I've played a lot of Etrian Odyssey games and as a result I feel invested enough in the series that I feel compelled to play them all as they come out. In March 2018, I played through the entirety of Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth, which I assumed would be the very last entry in the series on 3DS. I later found out Atlus was going to be releasing Etrian Odyssey Nexus and even Persona Q2, but then I just assumed those would be Japanese-only releases. Thankfully, I was totally wrong about that too!
The Etrian Odyssey series as a whole has become a little formulaic, although each entry typically adds a few elements to distinguish it from the pack. Broadly, it is a series of first-person dungeon crawler RPGs in which there are turn-based random encounters. The gimmick that separates Etrian Odyssey from other games is that the dungeons are not automatically mapped (at least not by default) and must be drawn on the 3DS touch screen. This has been the case since the very first Etrian Odyssey on the original Nintendo DS in 2008.
I think when I first considered trying the series, the idea of drawing my own maps actually sounded more like a turn off than anything else. I've always had a really terrible sense of direction, especially in 3D games and even more particularly in first-person games. Etrian Odyssey is certainly no exception in terms of how easily I lose track of where I'm going. However, there's something very comforting--therapeutic, even--about taking control of mapping myself. It feels less possible to get lost if I'm mapping out every location in detail. It's actually very satisfying. And it makes me more likely to explore every nook and cranny instead of becoming frustrated and just trying to find the exit to the next floor. In other games, I become so overwhelmed with that feeling of being lost and revisiting the same areas over and over that it's comforting to know exactly where I've been and haven't been.
Drawing maps isn't all there is to Etrian Odyssey, though. Each of the games has a pretty strong emphasis on party composition and character skill building. Difficulty in these games is frequently brutal, so effectively building your team is pretty important. I talked about this about a month ago when I first started playing Etrian Odyssey Nexus. Beyond the Myth is different from most other games in the series because it affords you the opportunity to select a race in addition to your character class. On top of that, each class has two different paths to follow that achieve different goals.
Beyond the Myth also returns to the classic format of a 30-floor mega labyrinth that makes up the entirety of the game. Etrian Odyssey IV had diverged from this trend by separating the floors into several smaller dungeons, whereas Etrian Odyssey III had supplemented the primary dungeons with a separate sea exploration map. I don't mind the mega-labyrinth method in Etrian Odyssey games but it felt lacking in content compared to the other games in the series since it didn't feature any extra exploration modes or bonus mini-dungeons of any kind.
At the end of the day, Beyond the Myth is a weaker entry in terms of exploration and actual things to do, but succeeds in the classes and customization options it offers. The pugilist class in general is a lot of fun and has a lot of different ways it can be built. The races available for use add yet another layer of options, particularly because each of them have a skill tree of non-combat passives entirely separate from the classes assigned to them. It's also one of the few games in the series that doesn't feature subclassing, which in other games is the ability to select a secondary class pulled from the same pool as the primary ones. Instead, each of the classes has their own unique class specializations. I like that a lot better, but it was not a trend that continued to Etrian Odyssey Nexus.
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