Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan (2012)

Despite being succeeded by 2 more games, Etrian Odyssey IV really feels like ultimate culmination of the games that came before. EOV is still probably my personal favorite, but it is essentially a reboot, taking the series back to basics while using the lessons it learned before to make a super tight and well designed old school dungeon crawl. Etrian Odyssey Nexus, the 6th and so far final game of the series, is basically a fan-service celebration of the entire series, something almost in the vein of Super Smash Bros, taking locations, characters, and classes from every game in the series and throwing them all together. But EOIV is the ultimate expression of what the first three games were working towards.

In terms of variety, it has every other game in the series beat, unless you’re willing to grant that concession to Nexus for simply reusing the entire series’ attributes. With ten classes and a far better, more robust sub-classing system, I found myself thinking of many more builds I’d love to try if I ever play it again, and even when I told myself I was going to stick with my starting party I ended up experimenting with multiple other classes and retiring older members throughout the game. Partially, this is because EOIV makes doing so much less painful than previous series. The game actually has distinct characters who join you as guests and then can permanently join the party, two of which I replaced my original cast with throughout the game. They open up new unique classes but fortunately start high enough leveled that you don’t need to waste time grinding them up to use them. Items are given that allow you to skip many hours of grinding automatically moving new characters up to a decently high level, and the penalty for completely re-speccing your characters if you want to change or tweak their builds is extremely slight, instead of the debilitating -10 or -5 levels it was in other games.

The greatest variety comes in the game world. Rather than exploring one single massive dungeon, you spend the whole game trying to make your way to the great tree of Yggdrasil always visible on the horizon. Since every previous game had you entering Yggdrasil within the first 15 minutes, this creates quite a sense of anticipation. Along the way, you’ll explore many large open areas that must be mapped and puzzled out much like the game’s dungeons, but without random battles to worry about, though the game’s ever present FOE’s—super powerful on-field enemies that need to be completely avoided until you’re much more powerful from when you first meet them—are there to force you to find ways around them. The maps have many small mini-dungeons spread around, most of which have unique resources or quests you can follow that lead up to each area’s greater dungeon. The whole system works a lot like EOIII’s ocean exploration sub-system, except far more robust and integrated into the main game.

Also for the first time in the series, I found the story truly engaging and more emotionally resonant. It’s still very simple and light by JRPG standards, but there are a variety of somewhat fleshed out characters and a compelling world mystery unfolding throughout the game. It’s also surprisingly one of the most wholesome JRPG stories I can think of, at least without being cloyingly sweet in a “children’s anime” kind of way, in the way something like Lunar is. The story has you encountering several previously undiscovered new races of humanoid creatures dwelling within the labyrinths you uncover. In very stark contrast to Etrian Odyssey I’s “oh, just genocide the indigenous people that are getting in the way of our exploration,” each of these encounters start out a bit tense and hostile, but each group makes an effort to engage with each other peacefully. As it continues, they learn of their intertwined origins, the ways they can help each other with their unique problems, and quickly begin to meld together into a shared new culture without any one of them dominating the others. Even when a major villain does emerge in the final act, they’re goals are entirely sympathetic, and the heroes of the story only want to find an alternative method to help them achieve their purpose, rather than trying to destroy them. Cooperation and coexistence is the game’s main theme, which works perfectly with the primary goal of pushing through the dispassionately deadly natural environment. There doesn’t need to be some evil antagonist when your struggle is against nature and the long reaching consequences of past mistakes.

I loved this game. I wish it had a bit more of EOV’s challenge, but that probably comes from not having a Hard Mode as all of the re-releases and later games do. Still, it had more than enough strategy to keep me busy, almost never resorting to basic attacks or auto-battle to get by, since even the standard enemies require you to stay on your toes and defeat them efficiently so that you can last longer in the overall dungeon. It allowed me to build my preferred kind of weird party compositions, creating a team of vulnerable technicians that systematically shut down and contain even the most deadly of enemies, risking constant death without any means of quick healing. Even the final boss I handled mostly by paralyzing and stunning them so that I only took heavy damage occasionally. Every single class has a wide variety of builds and build combinations you can work with, even before sub classing adds another layer to it. All in all, I’m very happy with the series, and now I understand why exactly I’d heard so many people were disappointed with the changes when the EOV came out.

This series is truly unique, and I sincerely hope that the remastered Origins Trilogy from last year is a sign that Atlus won’t abandon the series. But with Switch at the very end of its lifespan and no new game announced, I have to admit I’m not that hopeful. Perhaps I will give Nexus another try now that I actually am one of those full-series fans the game was meant to appeal to.

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