Tower defense games are the big thing right now and there are a slew of them waiting to be purchased and played. Dairojo! Samurai Defenders is one of them that came out for the DSiware store. Can it hold muster against other tower defense games of its caliber or is it bound to fall over like an ill-built tower? Let’s take a peek and see.

Tower defense games are some of the most basic genre of video gaming out there. The object of these games is to defend an area with troops against an invading horde. The horde usually follows a path to get to the area you’re defending and you place your defenses so that they can reach the invaders without too many casualties. You win if you hold them off and you lose if too many invaders get through. Simple. You honestly don’t have to do too much in these games except pay attention to the board so you can see where the invaders are coming from, the status of your defenses, and to see if you can build reinforcements or if you need to fortify an area that is weakening.

In Dairojo! Samurai Defenders you play as the general of an army to a feudal lord of Japan, or so one would suspect from a playthrough, and it is your duty to defend a castle from invading samurai, ninja, and various other attackers. You have a set amount of funding that you use to purchase said troops and place them within the castle grounds to defend the castle properly. Should the enemy have weaved their way through your labyrinth of defenses and reached the front gates, then the enemy will disappear and the castle will take one point of damage.

The graphics for this game are reminiscent of the Game Boy Advance days and are a tad better than the 16-bit that we have come to expect from the console, but they are still nice for this handheld system. The action doesn’t slow down and that is very comforting indeed as sometimes games of this sort tend to get bogged down with too much on the screen and not enough processing power to deal with it all. In fact, I found that I really enjoyed the little animations for each of the tiny characters.

Now this game is a port straight from the Japanese title that came out quite some time ago overseas. The group Abylight kept it very close to the original but made the rounds in between each wave of enemies slower so you can catch your breath. This was a good decision on their part as I, after playing the American version, downloaded the Japanese version to compare the two and found the overseas version very difficult indeed for the level of difficulty that they described.

Cute little warriors! Who’s a cute little warrior? You are!

However, it did take me about forty minutes to figure out what I could and could not do. Why is this? Because the game did not come with a tutorial of any sort. Nothing told you the strengths of the individual troop types, nothing told you where you may or may not place them in the game field, and nothing told you if they had any special abilities or strengths against other troops. The only thing that told you anything about any of the characters was the top screen of the DS while you were playing.

No strategy or tactics game should have you learn on the fly without giving you information as to strengths and weaknesses. Sure, you cannot swing a dead cat without hitting a tower defense game anymore, but to assume that any one of your players knows how to play your specific game, let alone one with specialized troops and upgrades, is ignorance on the developer’s part. Players need to know firing rates, strengths, different troop types, and where they can deploy any of the troops (a task which alone took me a frustrating 10 minutes).

I say all this because this is honestly only the second tower defense game that I have ever played, and I was having a great amount of difficulty with it trying to learn the rules of the game. Even when I went to the HELP menu to read the instruction manual, it was still a bit foggy on how to place my troops. A tutorial would have been immensely helpful and only added to the strength and playability of the game.

The view from the top DS screen.

But, in the game’s defense, once I did learn the rules of the game, the action was actually quite enjoyable, and I found myself replaying several of the areas over and over again just because I wanted to see how different troop types could be used. Once again, this is the second tower defense game that I have ever played and so I am not sure if this is the norm for this genre, but it certainly did boost my enjoyment.

Also, the ability to either set special items or make them random is a bonus as you can either make it harder for yourself or easier by simply choosing the hammer to repair the front gates, should they be damaged. There is a wide variety of items at your disposal and each one can help your armies in their own way.

Dairojo! Samurai Defenders is, in all honesty, just another tower defense game, but it is the characters and setting that set this game apart from others. If you are a fan of tower defense games, or if you have been looking for a good feudal Japan strategy and tactical game, then I would highly suggest that you pick this up and give it a try. The price that it asks on the DSiware section is a tad much in my opinion, as it is only 500 points from the original Japanese store.

If you are looking for something innovative, then search elsewhere. Dairojo is entertaining, but I cannot see someone getting it because they want something ‘new’. For someone who is looking for an introductory game into the genre, look elsewhere… but come back once you have some game time under your belt.