Persona Q was the first game I finished this year, although most of its playtime came from last year. It was a game on which I spent an enormous amount of time not only because I liked it a lot but because it had a lot of content to cover. It was essentially the casts of Persona 3 and 4 inserted into an Etrian Odyssey game although many traditional Persona/Shin Megami Tensei mechanics were retained such as Persona fusion, oddball spell names, and of course the characters themselves and their various backstories and histories. Pretty much everything else is yanked straight from Etrian Odyssey, which I why I felt it would be a great idea to backtrack and play through the series. I loved Persona Q so I figured it was a reasonable assumption that I'd like Etrian Odyssey too.
Well, I wasn't wrong, necessarily, but I still wasn't quite prepared for what I was getting into. Etrian Odyssey is difficult, time consuming, and often infuriating. The early levels of the Yggdrasil Labyrinth are punishing enough that I was almost ready to throw in the towel within hours. Still, I was intrigued by the options I had available to me in creating my own party from a pool of classes and the freedom I had in building those characters. Unfortunately, Etrian Odyssey punishes suboptimal party compositions pretty harshly. It seems close to impossible to compose a group that does not include a Medic, for instance. If not for the ridiculous power of their Immunize spell, I feel pretty confident that a Protector would have been an absolute requirement as well.
Much of the gameplay of Etrian Odyssey consists of traveling as deep into the labyrinth as possible and drawing accurate maps of your surroundings, hoping against hope that the enemies in the next fight don't end your journey prematurely. Thankfully, it is possible to retain map information after your party's untimely death, but you will lose any experience and items you might have gained on the way there. Early on, the only way to escape from the labyrinth without exiting from the first floor is to use a Warp Wire, an item purchasable from the shop for 100 EN. Of course, money is rather hard to come by early on, and 100 EN is absurdly steep. Frequent exits from the dungeon are brutal on your pocket. It is very difficult in these early stages to build up any sum of money to acquire better gear from the shop. It can be done, but it's very repetitive and time consuming. There may even be occasions where you can't afford to revive fallen party members if a particular journey goes awry rather earlier than expected.
Once you get far enough into the game, money becomes less of a problem. It is possible to farm FOEs (the powerful roving enemies that can generally be avoided) on earlier floors to gain items that can be sold for large sums of money. It's not easy to get to that point, though, and not particularly fun. I have no problem with difficulty in my games, but Etrian Odyssey is hard in the beginning mostly because you are being starved of resources. This isn't very fun to me. Once your funds are in order, everything gets a bit more manageable, but the difficulty remains pretty high throughout. There was never a time where I felt I was breezing through floors. It was always this sensation of chipping away at a mountain, slowly becoming stronger and more adept at making my way through.
Once you've built your characters up, you'll find that a number of strategies trivialize the difficulty of the game. The Medic's Immunize ability, as previously mentioned, is quite powerful. With ten points allocated to the skill, the buff bestows the entire party with a 60% resistance to all damage. This is a bug, mind you--it was only supposed to resist elemental damage. This causes it to greatly eclipse the Protector's Defender ability in usefulness as it only affects physical damage. However, the two abilities stack, meaning it is possible to render your party practically immune to physical damage while taking very little damage from elemental attacks. I tried not to take advantage of this, but I will admit that I used Immunize, if not a Protector. The game stayed hard enough even so, and I found I had to resort to some unusual strategies to defeat the final boss.
Etrian Odyssey is certainly rough around the edges--and if I'm being honest I probably should have tried to play the remake (The Millennium Girl) instead, but I wanted to play the original version of the game for contextual purposes. I intend to do the same with Etrian Odyssey II (and I'm doing that right now) but I'm already finding that it has a lot of the same issues as its predecessor. At least it has a lot more diversity in available classes and a few welcome interface tweaks.
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