Etrian Odyssey

"Attention Masochistic Dugeon Crawling Fans: Your Ship Has Arrived"

Games sure have come a long way in the past 15 years, and Etrian Odyssey is a prime example of this. Etrian Odyssey is a throwback to the old school dungeon crawling regiment of years past that beats the player over the head with absurd difficulty and slow character growth. It keeps things simple and employs a turn based combat style that you have seen before, but don't let that fool you, this game is tough, and the scandalous difficulty will quickly scare away casual gamers and leave them crying in the ditches.

I'm a pretty seasoned dungeon crawler fan, but Etrian Odyssey took no time in putting me in my place by wiping out half of my party in the second random battle of the game. After this happens (it will more than likely happen to you as well), you will need to regroup and think about what you are getting yourself into, and form a strategy before reentering the labyrinth.

Etrian Odyssey is quite the escapade. It's been a long time since I've played a game where I had to stick extremely close to the labyrinth entrance and level a few times before I could even venture a reasonable amount into the labyrinth.

I'm calling it a “labyrinth” and not a “dungeon” for a few reasons. First off, the main game takes place in the Yggdrasil Labyrinth, which is more akin to the labyrinth in Shining in the Darkness than most RPG dungeons. Each level of the labyrinth will have many twists and turns for you to navigate, and you will get lost very quickly if you do not take precautions. In order to help you out, Etrian Odyssey allows you to use the stylus to draw your own maps on the bottom screen, so you will not lose your way.

I'd now like to add that drawing maps on the bottom DS screen is not optional, it's absolutely mandatory. I didn't attempt the game without drawing maps, but it would be near impossible, since almost every part of the labyrinth looks the same and it would be incredibly easy to get confused and lost.

As you traverse the labyrinth, you will no doubt run into enemy encounters and let me tell you, most of these encounters can be quite challenging, especially in the early stages of the game.

The game starts out with a rudimentary story as you enter the town of Etria, and people see you as the new “chosen one” who will scale the depths of the labyrinth , kill all of the monsters, and loot the treasure that awaits you. However, before you can do this, you must create a guild of characters that will enter the dungeon. You can select a total of 5 characters to have in your active party, but you can create more than that for reserves or for experimentation purposes.

The character classes you can select are: Landsknecht (standard fighter), Survivalist (hunter/rogue type), Protector (Paladin), Dark Hunter (fighter that can inflict status ailments), Medic, Alchemist (mage), or a Troubadour. There are two other classes that you can unlock later in the game, but that comes much later. After you select your characters, you can supplement them with a few skill points and give them names and character portraits. It's a setup much like a PC RPG that allows for a good bit of customization in the character creation.

Once you start playing the actual game, you will be able to move around the town of Etria via menus only. You will never be able to see your characters at all. The town has an Apothecary that allows you to buy healing medicines and resurrect your fallen party members, a pub for accepting quests, a shop to buy and sell goods, an inn to rest and save, and a large hall that will allow you to accept missions, which are simply quests in the main storyline. You can also jump right into the labyrinth from town as well. This is where you will be spending most of your time.

With a rather simple structure, Etrian Odyssey paves the way for a classic dungeon crawling quest, and it doesn't bog you down by throwing a lot of story at you or making you look for NPCs to accept quests. It really throws you into thick of things quickly, and you will be bumming around in the labyrinth in no time. Whether or not the labyrinth will be to your liking or not is another story. Once in the labyrinth, things get a bit repetitive and boring, and the slow character progression and high difficulty will either intrigue you or drive you crazy.

I'll admit that I was intrigued for the first few levels of the dungeon and even up to a third of the way through the game, but things just started to get old after a while and I found it harder and harder to make myself play Etrian Odyssey.

Graphics 5/10

As I said before, Etrian Odyssey is a throwback to an earlier time in gaming, and the graphics seem to purposely portray this. The DS is capable of much better graphics than this, but Etrian Odyssey sticks with a very simple art and graphical style that looks rather antiquated.

The labyrinth is basically endless paths of forest with many twists and turns along the way. The design of each level seems to be rather confusing, so this forces you to use the mapping feature. The mapping seems novel at first, but after a few floors of doing it you'll just wish the feature wasn't there, and you could just play the game without having to stop and scribble down where the walls are every 3 or 4 steps.

Even though the labyrinth is in 3D from the first person view, you will not see your enemies before you fight them, the battles will be random, with only a small, color coded orb in the bottom right hand corner of the screen to show when an enemy encounter is getting close.

When you do get into battles, the enemies are simply a hand drawn images and that's it. Not a single bit of enemy animation in this game. When an enemy attacks, they will only flash for a quick second to indicate they have attacked. Now I understand that Etrian Odyssey is trying to make itself appear to be an old fashioned game, but this is just pathetic. Fighting the same enemies over and over will get really boring since an immense amount of grinding is necessary in the game, yet all you will have to look at are still enemy portraits. I just think it's incredibly lazy.

There's not really much to say about Etrian Odyssey graphically. It has a simple graphical style that looks pathetic by today's standards.

Sounds and Music 5/10

The music in Etrian Odyssey consists of about half a dozen tracks that will loop over and over again, but none of them are particularly noteworthy. With the amount of time you will spend in each area, you will get sick of the music and you're almost better off playing the game in silence. The labyrinth is broken down into different stratums that last about 5 floors each, and the music will change when you get to a new stratum, but even the new music will get old quickly.

There are no character voices in the game and the sound effects get the job done but offer nothing enticing.

Story 5/10

The main quest in Etrian Odyssey takes a while to get going and you will mostly be heading to the labyrinth for small quests to find a certain item or kill a certain beast.

When you first arrive, you will get a brief background of Etria and the NPCs will waste little time in telling you to head to the labyrinth to make a name for yourself. It's a simple formula, but the story offers little incentive to keep you going forward and the only real driving force is to level up your characters and explore the labyrinth.

Gameplay 7/10

Up to this point it seems that Etrian Odyssey has little going in its favor, but the gameplay can offer some salvation if you allow it to. The core gameplay is simple, difficult, and time consuming. It requires a lot of leveling, careful skill point placement, and a tremendous amount of patience. Getting through a single level of the dungeon will often take you days of playing, and seeing everything that each level has to offer will take even longer due to in-accessible areas scattered all over the labyrinth.

Even though the game can be fun in an old school sort of way, the game is just too unforgiving and requires too much effort to divulge any fun from the game. The fact that your party can be wiped out at almost anytime is bothersome, and the lack of convenient warps in the labyrinth often requires you to backtrack through 5 levels of the dungeon just to get to a point where you can progress further.

Things also get made more bothersome by the inclusion of FOEs. FOEs are a cool concept and I did like them, but they often throw the balance of the game way off. FOEs are basically elite monsters that stalk every floor but the first floor of the labyrinth. They are visible onscreen and move one step for every step you move. This means that they can be avoided, but later on they are pretty much mandatory fights since they will follow you and attack you. Not only this, but if you are running from a FOE and get into a random battle, the FOEs can keep moving and often jump right into the battle you are fighting in!!! This is extremely problematic, and will frustrate the hell out of you when it happens. Your party can often get wiped out by a FOE when you didn't even want to fight them to begin with.

The presence of the FOEs requires you to level like crazy just to make sure you can handle them when you run into them. I had gameplay sessions with Etrian Odyssey where I did nothing but level grind of 3 to 4 hours at a time.

The problem with the level grinding is that it's not optional, it's 100% mandatory if you want to progress in the game. The random battles simply don't give you enough exp. to keep you moving forward in the game, so you need to either grind on low exp giving mobs, or fight FOEs over and over, which is always fun. I'd also like to add that many FOEs re-spawn when you come back to the floors.

When you level up, the skill point system gives you one measly point to distribute to your character to raise a stat or learn a new skill. With the slow leveling and only getting one point for stat increases when you level up, the game becomes time consuming much like playing an MMO, but since Etrian Odyssey is not online, it's like playing an MMO by yourself, which is boring to say the least.

I'd also like to gripe about the skill tree, or lack thereof for the characters. Since you only have a list of skills and no skill tree, you will have to blindly put skill points into stats and skills to attempt to unlock certain abilities. There really is no indication as to what the requirements are for the better skills. I recommend looking at an Etrian Odyssey Skill FAQ for this. I recommend looking at a Skill FAQ because your whims of dumping skill points into useless skills will really come back to haunt you later in the game. Bosses and FOEs later on in the game will require certain strategies and if you do not have the required skills, you will have one heck of a time beating them. Discovering that you are lacking the skills needed to beat a certain enemy will require you to go back, grind for hours, and get the appropriate skills. Not really all that fun.

Despite all of this, Etrian Odyssey does have some engaging and challenging gameplay for those that are looking for a tough game. I'll admit that I really was drawn to this game for the first third of it, but then each level just started to seem the same to me and I slowly lost interest.

Longevity and Re-Playability 8/10

If there is truly one thing about Etrian Odyssey that makes it stand out, it's the length of the quest and customizable options of each character class. This game is a monster, and it will easily take you 60 hours to get through the game and quite possibly a lot longer.

There are lots of character classes to explore, lots of ways to take your character growth within each class, and lots of side quests and missions to partake in. If you are looking for a time consuming and in-depth dungeon crawling quest this is the perfect game for you.

On the other hand, more casual fans will find themselves feeling like they have seen everything that Etrian Odyssey has to offer by the 10th floor and will see little reason to keep playing the game.

Conclusion

I can honestly say that I enjoyed the time I spent with Etrian Odyssey, but I doubt I would ever want to play it again. It's a game that's better in theory than anything else. If the game was a bit more forgiving, was a bit more generous with exp., and had more warp points to negate all of the backtracking, it really could have been a great game, but I found myself no longer amused by the game after a few weeks of playing it.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 03/16/09

Game Release: Etrian Odyssey (US, 05/15/07)