Etrian Odyssey Untold

Playtime: 57.7 Hours

It took a while, but I was able to finish the game in Story Mode with my characters all at Level 66. I didn't end up reclassing anyone, so I pretty much used the stock party the entire game. I also finished all of the side quests before the postgame - including the optional bosses - which left me with a pretty big cash hoard of around 160k en. I stopped right after beating the Story Mode Yggdrasil Core fights because I'm not really interested in going further, since most DRPGs tend to seriously ramp things up at that point unfortunately. Raquna is the best btw.

Guild card stats:

- Max Level 66
- Enemy Discovery 78.61%
- Item discovery 66%
- Ventured Days 78
- Enemies Hunted 2683
- Walked 34761
- Total en 774787
- Grimoire Chances 263 (didn't use these much)
- Stones gained 122
- Stones Synthesized 0 (lol)
- Enhancements 70

This was a pretty interesting introduction to the Etrian Odyssey series, though I'm not sure it really represents the spirit of the franchise as a whole in a number of ways. These games typically let you build your entire party from the ground up, and even let you hire additional mercenaries to keep in reserve for different types of exploration or more fluid roles in combat. However, this game heavily encourages you to play in Story Mode, which is probably the single biggest difference from the original EO1 for which this is a remake. In Story Mode, you don't get to customize or choose the initial classes for any of your 5 characters, and you're also blocked from hiring additional members from the Guild Hall which locks down that dimension of the game's features. I'd say this probably worked to the benefit of my experience in all honesty, since the party that you are given is very balanced and effective, if simple and generic - 3 attacks (2 physical, 1 magical), a tank, and a healer. This simple layout really let me focus on learning and understanding the core mechanics of the game, since combat roles were very straightforward.

The story itself isn't particularly special, but Story Mode does kind of ruin one of the big twists of it at the very beginning of the game (that the world takes place on a regrown Earth, restored by the Yggdrasil trees planted around the world). Fredricka pops out of her cryo chamber and instantly clues you into what is meant to be a surprise reserved for the last stratum - Shibuya. Thankfully the game is pretty light on story no matter how you slice it, so the experience isn't really impacted - whether playing in Story Mode or Classic Mode, the objective of each area is pretty much just to dig deeper. I thought the character interactions were pretty nice and didn't tend to get in the way much - just a few lines here and there to build on each character a bit more, with nothing to distract you for more than about a minute at a time before you're back to spelunking. With what little the game gives you, I'd have to say Raquna is definitely my favorite character by a mile; she seems to have more spirit than the others, though Fredricka isn't bad either (and is fun to tease). Structurally, there is a significant change in the form of a new area - Gladsheim - in which you find Fredricka's cryo pod, and which develops into a side story following a second possible solution to the Yggdrasil issue that ultimately doesn't work out. The end of the game is also changed a bit - instead of having to slog all the way through the sixth stratum for another 20-30 hours to fight the true final boss (Yggdrasil core) and big bad of the game, it's turned into a 2-phase fight that happens after the Gladsheim fight, where the party receives a ton of buffs (and the boss a nerf) to equalize the playing field. I don't mind this at all - for if the game simply decided to keep that in the postgame after building the core up to be the great evil the entire story, what kind of ending would that be?

Even more than the combat and levelling mechanics of the game, I think the key feature of the game is the dungeon exploration - particularly the way that mapping works. Etrian Odyssey (as a series) makes use of the lower screen of the DS/3DS to have an interactive mapping feature built into the game, which is far friendlier than some old games in the genre that don't give you a map at all (assuming you'll draw one yourself on graph paper), yet is more engaging than the automaps found in many more recent entries. As a tradeoff, I feel like the floors tend to be somewhat small and relatively simple to account for the fact that a very sizeable portion of an average playthrough will be spent drawing a little chart at the bottom of the screen. Each area tends to have some fun mechanics, though most of the ones in this game are pretty much standard fare at this point since I've played quite a few DRPGs - moving tiles, teleport, buttons, floating platforms, etc. The theming of each stratum is really cool though - they feel unique within the context of the game, and the drastic differences between each new stratum add a slight air of mystery to the experience - because I wonder such a drastic change in the environment could happen within the space of a single flight of stairs. Overall, this is probably the best element of the game - both the actual exploration of the 3D environments with all of its gimmicks, and the mapping gameplay are fantastic and really made this a memorable experience. The only complaint I can really think of is that the variety of icons you can place on the map is somewhat lacking, making it hard to fully handle some complex mapping situations (like the number of teleports on that one floor...). I also wish FOE marks would actually move with the FOE, instead of being static. The last problem of EO1, of slow movement speed, has been fixed in EOU as far as I'm aware - I didn't feel like movement was sluggish in my playthrough.

The combat mechanics are decent, but not particularly special. For being a turn-based game, the speed of the menus & fights was quick (this applies to the entire UI) so fights really weren't a slog thankfully. I also found the mechanics around the Highlander's core damaging skills (Delayed/Cross Charge) really cool to play around, as well as the binds which feel pretty unique to Atlus RPGs. Overall, I think the gameplay flowed very nicely most of the time and didn't have serious trouble at any point; I also found the bosses to be somewhat challenging but not too overwhelming, which is pretty much what I expected given that I played on Standard difficulty to speed up the game a bit. I'm mentioning this first, because pretty much everything else is just going to be ranting about the things that the game got wrong (instead of everything else that it gets right).

There are some really irritating elements of the enemy stat & behavior designs in this game. The one that bugged me for the entire game was the handling of enemy speed; you can't actually see exact Agi values but it feels like enemies tend to either have infinite speed or none. It kind of makes the party's Agi pretty worthless; outside of Raquna who was reliably slow the entire game, the entire party would typically move in a single 4-man block before or after the enemy. There's no point strategizing about any of this if you can't play around it, and there's no counterplay to some enemy formations just bullrushing you with like 400 damage you can't prevent because you happen to move too slowly. Drops were generally OK, but there are a few quests that required some pretty awful grinding for lucky drops. The thing about it is that it makes it pretty easy to start overlevelling (especially when I can't switch out my characters), so by the end of the game I'm pretty sure I was at least a few levels above where I should have been because of some dumbass 1/20 rare drops that I had to get 10 times (thank Gold Furs). Lastly, I'm convinced that some Boss AI patterns are designed to focus down specific party members - for example, the Gimle boss fight fired something like 6-7 bank shots, and every single one of them was aimed at my Highlander (this is though Raquna's maxed Provoke, BTW). It's to the point where I think the game is potentially glitched, or just otherwise poorly designed - when there's no counterplay to these mechanics which can end up being instant kills or wipes, the combat just feels awful and there's no good way to alleviate that. A lot of the late game bosses felt this way; and the endgame suffered significantly for it (surprisingly, the actual final boss wasn't that bad).

The other side of the coin is the power of your party. This is primarily from the perspective the fixed story mode party, though I think it should apply equally to Classic Mode in many situations. Basically, skill quality is all over the place; in every way, it feels like there was some kind of design mandate for all skills to be 10 levels, but too many of them had little to no thought put into the scaling of their power over those 10 levels. Not every skill needs to have potential to be a 10-point investment, since that means some skills can (and do) mean far more per point than others - it's an antiquated mentality of design that was arbitrarily decided for the skill tree in this game, and should have been improved between EO1 and EOU to be honest. As a specific example, Provoke doesn't seem to work very frequently, even at level 10 - triggering less than half the time, not even to mention that about 80-90% of the enemies in the late game have multi- or all-target attacks that basically ignore it, which is some pretty awful game design. There is a neat bit of metagaming in theory that comes from leaving skills at Lv4 or Lv9 to avoid the bigger jumps in TP cost (and power) at Lv5 and Lv10, but it doesn't mean too much in the scale of things. It's not difficult to balance the game around some utility or less important skills having only 3 or 5 levels; consolidating it still won't make it possible to max out all of the actually important skills anyway, so there's still a degree of choice in character build required.

Overall, the QoL of the game is actually pretty good, and I feel like all of the town mechanics are very solid and sharp - there's not much to mention though. I guess Shilleka is a pretty entertaining character, and I think Valerie's cute (lol). The prepare buffs at the manor are really useful, but I feel like you're stuck with Rosa's for a huge part of the game and the detective & forest folk options don't even come into play until too close to the end; they should have been introduced much earlier, with Austin in Stratum 2 and Kupala in Stratum 4 maybe (though that might be tough to do with the story in mind). Anyway, here are my main two complaints: when examining a monster in the codex, you should be able to see their abilities, as well as the binds that block those abilities - this would make it much easier to properly prepare and counteract enemies, since otherwise I feel like I'm flying blind in enemy encounters a little bit. I never would have expected that I need to bind the legs of a floating wasp to prevent a poison stinger attack (???). The second is that you can't see what each level of a skill does in the custom interface, so you don't get a good picture of how the skill upgrades across the levels. It has somewhat limited utility for most damaging skills where it would be mostly useful for seeing rising costs, but would be a huge benefit to some support skills that have more major changes in behavior - heal/restore AoE (vs cost), number of binds restores, number of enemies debuffed, etc. The worst part of this is that this was apparently a feature in the original EO1, so I have no idea why it was removed in this game.

At the end of the day, I think there is guaranteed to be a decent amount of salt that accumulates in these games, especially towards the end where some very unfortunate encounters can happen that just instantly wipe your party and axe like half an hour of progress. There's a fundamental element of random and unexpected dangers in these games that I just think I can't fully accept, since I really prefer for games to be mostly deterministic. I think my mentality comes more from a desire to have any failure or loss come from a mistake in planning or execution, and that just can't happen all the time with these games without making them too easy, and maybe a bit boring. If I try to take a step back from the game and accept that, I find it far easier to see how the rest of the game really shines. I definitely don't think I'll be able to binge more than a single EO game at once, but I'm definitely interested in coming back to EO2U sometime in the not-too-distant future for another fix. With respect to that, the prebuilt story party in that game seems a bit stranger and more interesting than the tried-and-true setup of EOU, so maybe that'll keep things fresh!