Etrian Odyssey HD Reviews

Etrian Odyssey HD is classic dungeon crawler RPG, faithfully ported from the Nintendo DS to PC and console with little compromise for its original vision.

This scratches the part of my brain that loves dungeon crawls very well. I love the freedom I have with making notation on the map, and so far the game has been giving a good amount of pathing that makes backtracking a lot easier as you navigate the entirety of each floor. Combat feels pretty decent for a game of its age, and the visuals are really atmospheric in each stratum I've gone through.

If you are a masoquist or just think the dungeon crawler + a group of nobodies concept is awesome then this game is for you. I have played this game for hours and can say proudly that i got stuck at Cernunnos and now am forced to grind new party members because my unbeatable plan of killing everything that breathes in the first 3 turns no longer works since the boss is able to do the same in the second turn. Really shakes up the gameplay for people who like persona but want more of a challenge.

I've been playing this game for nearly 20 years, since it's EU release for the DS in 2008 and no matter how much I play it, I still love it. Over time the sense of discovery was traded for comfort and experimentation and yet the fun does not fade. If you like classic dungeon crawlers with a mostly environmental story, then you'll like this title. If you already have the DS version I advise playing it with a controller as it'll make it feel a little more natura, but the KBM is solid, too. Personally I'm using a mix of controller and KBM (the latter mostly when updating the map as i find deleting icons with the controller a little clunky atm).

Still playing the other two, this game is the quirkiest of the three released to steam. This was the first of the series and had the weirdest glitches and strategies that took two games to properly iron out. That being said, EO1 still offers one of the best setting reveals in the entire series that has yet to be topped in terms of wonder and scale. I love this series unconditionally both for difficulty and crazy teambuilding synergies. Bring Thread and a Medic, you're in for a ride.

A great and faithful remaster of the original Nintendo DS game. would recommend highly to anyone that likes dungeon crawlers.

Classic gaming. For its genre, it is a good game. I would recommend it, but it isn't anything uniquely innovative. I think this even might be a remake from the 3DS, but it is pretty awesome! I do recommend this if you want something to do while watching T.V.

Are you a big fan of classic dungeon crawlers like The Bard's Tale and Wizardry, but just wish there was more mapping and less story? Are you obsessive/compulsive in that Powerwash Simulator kind of way? Are you big on incremental min-maxing? Well, I don't think I fall into any of these categories, but I still enjoyed most of my time with Etrian Odyssey...up to a point. The good: Nice music (though I wish there was more variety). Awesome art with a unique dark-chibi aesthetic. There's automapping now, which takes a lot of the tedium out of the game (though you still have to add things like doors, chests and stairs yourself). It's fun to customize your party. Difficulty levels. Save anywhere (though the difference between quick saves and saves back at the inn is completely unnecessary and confusing). The meh: The late game. Best to explain my experience. So about 10 hours before the end, I hit the level-max for my main party. Which meant that grinding became a lot less fun. So I swapped in a few new characters so at least I could feel I was making some progress, but it wasn't all that fun. So my last 5 hours were spent in utter tedium mapping out a confusing last couple dungeon floors, my characters not getting any XP nor anything I could sell (my inventory always filled up quickly). And the random encounters at this point were so incredibly frequent...Ugh...I was so happy to be finished. The verdict: I have really never played a game like Etrian Odyssey before, and it's super-stripped down gameplay loop was in retrospect kind of compelling (despite all the above frustrations). I'm looking forward to playing the next two games in the series, because while the core conceit is interesting, things like maze design, side quests, story and random encounters could really use some work...

Etrian Odyssey HD is a great remaster and a great game, flawed but great. My only complaint, and it is somewhat of a big one is that the devs included a difficulty mode called "Picnic" which completely trivialises the game, your party gets boni that are disgustingly potent, enemies are weakened way too much, and you can switch from / to this mode with no penalty. I would recommend playing on Expert since it's a difficulty equivalent to the one in the original game on Nintendo DS, with it you'll play what is closer to the original experience.

This game is, as the title implies, this is a remaster of the original JRPG which was a DS exclusive back in the day, and said game was perhaps the one to make best use of the DS's touch screen. In this game, you build a party of up to 5 adventurers, and use them to explore and map an elaborate and multi-layered dungeon filled with enemies, traps, and treasure. The main gimmick of the game is that you must map the dungeon yourself, floor-by-floor, which is what the old touch-screen was used for, and which is probably best realized here on PC with a mouse and keyboard for this HD version. Probably the best feature of the game is the pacing. Every subsequent floor usually introduces new enemy lineups in the random encounters, and usually at least 1 or 2 new enemies, which makes every new floor a distinct challenge upon reaching it, while also giving you plenty of opportunities to level up and acquire new and better gear, meaning if you grind properly and are mapping the entire floor, by the time you've found your way to the next floor down you've just about mastered the floor you've been on. The brilliance of this comes when you take on side quests that require you to return to previous floors that you haven't visited in a long time; and when you do suddenly the enemies that once gave you such trouble are getting one-shotted before they can even take their turn. In short, your process in leveling-up is very, very well paced and feels very natural with the exploration mechanics, keeping you in a constant state of manageable challenge until it gives you an excuse to realize just how far you've come. There are few criticisms I have for the game, but what is likely the biggest relates to the classes. At the start, you can pick between 7 classes, with 2 secret ones that you unlock at different points of exploration. Each class feels unique and performs a different role for your group, whether it's healing, buffing, disable-ing, or DPS from either the front or back line; and between you not gaining nearly enough skill points by max level to learn and master every skill for a class, and the fact that you can only have up to 5 characters in a party, does mean that party build variety does exist. However, there are only 2 classes that learn any kind of healing skills, of of those the Medic is the only one that can use them reliably throughout the game; furthermore they get access to the skill "Immunize" which is, without exaggeration, an over-powered defensive buff. This means that you have no good reason to not take a Medic, meaning you realistically only have a party of 4 to truly play around with for composition. And of those 4, you don't have the widest variety to pick between. Once you've done a playthrough, you'll be hard-pressed to find a party composition that feels very different from your first. The two unlockable classes have the potential to fix this, but there are two problems: one is when you unlock them, as the first you can only recruit upon reaching a certain point on the 11th floor, and they as all new characters you register start at level 1. By this point in the game your main party will be at or beyond level 30 at least, meaning you will have a lot of grinding to do to get any new character up to speed. It's even worse for the 2nd class, which you won't get until the 16th floor. The second problem with the new classes is that both perform very poorly compared to the base 7. The Ronin in particular is a front-line DPS with perhaps the highest damage output for the role in the game, but the least amount of defense. This is normally fine, but their skills make them more difficult to use than they should be: each of their active skills is divided into one of 3 categories which are themselves locked behind the initial skill that "defines" each category. These skills all provide stat buffs to the ronin, but they are required to be used in combat before any of their active skills can be, meaning you essentially need to waste a turn with the character in order to use their more powerful abilities. This coupled with the Ronin's weak defenses leaves them feeling utterly inferior to the other front line DPS classes that you had access to since the beginning of the game, and certainly doesn't justify using one when you already had to grind it all the way up to the rest of your party. All said, Etrian Odyssey feels like a classic, straight-forward turn-based JRPG, with a cool and memorable mapping mechanic, and it was a great surprise to see it get an HD release for modern systems. If you're looking into the series and the other HD editions, this one is by far the easiest, though most restrictive, of the 3, and thus a great starting point if you want to check the series out. I highly recommend it. One last thing though, while most of the time it's perfectly fine, if you look just a little too long at some of the character art in this game, you should be placed on a list somewhere.