Around the start of this year I tried the Etrian Odyssey series for the first time and fell extremely hard for it. In the months that followed I hungrily devoured IV, V, and III, as well as some of I and Nexus; it easily became a rose favorite. Etrian Odyssey IV was my introduction to the series and is still my favorite and strongest recommendation for someone new to it, so I wanted to share a bit about the series for those new to it and about EOIV for anyone who's curious.
About Etrian Odyssey
If you're new to Etrian Odyssey, the basic conceit: It's an RPG where a group of adventurers run around a labyrinth (often in the forest; usually somehow related to Yggdrasil, the World Tree) while mapping it out. The stories range from simpler but potent to very simple, but leave a lot of the details up to you. The adventurers are of your own making- after naming your guild, you choose between a bunch of classes and a few jumpingly cute character arts per class, give your new characters names and specs and define them. You make the maps too; the game gives you mapmaking tools but doesn't include a premade minimap, so it's up to you to explore cautiously and develop your adventurers' picture of the dungeon they're attempting to survive.
In this way, Etrian Odyssey's a storytelling game- it gives you tools and challenges to face as fertile ground for imagination and telling your own stories. This interview with the original Etrian Odyssey's director's what convinced me to give it a try:
It's a game where you make a bunch of original characters and tell stories about their adventures together. Did you ever do this, when you were younger? When I was really young I imagined little fanfics but pretty quickly lost that spark, and never really made OCs or new stories of my own. Playing Etrian Odyssey helped me find that spark now and in doing so it kind of made itself a retroactive childhood classic, and for that I'm eternally grateful. Did you know making up OCs and telling little stories with them is really fun??? (deliriously) It's the best!!! You can do it too! The Flowers Guild still has and will have a special place in my heart so long as I tell stories (here's a character sheet I made of my EOIV blorbos after clearing if you want to see; beware of OC nonsense).
A lot of the RPG elements serve as setting up interesting scenarios for your characters. The games are challenging (though the newest releases of all of them have easier difficulty levels) but I found the challenge fun from a narrative perspective- if your characters are running out of resources, getting lost, getting killed, it's a chance to explore how they feel in all sorts of perilous situations. When you take the time to figure out a way through- and you always can, the games are brilliantly and deeply designed as RPGs and every situation has a way through- that becomes a new story for your guild. The towns have a bartender who hands out quests, which become narrative prompts as well as dungeoning prompts for facing the labyrinths from a different angle.
About Etrian Odyssey IV
Most of the Etrian Odyssey games take place alternately in a single very tall labyrinth and a peaceful town to return to outside. Etrian Odyssey IV was the first entry on the 3DS, and tried something a bit different- instead of one maze, there's an overworld scattered with many dungeons to find, both multi-story dungeons reminiscent of a stratum of the older games' labyrinth to little self-contained puzzle dungeons. The party gets an airship to fly around the world together and discover them, as well as just exploring the overworld, cooking, fighting monsters and such. I found the contrast between sweaty dungeon diving and peaceful airship adventures really appealing- if you're new to the series it's closer to other RPGs in this regard so I think it's a good starting point.
The class design is really solid too- every character has a skill tree they can customize as they level alongside a subclass, and the individual character design as well as party synergy is deep. I feel like they got stronger at creating those synergies / interesting designs with each game and IV felt like the first game where every job felt solidly intricate and like it could fit into any party. As an example, the Runemaster's an elemental mage class, but I found its customization made it play more interestingly than the usual "figure out the elemental weakness and hit it repeatedly". Each element's moves work differently, and you can strengthen one at the cost of the others which gives planning a build more interesting decisions. Lilith, my frosty runemaster, ended up specializing in ice and lightning multi-hit attacks while abandoning fire entirely, and used other skills to manipulate enemy weaknesses to support the rest of her party. At the same time, it was easy to imagine other ways to play the job- for instance, one who dumps all their points into fire and adding fire weaknesses could play well too and find openings in different situations. (One thing I appreciated is that most builds in this game are at least viable- the earlier games have "trap skills" where spending points on them ends up being a waste, though you can respec, but most things in EOIV work at least somewhat well together.)
The visual design of the game is gorgeous and calming- it's lush and green, with plant and tree motifs everywhere; the world and backgrounds are beautifully and serenely painted, perfect for exploring the world or running around in the woods. The dungeons themselves tend towards beautiful spaces in or intertwined with nature- a lush old-growth forest, a mountainside cave with hot spring, a castle being reclaimed by tree and flower. That's not to say the dungeons are a peaceful place- the bar and adventurer's guild have plenty of stories of losing familiar faces to the labyrinth's monsters- but the combination of the woods' serenity and the recognition of their danger hit at something deeper that resonated with me really strongly. Your relationship with the woods isn't one of domination- it's a map-making game, after all; you're studying the woods, understanding them so you can draw them out, filling out your monster codex as you learn of the local fauna. The games at least reference "conquering the Yggdrasil Labyrinth" (and beating a stratum does feel really good) but your relationship with it feels more symbiotic than that, and the people and cities depend on the labyrinths.
That symbiotic relationship carries over outside the dungeon, too. For as intense and deadly as the mazes become, the city of Tharsis is a persistently kind and supportive place. Each part of town has a focus character who opens up to you with new things to share as you venture deeper. The bartender connects you with people who need support and can support you too; the blacksmith's always happy to modify your weapons for you or craft something new with what you've sold her free of charge; no matter when you show up the innkeeper'll be there to cook up a pot of soup for you. I've found that plenty of games with cozy aesthetics on some level replicate the systems of oppression and domination of nature that make true comfort so hard to find in real life, but in Tharsis there's a persistent sense of mutual support and dependence that mirrors your party's dependence on each other and interaction with the labyrinths. That sense is matched in the story as well with the characters and peoples you find as you explore farther lands, and the plot despite the series' reputation for simplicity had me crying; it's spoilers but I'll say a bit more for anyone who's cleared the game (please don't read until you've cleared the game!).
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If Etrian Odyssey IV sounds like an appealing adventure, or you see Yuji Himukai's arts and feel a strong desire to make up a bunch of OCs with them, I super recommend hacking your 3ds or downloading an emulator and giving it a try. (Or if you'd prefer, Etrian Odyssey III's on Switch and is a similarly great starting point; maybe I'll write about it too once I 100% it.) And if you've made it this far, here's my guild card, if you'd like the Flowers guild to eat a tankbuster or two for ya.
