I started Etrian Odyssey IV a little under a year ago. When I got it, I had a few other games I was playing at the time, and I had some trouble getting into it, so I shoved it off to play other titles. However, after beating another Atlus RPG on the 3DS, Shin Megami Tensei IV, I decided to give it another go and wow. Unfortunately, the game does not record your time, so but my 3DS tells me that I've played EOIV of quite some time. Clocking in at around 120 hours, EOIV is one of the better JRPGs I've played in a long time.

Audio and Visuals:

The game looks fantastic, if you like an anime art style, as every character is that. But assuming you do, they look pretty good. Each character model is well defined and unique, and the enemies look smooth and polished along with the environments. I had a slight issue in the 5th dungeon of having trouble locating some passages, but other than that, no complaints. The music is what it needs to be, when it needs to be. Mysterious and slow, or upbeat and peppy. It never feels out of place.

The story of EOIV (and other EO games I have been led to believe) is rather bare bones. You the player are not a single character but rather an entire guild of adventurers (which you do get to name), each of whom you hand pick from one of I seven classes, however no party can consist of more than five characters. Each class has four unique sprites and two palates for each of those, of which you pick one to represent that character. Then you name each of them and they have no backstory. EOIV doesn't hound the player with long text scrolls about each character's life and story, instead, it trusts that the player will personify each character themselves, giving each of them meaning and reason. The story is very bare bones because it lets you tell whatever kind of story you want in the confines of this loose structure the developers have established.

More to the point: What is the story? Enter, the newly formed M3M3T33M guild, a group of new explorers who are given a skyship and told to go explore. Also, there's this big tree way over there and you should go check it out, I guess. So your quest begins to traverse the lands to find the new places to explore.

The rather absent nature of any kind of narrative direction is one of EOIV's biggest selling points, however, I would understand if someone told me that they just couldn't get into it. If you're looking for an epic monumental tale like Final Fantasy or Dragon Age, look somewhere else. The pacing is very slow in the beginning and really up until about halfway through the game where there is a small spike, but as a whole, the story moves kind of slowly.

Characters:

Unfortunately, the main party of EOIV has no character at all, so you are left with a cast of about 6 NPCs to be developed, and much like the story of EOIV, this is done subtly but very light. What was there was very well done and I thoroughly enjoyed, but there wasn't much.

Gameplay:

On to the real meat of EOIV: gameplay. Do you like graph paper? Yes? Good, because Etrian Odyssey has all the riveting gameplay of a sheet of that. No wait, don't go, its better than it sounds. Yes, like RPGs of old, Etrian Odyssey sports a grid based movement system with random encounters along the way. The game can be adequately divided into three sections: In the skyship, in a dungeon, or in a battle. Starting with the first, moving in a skyship is pretty fun, but its very restrictive until you gain the ability to change altitude and does little more than act as a hub world for the dungeons, however once it opens up, it does improve slightly. The most important and biggest part of EOIV is in the dungeons. Each dungeon is grid based, first person, and takes up the upper screen. The lower screen is dominated at all times by the map, which you must draw yourself. While this might sound terrible now, it's not as bad as you might think. I found drawing the map to be rather soothing and enjoyed looking down to see the expansive map I have drawn from nothing. A huge portion of the game is spent drawing these maps. This is EOIV's biggest defining feature.

Other than that, apply your standard JRPG experience. Random encounters, turn based combat, no ATB. I particularly enjoyed the circle in the bottom of the screen that gave you an approximation of how likely you were to encounter an enemy, a feature I would love to see in more games. There are a few differences in the combat in that characters can have their head, arms, or legs 'bound' which affects which actions they can take, which added another layer of difficulty, even if it was a little tedious, and that characters can be placed in the Front or Back row, which affects who they can attack and which attacks can hit them, and in which manner. I would however like to point out the subclass system which lets you assign a second class to any character, no exceptions. A mage with a mace or a knight who uses white magic. This is option is only opened up after a few dungeons, which provides the player time to become accustomed to and familiar with each character's base class before adding another layer of complexity onto combat. The subclass system is, in my opinion, a great example of EOIV's level of customization for each character while also showcasing the immense depth it's combat has.

All of this brings me to my next point: EOIV is ruthless. Some of the bosses I fought were all genuinely difficult, and never unfairly so. Whenever I died I always felt there was something else I could have done better to win next time. The game pulls no punches though. Though as long as you play smart and use tact, most of the difficulty can be gotten around. Just steel yourself for some real difficult boss fights. And yes, the game does include an 'auto-attack' button which makes grinding much easier.

Conclusion:

All in all, EOIV is a fantastic game. Very open ended, and unfettered by modern hand holding, a simple well crafted story on top of a deep and complex battle system which never fails to engage. While definitely not the game to introduce someone to the genre of JRPGs, EOIV has done a fantastic job of selling me, a longtime fan of the genre, on the series, to the point where I had purchased Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl, before I had even finished EOIV. However, it is relatively impenetrable to newcomers and has poor pacing in gameplay in the early stages and poor narrative pacing throughout mar it, but not enough to ruin it.

8/10, surpasses expectations