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Mani-Kanina
@Mani-Kanina

Etrian Odyssey is a pretty old game at this point, the original on the DS coming out all the way back in 2007. I still remember the very mild buzz within gaming journalism when it got localized. Before good info was out, people speculated that characters would permanently die should they fall in battle; thankfully that was never the case.

I think it's important to set the stage though, this was a very small game releasing in a niche genre; yet it got a localization. I think part of the reason why is that the DS had kind of gotten a reputation for having a lot of RPGs, so maybe it was seen as an easier sell? I can only speculate, really.

I did try out the original game shortly after it came out, but I didn't make much progress in it before giving up entirely. Still... there was something charming about it, which is why I kept up with the series and tried every entry as they came out. By the end of Etrian Odyssey 3 I was a pretty big fan.

With the release of the Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection, I saw an opportunity to go back and experience the original version of one and two in their full glory. At this point it's been many years since I beat both of their 3DS remakes.

My experience with this title is quite mixed however. There is a lot to get through, but I'd like to make it clear upfront that this isn't a spoiler free review. It'll also contain some mild spoilers from the 3DS remake: Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl.


Having Bunnies around is always a relief!

A Town Called Etria

Games from 2007 might feel quite retro now, but the design mantra for the game was considered retro or dated even at this game's inception. As with many old classical first person dungeon crawlers, you start by making a party of adventurers that are moronic enough to jump head first into the pits of hell.

The game will not permanently kill any character you make, thankfully, but that does not mean it's not mean. Etrian Odyssey, or EO for short, is all to happy with punching you in the gut hard and as often as possible. As a series veteran I naturally decided to start the game on the hardest difficulty: Expert.

Or to speak plainly: The only difficulty level that the original DS release had.

I'll be touching in the changes made in this HD collection later, but I felt that it's worth pointing this out early. If you're not familiar to the series, play on the regular difficulty; Expert ain't for the faint of heart. The new "regular" difficulty would be considered on the hard side even by JRPG standards.

Character creation for the Archer class. :3

But yes, make a party and then dive into the hell hole that is the Yggdrasil Labyrinth. For this playthrough I used this team comp:

Protector, Landsknecht
Medic, Alchemist, Troubadour

It's pretty bread and butter, to be frank. But this games does not let you leave town without a tank and a healer. Thankfully, once you get further into the game, that drops down to only a healer, so you can fill the rest of your slots with damage dealers.

Me, valuing my sanity, decided to stick with the tank anyway since grinding up extras in this game sucks and if you want to do the postgame then the tank suddenly becomes non-optional again. To be frank, the balance in this game is just all over the place, and that seldom does it any favors.

The Ant Queen! A very funny boss that you need to kill before the fight gets out of hand!

Throw balance out the window

If you go into the game knowing that medic in EO has the best defence buff in the entire series then you're in for a very easy mid to late game. If you don't... well, good fucking luck making much progress. I went through the fourth distinct zone-- stratums, the game calls them -of this game without ever upgrading the gear on any of my characters, including smacking the boss to death.

For those of you who are familiar with the game already know that you can't just smack that boss and be over with, so I had to come back with upgrades anyway to slaughter the rest of the minibosses first. But I think it's telling that beating up the main boss was no problem what-so-ever as long as you knew to use the right buff.

Likewise, there are a lot of abilities you can spec your party into that are just completely useless. Or are useless to max out. The first stat point into any given ability gives unproportionally more than any further points. Likewise, investing from level 4->5, and 9->10 also gives you a much larger boost; though still not close to what the first point investment does.

The raw numbers of how things actually work are hidden away so you're left guessing what is or isn't shit. Or, more likely, look up a datadump online so you can see how it actually ticks internally. The later games in this series got better with making it clear what things did with every entry in the series, but some of the stuff in this first game is straight up baffling.

The HD version of this, thankfully, added in some tooltips to help, but not nearly enough.

I might have some complaints about the visuals of the HD version, but many places still look really good.

What about the dungeon?

The meat of a dungeon crawler is the dungeon. Having played Untold before this, most of the floors have felt remarkably similar. I don't really have too many complaints about the wast majority of the game, most of it is good or interesting. There are a couple of standout exceptions, but I'll go over those separately.

I will say though, that a problem this game has in it's dungeon design everywhere is tedium. The game introduces the notion of shortcuts fairly early on, hidden passageways that you need to unlock from the side that's deeper into the labyrinth first, but once unlocked you can speed up your travels significantly.

Some floors uses these well, but frankly there aren't nearly enough of them. Every stratum, starting from the second one, has a healing fountain in the middle of it. This is great and lets you refresh when needed, but I can't help but feel that it wouldn't be as necessary if the progression was more tight.

Town looks nice.

So while some floors drag out for a bit, especially when backtracking to get further down, I can stomach that. What I can't are the many moments of just complete bull crap that the game throws at you. There are places where FOEs, minibosses that roam the map, just spawn in arbitrarily after you step on a certain tile.

It was cute in the first instance in the first stratum: you walk into a room, see a treasure chest on the opposite side of it; but if you approach you get a FOE that spawn in behind you. It's sadistic in a way that is ultimately funny.

What is less fun is the absolute crap shoot that is stratum 5. This mechanic is used extensively there, especially for when you're traveling into unmapped territory. Oops, took a wrong turn into a dead end? Well you can't go back, so have fun warping back to town and then trudging all the way back there again.

To say that I was getting peeved would be an understatement.

It got to the point where stratum five of this game is now my least favourite in the entire series. Considering some of the other "haha funny" that exists across the series, and this very game, that should say a lot to those familiar with the franchise.

BF28 has like, 14 staircases going up in a row. Have fun picking the correct one!

Speaking of, stratum six is an area full of bullshit. I respect it more though, why? Well, firstly it's optional, that allows content to be harsher in my mind. Likewise, it's completely upfront about what it is, and actually has a few cool ideas. The warp maze on B29F sucked to map out, but it by no means makes it unclear what it is or what it wants you to do.

The fucking 14 staircases in a row on floor 28 is just dumb though. Going up or down a floor resets your encounter rate, so it's just tedium. It looks neat in a "haha funny" kind of way, but I can't help but feel it adds little. In contrast, the gimmick on a previous floor of needed to follow behind a trailing FOE was actually neat.

None the less, there is a lot of tedium, and that's not good.

One of the rarest enemies in the game: A tiny blue plant

Mapping the way to your heart

A huge core appeal of Etrian Odyssey is mapping out the dungeon. You did this on the touch screen on the Nintendo DS, and it was good shit. While it can be hard to grasp if you haven't played any of them on original hardware, a very large part of the appeal of this game, and series, was the mapping. A lot of the charm in that is sadly lost in the HD version; mostly because it's less practical to do the mapping now, but there is still a glint to it.

The original music is also preserved, and while it's far from my favourite OST in the series, it has some really good tracks to fit both the atmosphere of exploring a warm forest as well as fighting for your life against creature shaped abominations. The OST is composed in a rather specific style that has a lot of synths/retro samples to it; something which gives it a very specific feel.

I think those things add up to the main selling points of the original game and its sequels: the charm. It's not just drawing the map, but also the absurdity, and beauty, of the places you go to.

But I can not, and will not, recommend the original game. This HD re-release adds both some bug fixes as well as some much needed QoL. But more than that, the 3DS remake exists, which, while having its own issues, I feel stand up better than either this or the DS version does.

QoL changes include, but are not limited to:

  • Faster walking speeds in the dungeon.
  • Being able to speed up the battle speed.
  • Respecing your character only costing five levels instead of ten! (Yes, really!)
  • Being able to quicksave at any point.
  • Being able to abuse and reload a quicksave even if you die (Something that saves you another fucking trip down to the boss room!!!).
  • More and better mapping icons!
  • Configurable Auto paths for when you're just going to the same place... again!
  • Better info on skill trees.
  • Easier difficulty levels!

I could not see myself wasting my time with the original DS game. The slow walking speed brings some charm in seeing the sights and setting the mood, but it would likely more than double the amount of play hours over a complete run.

That's not to say everything is perfect with this release, however...

The Ugly

The 3D terrain looks fine. It's a bit low poly, but I feel like that adds more to the charm. But a lot of the portraits that are redrawn in HD resolution just feel wrong. It's hard to put it to words, but while the sprites are redraw to be as if they were in HD res, not enough work was put into realizing what was implied in the original art; but wasn't actually shown.

The forest folk warrior being a good example.

The forest folk warrior is a good example. The original sprite, upscaled on the right, is rather clearly depicting an angry dude with two swords. They look like they are leaning forwards a bit and you can see their open mouth, though you don't really make out any details. Are they gritting their teeth? sneering at you? Maybe yelling? It's up to the viewer to interpret.

Likewise, the angle of the shot, to me, places the eyes under the hair or behind the hair. It's not that they don't have eyes; you just can't see them from this perspective. The HD redraw, on the other hand, makes it look as if they don't have eyes at all. Maybe that was the developers original intentions? I couldn't tell you. But what I can tell you is that I think this just looks off and bad.

Most other examples in the game are not quite this bad, though Ren is pretty darn up there with how bad their face looks; but rather this is perfectly illustrates just how wrong and off it can feel to look at a lot of the art. None of the charm of the original sprite work is there, and while that is understandable, I don't feel the trade-off was worth it here.

They should have just brought in the animated 3D models from untold instead.

Maybe then the first boss wouldn't just be a recolour of a regular enemy.

Pictured: an eleven hour time difference between save files.

The bad

Frankly I don't think EO1 is a very good game. With the QoL in the HD version and the ability to play on a lower difficulty level makes it an okay game. But new people to the series should probably start with EO3 instead; It's generally just a much better game.

As the picture above shows, I put the game on an auto path and left it running over the night to reach max level. I was around level 50 when I reached the final boss; I felt a bit underleveled so I checked a guide to see what they recommended, which was, you know, being around level 60.

I struggled a bit on the boss, mostly because it can remove your buffs and I needed to get my medic fast enough to apply it again at the start of a turn before the boss could kill someone. At the end of the day, it wasn't the extra levels that helped me get enough stats tough; it was instead investing in an accessory with a crap ton of AGI on it.

I don't really think the final boss was very good... frankly I'm not sure if I found any of the bosses all that great. But that's mostly because the strategy on the players side of the court is always going to be the same.

I'm currently tackling the post game, and I intended to try and punch out the super boss at the end of the game to see where it all lands, after that though? I'll move on to EO2; a game I already know from my own prior experiences that I like more.

The Story

I watched a video reviewer talk about this game, and I think they summed it up really well (I apologies for not remembering their name and video, or I'd link): "The plot twist is that there is a story."

I think that's really the best way to put it. You go through the majority of the game thinking it's just a generic quest for fame and fortune, then all of a sudden it drops a bombshell on you. That being said, Untold does a much better job developing the story... yet I feel Untold kinda fails the player? Because it spoils what is a late game twist in the opening hours: That Etrian Odyssey is actually a post apocalyptic setting.

Still, despite my misgivings, I love this series, and I hope they port over the 3DS games too. Having them all accessible on a platform that is still alive is the dream.

As for Etrian Odyssey 1? In the end;

The Labyrinth Swallowed all


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in reply to @Mani-Kanina's post:

That's true as well. It would be cool to know the inside baseball of what led EO to get localized, it being a "handheld" (i.e. viewed as a cheaper project) game might have been something to do with it, I've heard that EO is one of Atlus's cheapest (and therefore most profitable) franchises to produce. They may have put in the localization effort to get another bite of the apple in different regions, which might explain why they only went back to Europe with the soft reboot of EO IV.

Post game update: It sucked.

I resorted to a guide for the final super boss, and it just felt completely hollow and soulless. I don't think this series has a good track record with super bosses in general, but the way this one is structured basically forces you to fight it some fifty time to map out what flavour of the "kill your entire party if you don't use the right block" it's going to do on a given turn.

I don't really feel bad for skipping that crap.

Oh well, onto II!