Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City is the third entry in the aforementioned DS tactical-RPG series from the fine folks at Atlus. The series has garnered significant attention over the past couple years (at least within the RPG community) for its supposed “Old School Difficulty” and design philosophy, but fortunately—or unfortunately—I had yet to pick up either of the previous titles, so I was going in with a fresh and open-minded perspective.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that this game wanted to make me a masochist.
Game: Etrian Odyssey III – The Drowned City
Publisher: Atlus
Developer: Atlus
Genre: Tactical RPG
Price: $29.99
Verdict: Intense but fulfilling experience that shouldn’t be missed by anyone with a DS
Pros: Incredibly deep combat and exploration mechanics
Cons: Brings new meaning to the word ‘hard’
Acquired via Publisher
For anyone who is not familiar with the premise of the series, each game basically breaks down into three distinct categories: exploration, leveling, and cartography. The story in EO3 is relatively straightforward in providing veiled motivation for your guild of explorers traverse a multi-floor labyrinth in search of clues of a sunken ancient city. Your guild is made up of user-generated characters who are specialized in a number of typical RPG classes. Each floor in the labyrinth is navigated from the first-person perspective and uses a roguelike turn system—in that each step/turn taken by the player is also taken by various enemies throughout each floor. In addition to the punishing enemies traipsing through each level (who act somewhat like mini-bosses), random encounters also provide a significant chunk of game time as you deal with them throughout the labyrinth.
So you might be wondering, if the plot isn’t particularly compelling, what motivates continual abuse at the hand of a handheld RPG? Well in short, it is EO3’s third pillar of game play, cartography, which manages to tie everything together to form an incredibly fulfilling experience. Each floor in the labyrinth is represented on the DS’s touch screen on a 900 square grid (30×30) that is filled in and mapped as you continue to explore. Every space that you have been to is filled in automatically (although there is an option to turn this off, but I don’t hate myself nearly enough to do it); however, walls, obstacles, and shortcuts remain blank, therefore necessitating constant notation. Without continual upkeep, your map will become confusing and lead to inevitable deaths and a never ending cascade of frustration. While it would seem like it would be an incredibly boring and tedious aspect to the game, filling in your map provides a strange sense of accomplishment as you become increasingly more familiar with each level.
As I stated in the introduction, Etrian Odyssey is often criticized, or praised (depending on the reviewer) for its “old school difficulty,” but that is simply not the metric that it should be judged upon. The difficulty is simply a means to prioritize quality map notation and, judged by that, EO3 far succeeded my expectations. Certainly there are things that you can and more then likely will do that can hamper or hinder your experience, but I found that making these mistakes represented a harsh learning opportunity that dictated how one should play the game.
This is where I think EO3 becomes an experience that has to played by any RPG fan, because by in large, it is the first game that has treated me like an adult. The lack of a tutorial creates a sink or swim scenario that you’ll come to see is notably absent among its contemporaries. The artificial restrictions that EO3 places upon you (party size, equipment slots, inventory size, character progression system) will test both your ability to think on the fly and your ability to truly plan out battles step by step. I would liken playing EO3 to the experience of learning how to play chess; you are first taught the rules of the game, but only through experience are you able to beat a seasoned veteran.
Etrian Odyssey won’t provide the far reaching narrative of a Square Enix RPG or the escapism and cinematic nature associated with most console games, but what it will provide is one of the tightest and mechanically sound, and as I would argue, fulfilling experiences on any current generation hardware.
GrE Grade: A
Popularity: unranked [?]
