Note: This review is for the Etrian Odyssey Origins remaster version of the game for Nintendo Switch.

I’m gonna try not to compare this game too much to Etrian Odyssey V, my entry point to the series and one of my all time favorite rpgs. There are a lot of things that the game does poorly in comparison, but that really should be expected after 4 games of iteration.

Etrian Odyssey is an exceedingly old-school dungeon crawler with an emphasis on character customization and strategic leveling. It has a lot more in common with tabletop pen and paper rpgs than with a typical jrpg. There’s virtually no story, few characters, and little flashiness in its presentation. Whether you enjoy EO is reliant almost entirely on two things: do you like turn-based rpg combat, and do you like custom building a party of chosen classes each with a variety of different possible builds?

There is a LOT of combat, which is presented in first person pov with only little flashes of animation and description. Fortunately, it goes extremely fast, with most battles lasting less than 5 seconds if set at high speed. Despite having a lot of combat options available due to the many varied builds, battles tend to be very simple, which I’ll talk about more in my criticisms. Mostly you just over power enemies with damage, and probably 90% or more of the battles I handled with Auto-battle, which just has all of your 5 characters attack repeatedly.

The real meat of exploration is the series’ unique gimmick: mapping. The exploration is done in first person view, with very simple visuals of hallways connecting larger rooms. The map is set to a grid, but you have to draw the actual walls and label any important details yourself. Since you’ll be navigating back and forth over the same floors repeatedly, accurate mapping is vital. This is either going to be a satisfying activity for you or a pain in the ass, depending on preference. I really like it. It forces you to constantly be thinking and paying attention to your exploration, with success often relying on you using logic and the incomplete map to guess where to find hidden passages. And fortunately the game does include an Auto-Mapping feature as a quality of life feature. Despite its name, you still have to actually do the mapping yourself. Auto-Mapping just tracks any floors you step over and any walls you touch, so it saves a lot of time doing the basic grunt work of mapping, but you still have to add in all the important details and develop your own system of keeping track of the location of enemies, doors, switches, etc.

While normal battles are mostly mindless and easy, the map is also filled with FOEs, large mini-bosses that can be seen on the map and roam around, chasing you down if they come near. You can map out their patterns and avoid them if they are too difficult, and later games in the series turn avoiding FOEs into very satisfying navigation puzzles. Unfortunately that aspect is very undercooked in this game. Even with special abilities letting you supposedly track the FOEs and plan around them, a huge number, honestly probably the majority, of them simply spawn out of nowhere once you’ve walked into a corridor where you no longer have any way to avoid them. I got into the habit of simply killing them every time one showed up instead of avoiding them, especially since they provided the only thing close to a challenge in the game.

I played the game on the hardest difficulty setting, but unfortunately, it was still a total cakewalk, at least once you’re out of the first hour or so when your characters are so weak they can’t do much. The satisfaction of the game was let down significantly by its low difficulty, but especially by the way its design hamstrings its own tactical options. I like to play these games with weirder builds, more focused on controlling and disrupting enemies than on sheer damage and health management. This game even unlocks a special class you can only get in the second half that focuses exclusively on debuffs and status ailments, and I went through the trouble of raising a new character of that class the 40+ levels it took to get her to parity with my other party members. That turned out to be a huge waste of time. Nearly all of the bosses, and probably at least half of the standard enemies in the game, have a flat resistance across the board to all status ailments. I usually ended up killing every boss or enemy before I could manage to get any status effects active, and in the last 5th of the game I abandoned using my ailment based characters as they were pretty much useless. And even with 1 or 2 innefective, underleveled characters, the game was still trivially easy.

Despite falling down in its core system of turn-based combat, I still mostly really enjoyed this game. It’s kind of hard to explain exactly why. The loop of reaching a new floor, exploring and slowly mapping out this great labyrinth from a blank screen, is really satisfying in a way I’ve not experience in any other game series. The art is extremely charming and even though I find a lot of the balancing choices frustrating, the actual act of combat and maneuvering through the mazes is well designed and easy to use. The mapping controls were designed for a touch screen, originally on the Nintendo DS, and can still be used that way on Switch. But if you play docked, or just use the controller system as I did (having gotten used to it), it’s a lot more esoteric and unintuitive. But it’s just making the best of a weird requirement, and once you get it down, it works well enough.

Overall, I just really like the style and tone of the game. It’s a very upbeat, relaxing, friendly sort of dungeon crawler. The stakes are low, with your party just exploring for the sake of pure intrigue and profit. The story does ramp up to a pretty interesting reveal and some more explicit story in the final two areas, but the story is still very sparse.

Maybe I’m just biased by my affection for the later game I’ve played, but I think this is a fine, but bare bones game if you just want a decent dungeon crawler. But I wouldn’t recommend it over any other game in the series. If you’re interested in trying it out, I’d start with 3rd game that’s also just been remastered, or 4 or 5 if you have a 3DS lying around.