Etrian Odyessy: Introduction

It's September 2010. Our family has stopped by our 'local' (it's a 30 minute drive away) Gamestop again. As we walk in and my brother and I start to wander I see a stand by the register showing off an upcoming game. It has some cool characters on the front, but it's the first I've ever heard of it. I don't know whether it will be worth the chance or not. Plus it comes out in less than a week. Is there even a point to a preorder?
As we start to file out, I stop and go back to the counter. The game looks interesting. Why not give it a chance? I put in my preorder.

 

A week or two later we stop in again. I pick up my game. Turns out it had a preorder bonus; an art book featuring character and environment art from the first two games in the series. It also gave a sneak peak at art from the game I just bought, as well as snippets of concept art.

 

That artbook is still one of my treasured possessions. The game was Etrian Odyessy 3: The Drowned City.

Etrian Odyessy is a series of dungeon crawler RPGs originally released for the Nintendo DS. You play as the leader of an adventuring guild, leading a group of adventurers as you explore a vast and dangerous labyrinth. While the first two games don't have much of a story, the future entries do their best to incorporate more compelling characters and story beats. There are also remakes of the first two games that feature massive overhauls of some previous classes, a new class for each game, and a Story Mode with a prebuilt party of characters and a separate, smaller dungeon to explore. Note that the remakes are not the same as the HD Remasters that released in 2023. 

Outside of the remakes and their respective story modes, the members of your adventuring guild are up to you to create and manage. You can choose from a variety of classes each with their own, allbiet limited, selection of character portraits. No classes are gender locked (glares at Fire Emblem), nor does gender effect character stats. In fact, there is nothing forcing pronouns and gender identities onto your characters at all beyond the portraits. You could very easily make your own headcanon for all your characters. Though the voice acting available in the titles after the first remake may cut into that. Player character names, as well as the name of your guild, are also up to you.

The games take advantage of the dual screens of the system by allowing you to map out the labyrinth on the lower screen as you explore. While there is limited automapping in that the tiles you walk over are mapped, it is up to the player to draw walls and utilize symbols and notes to aid in future explorations. EO4 and the later entries would release on the 3DS, greatly benefitting from the upgraded hardware and making numerous quality of life changes. These includes multiple difficulty levels, additional save slots (unfortunately not in EO4), and a full automapping feature.

For me, the best part of the series has been the mapping. Having to map out the labyrinth and being able to do so easily and quickly on the lower screen makes it truly feel like you are exploring a vast labyrinth without disrupting the flow of the game. Later sections of the labyrinth also tend to feature special quirks that make exploring and progressing a puzzle in its own right. For example, one section in EO3 (which will be discussed in my next post, so it isn't too much of a spoiler) features platforms that work like ice blocks. Hopping onto one will send the platform and yourself in the direction you moved. If you hit solid ground you automatically hop off the platform in the same direction you were moving. But if you hit an obstacle, you stay on the platform and can move in a different direction, again in a straight line until you hit something. This obstacle could be a wall or, in the case of the later puzzles here, another platform that you cleverly setup earlier to get to the passageway allowing deeper access to the dungeon. 

The mapping is not the only key feature to the labyrinth. Most floors past the first will also feature FOEs- powerful monsters that, when you first encounter them, are far too strong for your party to defeat. They are the other main way that the series makes dungeon puzzles. Navigating a room or floor without getting into a fight with a FOE is key to keeping your life and making progress. The truimphant feeling of coming back to these FOEs that made your exploration challenging and taking them down is incredibly enriching. It helps that FOEs tend to drop items that give some genuinely good gear.

I've fallen into several deep dives of the EO series this past week. I'm more or less refreshed on the gist of all the mainline games. Now it's down to actually remembering my experiences with them. Hopefully sometime this week I'll be able to write out a post about EO3, my very first game of the series. Wish me luck, cuz my memory sucks and I haven't played that game in nearly 10 years.