon crawling or the poorly implemented magic casting - no, indeed the save system is the most gigantic flaw in the game. For an RPG on a handheld, you really need to have a quick save system in place for those moments where you just need to stop playing - and this is almost strictly a dungeon crawling game, so why do we have to leave the tower and go to an Inn just to save? Why not allow players to quick save and upon reload just put them in the Inn? It really is a pain to beat a major enemy and then feel the need to rush all the way out, go to an Inn, save, and then go back just to have security upon death.

Tao's Adventure: The Curse of the Demon Seal has a lot of neat ideas, and the story is typical RPG fun without becoming convoluted or pretentious. It's simple, fun, and has a lot of possibilities; but poor design has cast this spell into the "strictly for the RPG die-hard" section, losing out a big chunk of the DS audience, but perhaps bringing in a whole new one at the same time. For RPG fans this is an adventure worth going on, with a long albeit sometimes slow and trouble-some to finish story, but if your fun with past RPGs is debatable or you find yourself struggling to cope with numerous quirks that muddle most role playing titles then you should avoid this one.

Reviewed by Christopher Martin for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).