Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan Review (3DS)
Warning: Grind. I’m tempted to go around shops, whacking great big stickers on games with particularly grind-y natures. Battling waves and waves of enemies, just to level up, is not a super satisfying experience and, unfortunately, it’s a practise that Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan occasionally dabbles in.
Yet I can’t put it down.
It’s because, grind aside, Etrian Odyssey IV is smart. I’ve often been one to shmeh and poo-poo JRPGs because of their rigid formats. Good stories, yes, but gameplay-light. A narrative meal with a gameplay side salad, if you will. But Etrian Odyssey IV is a JRPG that puts the play front and centre, foregoing a full blown narrative arc in favour of context and personal tales.
For fans and stalwarts of the Etrian Odyssey series you’re likely nodding your heads in agreement, possibly wrinkling your brow in intellectual accord (or at least I hope you are), but for those unaware of Atlus’ little DS JRPG wonders, here’s the scoop. The Etrian Odyssey series re-visits the first person dungeon crawlers of old, focusing on the joy of investigating, and discovering, the unknown while battling the pure fear of unpredictable progress. When you step into a labyrinth in Etrian Odyssey you must take it one step at a time with no map, unearthing its enemies and secrets as you go.
The genius here is the map system. These aren’t simple dungeons you visit once and conquer, these are mazes that you become intimate with; a feeling that’s embellished by the game’s cartography ingredient. Taking a step will add the floor square to the map, but it’s up to you to add walls, doors, and reminders around the bottom screen as and when you uncover them. And there’s a lot to discover.
At first I thought the map element would be a load of extra faff on top of the endless battles, but I soon became intoxicated with annotating, maintaining and building my personal guide. I’d come to a locked door and pop down a note. Find a locked chest and leave a reminder. Doodle the path I could see beyond a river to try and work out where I should be approaching it from. I even found a secret magic restore point (thanks to a hint from a lovely guard I found) and had to mark on my map that the red fruit was the one I had to eat (the guard had warned me off the yellow fruit, cheers chap). Creating the map is one thing, but detailing it for use in future explorations is a joy, particularly because you know that you were the one that added the real meat of the information.
The map also comes in handy because there is a strong puzzle element to Etrian Odyssey IV. Outside of some standard puzzling (one dungeon limits you to ten steps in a central room, tasking you with studying the map to ascertain the optimum path) FOE enemies are visible at all times, and every time you take a step they will too. These are often powerful enemies that should be avoided, but they are just as frequently required as tools to advance. Working out how to use them is a necessary evil, but their presence is a much needed seasoning of fear in the spelunking soup, especially when you consider that all of the other fights are typical, random JRPG fare.
Yep, battles are unavoidable, and they are indeed turn based. Yet you choose your party – you create your team, choose their names, select the skills they have and determine how the five of them will stand in combat (in two rows). Much in the way that the map lets you put a personal spin on your navigation, the ability to handpick your squad adds a degree of choice to a genre where systems can often be rigid. Want a balanced, diverse team? Sure thing, totally fine, probably recommended. Feel like rolling with a wall of three tanks defending two mages? Yep, that’s acceptable too. Five mages? Ok, little silly, but if you really want.
Then when you’re in combat, it feels a bit smarter than your average game. Archers can bind limbs, and the game rewards you for knowing how an enemy will attack. Binding a bear’s legs won’t do anything, but restraining its arms will make it unable to attack. Sure, you’ll fall foul to bad luck every now and again, and when you meet enemies with poison and sleep abilities things can get increasingly rough, but Etrian Odyssey IV feels like a game that rewards perception and consideration frequently.
The game’s reliance on player smarts is more apparent if you play it on the harsh and painful normal difficulty over the comparably fluffy and cuddly casual one. In normal mode, death is a rude shunt back to the last save much like a true 90’s JRPG. Casual allows things to be a bit more ‘Pokémon’, with a party wipe returning you to town for a lengthy snooze. The game augments this choice by saving some content and rewards for those that step up to the ‘normal’ challenge, though the difficulty can be altered during play.
You might have noticed that I’ve not spoken about the game’s story yet. That’s because, as I alluded to, it’s more of a framework, a contextualisation, for the dungeon crawling, with the more interesting stories growing from your own personal gameplay narrative.
There’s a big tree, we want to see the big tree, let’s go. That’s really the thrust of it, though the game puts things a bit more airy fairy than that. This said there is more than enough in the way of breadcrumbs to keep you interested, with the game initially starting as a ‘nasty creatures here’ tale and soon evolving into a yarn about creators and creations. It’s enough to keep you interested, anyway, and some of the characters are rather entertainingly written.
It’s just a shame that the grind is inevitable. I kid you not when I say I ‘played’ the game while working (and indeed, am doing so now), by using the auto-move tool in the dungeon to set my character in a circle – it’s advertised as a tool to automate favourite paths to, say, resource spots – and then, once I heard the battle music, I’d pull L to initiate auto-battle (a tool that just spams the basic attack command over and over). It’s mindless, sure, but at least, at least, Etrian Odyssey IV gives you the tools to make this sort of thing a bit automatic.
But look, don’t let that put you off. There’s so much good in Etrian Odyssey IV – the personal squad choice, the smart combat, the compelling and satisfying cartography element – that I don’t want the concept of the grind to dissuade you. This is a huge, mysterious, intriguing JRPG that is a true triumph of time consuming entertainment when you consider everything it does so right. Sure, the series has been doing all of this for a while now, but Etrian Odyssey IV is the best realisation of the maze probing series to date. So on second thought, I shan’t put those stickers on the boxes, I wouldn’t want to put people off getting Etrian Odyssey IV. I might attach stickers saying ‘I can’t put it down’ instead…
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