Etrian Toolbox

Despite my mixed feelings on the Etrian Odyssey series, I went ahead and ordered the third and fourth games. Etrian Odyssey II is really fun once it gets going. You have to invest a lot of time into making your characters strong and into planning your strategy. There are many strategies that are effective in the early parts of the game and others that are only effective later on. Fortunately, Etrian Odyssey allows you to respec your skills at any point after reaching level 30--at the steep cost of losing 10 levels, of course. Once your party is at a certain point, farming the stratum bosses is really a simple matter, though, and as a result it's not incredibly tough to get those levels back.

I really like that EO allows you to field a huge number of adventurers and switch them out at will when returning to town. It gives me plenty of room to experiment and to explore different strategies. Some of my characters serve no more of a purpose than harvesting resource points in the dungeon. I trained my Dark Hunter initially so I'd be able to use the instant kill skill Climax to meet the requirement for the second stratum boss's conditional drop--but I ended up liking the class so much that I drafted him into my permanent lineup. I'd actually used a Dark Hunter briefly early in the game, but I'd had a really hard time making him useful. He was frail and did very little damage. It wasn't until I'd pumped quite a few levels into the guy and maxed out Climax and Bait that he really started to become useful. This requires a good 25-30 levels, mind you. Now he's a master of counterattacking and finishing off enemies at 55% health or less.

I think in order to greatly minimize my frustration in Etrian Odyssey III (and IV I suppose) I'll need to figure out the best strategy for the early game. This is by far the most frustrating aspect of these games so far, but once I'm at a point where I can easily acquire experience and money, I can experiment with team compositions as much as I want. If the early part of the game goes more smoothly, then I get to the juicy part faster and I get a much better impression of the game.

I've also considered going full out and ordering the remakes of Etrian Odyssey I and II when I'm done with some of the others. I've read that they're different enough from the original versions to be considered brand new games in their own rights. If they include many of the new classes from later games in the series then I don't see why I wouldn't want to try them out. Evidently they also contain new story-heavy modes with predetermined characters. I have mixed feelings about that, but it does sound like something I'd like to try at any rate. Also coming up is Etrian Mystery Dungeon, a fascinating hybrid of EO's gameplay and that of the Mystery Dungeon series, of which I've only played Chocobo's Dungeon. I like that game a lot but sadly I have not finished it. I'd like to set a tentative goal of completing Chocobo's Dungeon and at least the rest of the contiguous EO series before I tackle Etrian Mystery Dungeon, but I have to say I find the concept very intriguing.