Success and Ninja Studio’s most famous character right now is Izuna, a smart-alecky ninja who starred in two self-titled dungeon hacks on the DS, and so she leads the cast of Windy X Windam with her kunoichi partner Shino. The rest of the characters are as bland as fighter stereotypes get: Kirikou is a standard young swordsman, Ashley is a busty staff-fighter, and Reath is a vaguely fishlike archer. Others are cribbed right from the Guilty Gear design documents. The requisite Big Guy resembles Potemkin and is named…uh, Big. G is an amorphous shadow-creature not unlike Eddie or BlazBlue’s Arakune. Jack is basically Slayer with sunglasses. And then there’s Stin, an unsettling, scantily-clad parody of Guilty Gear’s infamous nun-boy, Bridget.

The DS is an odd place to put a fighting game. Most fighters are horizontal in nature, scrolling left and right and allowing brief aerial moves. The DS’s viewing area is two screens high, and many fighting games on the system, from Guilty Gear Dust Strikers to Jump Super Stars, re-work their battles to be more vertical in nature. Windy X Windam doesn't bother. To avoid wasting all of that space on the upper screen, the game's characters can spend a lot of time in the air, dashing and double-jumping and slowing their descents with the aid of a button and a power gauge. Other than that, they have the usual special moves and two levels of super-powerful attacks, each of which is accompanied by some costume change.

It’s rare to see a traditional fighter that embraces frequent aerial movement, and it’d be great if a game did so with intricate play mechanics and combos. Windy X Windam is not that game. It’s clumsy in every respect, with simple multi-hit strikes, two attack buttons, and unreliable controls. Everything moves too slow when fighters are on the ground and too fast when they’re in the air. But there’s seldom a good reason to pull off any acrobatics up there. The game can be played as a cheap, straightforward fighting game, leaving the upper screen empty much of the time.

The rare sight of the top screen figuring into gameplay.

Windy X Windam doesn’t look so bad for a small-screen fighter, though there’s a cost. Ninja Studio made the characters large and reasonably detailed without realizing that they crowd the player's viewpoint, leaving little room for careful movement. The game's designs show only one novel touch, as every fighter switches outfits or forms with special attacks. Not that it maters when Izuna (who gets cleavage-baring wardrobe adjustments) and Shino are the only ones appealing enough to bother playing.

Yet Izuna and Shino can’t save anything, especially not without an amusing Atlus translation to spike their conversations. Graffiti’s localization is routine and occasionally awkward, though there wasn’t much for them to use in the first place. Characters spout off boring exchanges before battle, and the game’s endings don’t even feature original art. The backgrounds are spare and routine, with the sort of design motifs you'd seen in some briskly forgotten Neo Geo fighter from the mid-1990s, shrunk down to DS size.

Speaking of Izuna and Shino, Windy X Windam holds one more insult: you have to finish the game on the hard setting to play Izuna, and again on "maniac" to unlock Shino. Once through it is more than enough, but at least the rock-stupid enemies make any return journeys quick. Even the last boss, clearly intended as a visual homage to SNK’s nearly unbeatable powerhouses, goes down without much of a fight.

I can’t help but pity Izuna in all of this. Perhaps she was created just to push suggestive statuettes and ribald comics, but she deserves better than Windy X Windam. It resembles someone’s pet project, pushed through to the market by a publisher counting on a mildly popular character to sell a sub-par fighter or at least a few pieces of pandering merchandise. Collectors might want Windy X Windham just in case it becomes a rarity, and Izuna fans might want it for dubious reasons. But there’s no point in ever playing it.