I don’t feel like doing a full-on review, but felt like Etrian Odyssey was worth commenting on at least in brief. In short, the game is something like a rudimentary Dungeons and Dragons campaign. And I mean, rudimentary. It’s like one of those sessions that begins with the Dungeon Master saying, “You’re at the entrance to a dungeon. What do you do you do?”
It’s fun, though, in a strange way. They let you create a party of any combination of classes, and offer four different ‘looks’ for each just in case you do feel like making multiples and still want to tell them apart. From there, you explore a forest-slash-dungeon, doing standard RPG things like fight monsters and gather stuff to sell in town. Which you will do a lot of, as monsters, for ONCE, don’t just happen to be carrying wallets or pouches of gold.
One of the game’s main gimmicks is that you’re required to draw your own maps as you progress, which surprisingly isn’t as annoying as it sounds. The game at least auto maps the spaces you’ve been on, leaving you to draw walls where appropriate. Other things like spots where you can gather wood or boobytraps can also be marked with appropriate icons, though I kind of overused the Monster icon early on before I realized the game even had random encounters. They give you a little radar thing in the corner of the screen, but it’s pretty useless for the most part. It goes from blue to red as you walk along, and I guess you’re supposed to be able to guess where a monster is approaching unseen accordingly, but it basically just means “You have x steps left until the next random encounter” since about 75% of the game is zig zagging corridors with no dodging room. Again, assuming that you CAN avoid battles somehow.
And who can forget the infamous F.O.E.’s? Essentially the game will randomly grab an enemy from way deeper in the dungeon and plop them into an earlier level to challenge you. I lucked out on my first one, personally and got some kind of mutant deer that kept attempting status effects that didn’t take rather than actually attacking until I killed it. They do get worse.
At least the game’s creators are aware of their own niche status, so at least it shows that they tried to make it as good a dungeon crawl as they could. It’s actually pretty forgiving, by say, Rogue or Izuna’s standards in that you just restart from a save point with your gathered map data, and your supplies are given back to you.
Biggest complaint though: the fact that ALL you do is explore the dungeon kind of lends it an MMO feel, especially when gathering hides for a quest or crap like that.
