Etrian Odyssey: Nintendo DS Review

Gamers around our age (late teens) are generally too young to remember the heyday of the dungeon crawler RPG. A hallmark of these types of games are the huge, sprawling dungeons with virtually no landmarks whatsoever to guide your way through. Back in those days, gamers would combat this by the use of graph paper, meticulously plotting out the dungeon in an attempt to find the most efficient route from point A to point B. This often proved a necessity, since the confusing dungeon layout was often coupled with brutal difficulty in battles. Toss in most of the conventions of an old-school RPG (thin plot, random battles, jobs, turn-based menu battling) and you’ve got yourself an honest-to-goodness dungeon crawler. As the years went by, this particular sort of game began to decrease in popularity, especially as flashy RPGs that were long on graphics and storyline began to come to the forefront of the gaming scene.

Brief history lesson aside, Etrian Odyssey (developed and published by Atlus) is a game that hearkens back to these ‘old-school’ games. Basic overview: There’s a huge forested labyrinth that no one’s ever fully explored before. You’re to set up a team to succeed where everyone else failed. And… that’s about it as far as plot goes, at least for a large part of the game.

Of course, going in there alone is liable to get you eaten for dinner by the large variety of carnivorous little beasts that roam throughout the Yggdrasil Labyrinth (as a sidenote, game developers love to use the word Yggdrasil waaayyyy too much), and as such, you’re going to need a team of tough little brawlers that can hold their own against the dungeon’s terrors. The game places you in charge of this, allowing you to create and name up to 16 individual fighters from 9 different classes (7 initially, 2 unlocked later), all of whom have their own specializations and abilities. The class names range from the straightforward (Protector, Medic) to the more eclectic (Alchemist and Hexer, the game’s Mage and Dark Mage classes respectively) to the downright bizarre (Landsknecht, which is essentially the warrior class). The customization doesn’t stop there, though. You start off with 3 skill points, and you gain 1 more point a level (up to a total of 70 levels and 72 skill points), and you’re to distribute these points to unlock the character’s skills as you see fit. With 20 skills for each class (and all of them can be leveled to a max of 10 times), two characters from the same class can end up playing radically different from each other by endgame. You can have up to five characters.

As we’ve said before, Etrian Odyssey is a nod to the old-school, and this is followed up by having a humongous, 30 level labyrinth filled with secret passages, twisting pathways, multiple dead ends, and lots and lots of monsters. Map-making or a photographic memory is going to be a necessity for anyone who hopes to traverse the labyrinth. Of course, carrying around bundles of graph paper would rather defeat the point of this game being placed on a handheld in the first place – which is why Atlus helpfully included a mapmaking feature on the touchscreen of the DS. Using the stylus, you can draw the pathways and walls of the great forest, and you can also choose from a variety of icons to indicate where you might’ve run into something of interest (and if all else fails, you can leave a short memo at that particular spot). It should be noted that this is more or less mandatory – while the game sports an ‘automap’ feature, it merely fills in the floor behind you as you walk – stuff like T-forks and icons still need to be added by you. Drawing a good map is vital to surviving in the labyrinth, because you’re running on limited resources and facing an endless amount of foes – efficiency in your movement is key.

Of course, the other half of the equation is the battling. As you wander the labyrinth, you’ll run into all manner of foes, from weak butterflies to fearsome dragons. Compounding your battle worries is the fact that several extra-powerful enemies roam the labyrinth (represented by glowing orange balls in the dungeon). Known as FOEs (Formido Oppugnatura Exsequens), these critters are a cut above the rest, and will crush you mercilessly if you face them unprepared. Using a wide variety of weapons and skills, it’s up to you to take them down and forge even deeper into the labyrinth.

Of course, every adventurer needs to take a break once in a while, and the town of Etria, situated on the outskirts of the labyrinth, provides just such a watering-hole for weary wanderers. In here, players can do most of the RPG conventions, such as napping at the inn to recover your health, visiting the pub to receive quests, buying and selling items at the store, and so on. It should be noted that unlike most RPGs, enemies don’t give cash when they perish. Instead, several body parts may be looted, such as fangs or wings, and sold to the storekeeper for cash. Selling her this raw material also unlocks new items for her shop, for example, if you sell enough ‘Soft Hide’, you’ll eventually get to buy the item ‘Hide Boots’. Alternatively, investing in several ‘harvesting’ skills for your characters means that they can grab resources at several points in the dungeon to bring back to town to sell. The town also provides the game’s only save spot via the inn, so if your party wipes in the dungeon, be prepared for a long trek to get back to the point where you met an untimely end.

The last point underscores one crucial aspect of this game – this game is difficult. Unprepared travelers can expect to find themselves with low HP and TP, no escape items, and an enraged FOE bearing down on them. Choosing to take a short rest in a flowerbed may lead to you being ambushed by a bunch of venomous critters, and they don’t really care very much if your character’s HP are all in the single digits. Your very first fight in the game can end with you victorious – but with two characters having been felled in the course of combat. The game pulls no punches, and if you mess up, you pay a price.

Aesthetics wise, the game opts for a more subdued tone. The game is done in a first person perspective – in battles, you’ll face off against beautifully drawn but inanimate sprites of monsters. The art style is Japanese through and through, and it may be a turn off or turn on depending on your preferences. The music is old-school Yuzo Koshiro, that is to say, the music is superb.

With all I’ve said, it’s pretty obvious that this isn’t a game meant for everybody. However, if you can appreciate the gameplay mechanics used in this game, and if you’re one of those who bemoan the complete lack of challenge in the vast majority of today’s games, Etrian Odyssey is a rare treasure indeed.

By: Jonathan Lau