Budget Bin Review: Etrian Odyssey

  

If there ever was a game so sadistic, so merciless in its execution, so single-mindedly methodical in making a player’s life difficult enough that the individual either breaks down and cries, or simply chucks his portable game system into a wall – Etrian Odyssey would be its older, tougher brother. The one that has the tattoos and eats broken glass sandwiches for lunch.

If you’ve played any of this generation’s roleplaying games (or even last generation) and found them challenging, perhaps difficult – mayhap you could even say they were hard – then say hi to the game that you will look back on say, “At least it’s not as hard as THAT GAME.”

This is the review for Atlus‘ Etrian Odyssey, or more commonly referred to as You Can’t Win, or OMG A DEER JUST KILLED MY ENTIRE PARTY BLARGHSLARGHSDF.

The entire review after the jump!

If there ever was a game so sadistic, so merciless in its execution, so single-mindedly methodical in making a player’s life difficult enough that the individual either breaks down and cries, or simply chucks his portable game system into a wall – Etrian Odyssey would be its older, tougher brother. The one that has the tattoos and eats broken glass sandwiches for lunch.

If you’ve played any of this generation’s roleplaying games (or even last generation) and found them challenging, perhaps difficult – mayhap you could even say they were hard – then say hi to the game that you will look back on say, “At least it’s not as hard as THAT GAME.”

This is the review for Atlus‘ Etrian Odyssey, or more commonly referred to as You Can’t Win, or OMG A DEER JUST KILLED MY ENTIRE PARTY BLARGHSLARGHSDF.

If I’m making Etrian Odyssey out like some sort of ogre, that’s because it very well is one. But that’s not to say it’s hard because of some crippling bug, glitch or broken-ness that plagues most games – it’s hard because it’s designed to be. It’s a streamlined package to deliver efficient and brutal punishment to those who don’t plan, those who don’t strategize, and those who go into battle armed only with the thought of “If I try hard enough, it’ll be okay, right?” In short, Etrian Odyssey is so cruel, it’s almost spartan. And since I’ve just made the first 300 reference, I’ll be making them more and more in the review.

SPARTA?! THIS IS ETRIA!

   

Etrian Odyssey starts you off by asking you to make a guild of your own, starting with its name. After that, you’re free to make any number of guildmembers, with a variety of classes to choose from. These classes are the typical fare we’re used to in RPGs – the archers, the healers, the mages, what-have-you.

It’s also here that you get a peek at two of the unlockable classes in the game – The Ronin, a high-damage, close-combat swordsman that specializes in unique stances, and the Hexer, dealer of deadly curses and status effects. These will become available to you at some point in the game, but since you’re still starting out, it’s better to focus on what’s available to you now – what you do at this point will affect not only your gameplay, but ultimately your survival throughout the game.

And no, that’s no exaggeration. Each class has 21 possible skills, with each skill having a preset requirement (gain so-and-so levels in this skill to unlock this other, higher-level skill, etc). Now, despite this rather high number, it’s actually quite easy to get your character into the build you want them to be in. Skills are nicely-grouped, and you’re never at a loss as to what skill affects what – thanks to a pop-up that notifies you of exactly what you need to know.

If you want a Survivalist(the archer in EO) with a skill set that’s emphasized on preventing ambushes and gathering rare items, as opposed to one that specializes on hard-hitting, arrow-based attacks, it’s as easy as simply choosing from the relevant skills and levelling them up with points. However, these points aren’t so easy to come by – you get one point each time your character levels up in battle – but with no lack of EXP-farming opportunities from the game’s FOEs (more on them later), getting the character builds you want is certainly possible, but not without some doing.

So, you’ve named your characters, made a party of five adventurers (a member of each class should do, unless you’re opting for a more specialized group) and equipped them with the basic necessities of adventuring? Then it’s the Yggdrasil Labyrinth for you – and you should do well to fear it and respect it. Fear it, for it changes people – respect it, so that it would let you leave in one piece

 

Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here.

A bit of a backgrounder on the Yggdrasil Labyrinth. It’s the main dungeon of the game that’s divided into floors, starting with B1F. The second floor after that would be B2F, and then B3F, and so on. Every five floors constitutes as a Stratum, and every Stratum is different from the other not only in appearance, but also in creatures. At the end of every Stratum is, of course, a Boss that you’ll have to overcome to get to the succeeding floors, and the next stratum.

Exploration in Etrian Odyssey is handled differently from other RPG titles – and while hardly conventional, it adds to the immersion that you, the player, is doing all the exploring, other than just merely directing the actions of a seperate entity. The top screen of the Nintendo DS gives a first-person view of the labyrinth you’re currently exploring, while the touchscreen displays an ever-evolving map that fills out as you progress. It’s here that the touchscreen functions of the DS come into play – as it’s up to you to ‘draw’ in important details to the map, such as the locations of dead ends, doors, and floor exits/entrances.

Although there IS a feature in the game where you can leave the map to keep track of what areas you’ve already explored for you, it’s much better to take the time to map out everything just so you know exactly where to go. The reason for this is that there will be other elements other than the usual doors that you’ll be coming upon to take advantage of. These are Item Points, from where you can mine, take or extract loot that you can sell in the town shop.

  

Give them NOTHING! Take from them EVERYTHING!

Now for the main feature of Etrian Odyssey – combat. Combat in Etrian Odyssey is simple – the exploration screen becomes the battle screen, with proper indicators of your party members’ HP, TP (points you use for skills), as well as status. The enemy is shown on the screen as an unmoving, hand-drawn sprite – and while rudimentary, it does its job in creating a nightmarish image of the monster currently making life difficult for your party.

Attacking or casting magic is as simple as selecting the relevant option in a menu, and simply waiting for the characters to perform them, the enemy to retaliate, and then the cycle begins again. The attack animations are in the simple side, too, with the flashiest ones being the brief, blink-and-you-miss-it spell animations. While admittedly, they’re nothing to write home about, they’re impressive in the sense that they carry the sense of destruction easily without hampering the breakneck pace of battle. All in all, it’s beautifully simple, with what normally is a complex affair filled with elaborate animations and special effects pared down to the barest essentials.

While deceptively simple in execution, battles in Etrian Odyssey are often anything but. Unless you’ve been grinding for quite a bit and lord over your current floor’s monsters by a significant number of levels, the difficulty in actually surviving a battle – much less winning one – is such that you’ll often feel as if your party members barely got to walk away from the encounter with body and mind intact. It doesn’t help that FOEs – stronger, tougher monsters that patrol the labyrinth’s many halls and corridors, symbolized as a floating ball of orange fur – will stalk you on sight, and will attack you even in mid-battle by joining whatever creature or boss you’re currently engaged in battle in.

While this certainly ramps up the already high difficulty some (and if being killed by BUTTERFLIES on your very first try isn’t a sign of difficulty, I’m not sure what is), it forces you to think and strategize two, three, even four steps ahead – something today’s Final Fantasies and Tales of Destinies stopped doing. It makes you think and re-think every move you make, as it punishes

   

ETRIANS! TONIGHT, WE DINE IN HELL!

If you think the town is a safe haven where you can rest your party’s bruised and battered bodies, think again – the town that you’ll be doing much resting and reviving with is actually home to two of the most savage NPCs in the game, namely the head of the Ceft Apothecary and the inkeeper. While they don’t actually fight you – in fact, they offer you invaluable services such as reviving unconscious party members and revitalizing overall party TP and HP – the prices they ask for aforementioned services actually cost a pretty penny, and these prices actually increase with every level you get! Talk about daylight robbery, here.

The good news is, the prices themselves hit a ceiling at a point in the game where you can easily earn a bundle from random enemy encounter loot – and with the Medic’s Revive Ability, you can actually skip going to the Apothecary altogether. There are also springs scattered in labyrinth floors that act as a full restore point for your party, but they’re few and far between. So get used to the innkeeper’s smiling face as you fork over the cash, in exchange for letting your party rest from the abuse you’ve been putting them through. Rassin’ frassin’ dumb grinning inkeeper!

However, despite the obvious obstacles that the game throws at you from day one – Etrian Odyssey is an engrossing, addictive title that shines above the usual dungeon crawler in its simplicity and unforgiving difficulty. You get a great sense of accomplishment with every FOE you manage to defeat, and the spoils of victory reward you both with monetary gain AND more powerful weapons you can purchase from the town shop.

Even if you meet your untimely demise, whether from the overpowered attack of an FOE or simply a bunch of moles ambushing you in the middle of nowhere, you actually feel eager to restart your game, to get better and stronger so that you’ll breeze through them the next time you come across such vermin. It’s one of those games that are actually challenging enough that you feel driven to press on – that you actually want to explore further and further even though your party’s on its last member, just to see what kind of creepy crawlies you’ll be up against next turn, next floor, next stratum. Not a lot of games can do that – and Etrian Odyssey does.

Yes, there’s virtually no story to speak of, the quests simple and quick, and the visuals simple. But there’s no doubt that Etrian Odyssey, while being no cakewalk, is one of the finest, most solid RPGs out there for the Nintendo DS – and even for today’s consoles. If you’re a hardcore RPG fan looking for a challenge that’s easy on the eyes, Etrian Odyssey is the game for you.

This has been QJ’s Budget Bin Review of Etrian Odyssey.