WHICH ETRIAN ODYSSEY PC

The touchscreen is a hair better, but you often muddle things and drag around elements instead of tracing them. The buttons are more precise, but awkward and clunky, needing to quickly toggle between shoulder buttons and joysticks to emulate a mouse movement on the screen.

Here, the map movements are either button bound or touchscreen centric, a rare and important use of the touchscreen for the Nintendo Switch. To seek the Holy Grail! No? Wrong question?

It was intuitive (as many things on the DS were) and you could easily get into a rhythm in the process. This made a lot of sense on both the DS and 3DS: dual wielding the buttons and a stylus meant making a few moves and jotting them down quickly so you could remember them for later. The maps are bare and players need to take time and actually draw out the map as you move forward, lest you leave yourself blind for the future returns (of which there are many). You are hampered by your inventory’s limitations, the skills of your team preventing you from doing too much, and the blindness of the map, which is a massive undertaking that will make or break the game for you. The plot, while intriguing, is incredibly spread out over dungeon dives that can very realistically take up to an hour at a time. Every monster you encounter feels more like a TSR leftover than anything else: slimes that are more jellies, giant sloths and firebirds, and mutated animals that are right at home with rolling to calculate THAC0. After all, Atlus advertises these games as JRPGs, but Etrian Odyssey feels as Western a dungeon crawler as you can get. Out the gate, players who have never experienced these games will be confused. Sloths and bees, natural friends who always attack in groups. Lather, rinse, and repeat until exhausted. Go in, slay monsters, try and get back out. I personally loved the 3DS version because it gave me a little more purpose and reason to continue moving forward, whereas the vanilla experience of Etrian Odyssey HD is more blunt and to the point. While the concept is the same – dive into the Labyrinth and slay monsters – a lot of the story driven extras that exist in the 3DS remake ( The Millennium Girl ) don’t exist, and that might not jive with players as well. One thing that players are going to need to keep in mind is that the first title of Etrian Odyssey is a DS remake, not the 3DS title, and that’s an important differentiation. Still, with little more than gumption and curiosity, you must venture forth and discover the deep secret at the heart of the Yggdrasil Labyrinth. There are some truly mysterious forces at work, and you quickly find doors that cannot open the first time, complex monsters and evidence that some unseen force is watching over all of you. You assemble a guild of warriors, healers, alchemists, and dancers (if you’d like) to venture forth and map out the Labyrinth, helping out the chief and other guilds who wish to know the secrets.

This was, surely, a homerun for Altus out the gate.įor those unaware, Etrian Odyssey takes place in the city of Etria, where the seemingly endless Yggdrasil Labyrinth has erupted, enticing and threatening adventurers to plumb the depths.

So I knew that a great time could be had delving into these much celebrated games, particularly with an HD gloss on the Nintendo Switch.

WHICH ETRIAN ODYSSEY PC

After all, dungeon crawling has been my bread and butter since the heydays of the old Dungeons & Dragons PC games, and I spent more time in the 3DS Shin Megami Tensei titles than was healthy. So when Atlus announced the release of the Etrian Odyssey HD collection, I was ecstatic. We can enjoy and appreciate what we had and admire what it still means to us today. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and one only needs to look as far as the Final Fantasy Pixel Collection to see why it’s great to bring back the classics with a fresh yet subtle coat of paint. One of the biggest complaints that I hear, day in and day out, is that Nintendo should make their old catalog of exclusives readily playable on the Switch. People clamor constantly for old games to be re-released on current generation consoles and platforms.

Which etrian odyssey