It's time to once again venture in the Yggradsil labyrinth and getting PTSD after seeing your party mauled by purple butterflies the moment you step outside the tutorial area.
Kidding, even the tutorial area can kill you.
Etrian Odyssey Origins is a collection of the first three Etrian Odyssey games that were published on the DS, adapted to hardware that doesn't feature two screens, a touch screen, a pen input, or a combination of both.
The games can be purchased as a compilation or separately, and if you want to try out one, go for the third.
The approach to these ports is that they are straight ports of the DS originals, so EO1 and EO2 lack any of the updates introduced in the Untold editions available on the 3DS. This means enemies are static sprites and not animated models, there's a limited number of character portraits that cannot be customised in colour, the skill balancing is the same, and there are still the same limits as on the DS, like limited number of characters in text entries and no real way to plot down teleport points (hello 6th layer in EO1).
There's a number of improvements, although minor: each class has an extra portrait, options for all games share the improvements made in EO3 (like request to end turn after you input the last action, or movement speed in the labyrinth), and on PC there's a small number of graphical options. I'm pretty sure any kind of PC will be able to run this at whatever framerate, we're talking about DS graphics to which you can even disable antialiasing.
Talking about graphics...well, they hold up greatly. The drawing distance is only a few tiles away, but environmental textures and enemy sprites look surprisingly good, as someone actually spent some time rescanning the original illustrations rather than just upscaling what's in the DS ROMs, and I'm playing at 4K on a 32" inch monitor. Playable and non-playable portraits clearly show pencil strokes, and this is a testament to EO's overall excellent art direction.
Music is still great, we're talking about Yuzo Koshiro, so there's nothing much to say here, they sounded great on the DS' small speakers, they sound even better on decent speakers today.
Now, the interface. Developers did everything they could to bring Etrian Odyssey to double-touch-screen-less systems, and the result works. It takes a bit to get used to though, whatever your previous experience with the franchise is.
For my first go I used my laptop, a Surface Book because it has a touch screen and pen support. The game cannot be controlled entirely with the mouse/pen, you need the keyboard to control the party in the labyrinth, and the interface isn't exactly mouse-friendly: controllers/keyboards are clearly the primary focus here, given the interface is exactly the same as on the DS (adapted to a single 16:9 screen). But I did this specifically for the map drawing part, and with a pen it's basically the same as on the DS: left hand to control movement and inputs, right hand to draw the map (you can change dominant hand in the options). I then switched from pen to mouse and the experience didn't change much, though I settled in using the directional arrows for movement and WASD for secondary movement (strafe and so on).
There are keyboard (and thus controller) shortucts for pretty much every part of the interface, but I think this plays better on PC or on portable Switch with touch controls: the interface is clearly thought for something more than buttons, and no matter how many shortcuts you introduce, it'll never be as good as in the original. Think Darkest Dungeon on console: sure, you can do it, but mouse/touch controls are oh-so-much immediate that there isn't even a contest.
You can forego map drawing completely if you so chosse with the fully automatic map drawing function in the options, but that removes a huge part from Etrian Odyssey. This lets you play with the "game" (the upper DS screen, the one where you see the labyrinth) set to full screen, rather than sharing the screen with map and zoomed map.
As the game goes...I've just started EO1 and is the same as before, therefore I summon the threads of old.
Etrian Odyssey
Etrian Odyssey II
Etrian Odyssey III
Etrian Odyssey Untold
Etrian Odyssey Untold II
Kidding, even the tutorial area can kill you.
Etrian Odyssey Origins is a collection of the first three Etrian Odyssey games that were published on the DS, adapted to hardware that doesn't feature two screens, a touch screen, a pen input, or a combination of both.
The games can be purchased as a compilation or separately, and if you want to try out one, go for the third.
The approach to these ports is that they are straight ports of the DS originals, so EO1 and EO2 lack any of the updates introduced in the Untold editions available on the 3DS. This means enemies are static sprites and not animated models, there's a limited number of character portraits that cannot be customised in colour, the skill balancing is the same, and there are still the same limits as on the DS, like limited number of characters in text entries and no real way to plot down teleport points (hello 6th layer in EO1).
There's a number of improvements, although minor: each class has an extra portrait, options for all games share the improvements made in EO3 (like request to end turn after you input the last action, or movement speed in the labyrinth), and on PC there's a small number of graphical options. I'm pretty sure any kind of PC will be able to run this at whatever framerate, we're talking about DS graphics to which you can even disable antialiasing.
Talking about graphics...well, they hold up greatly. The drawing distance is only a few tiles away, but environmental textures and enemy sprites look surprisingly good, as someone actually spent some time rescanning the original illustrations rather than just upscaling what's in the DS ROMs, and I'm playing at 4K on a 32" inch monitor. Playable and non-playable portraits clearly show pencil strokes, and this is a testament to EO's overall excellent art direction.
Music is still great, we're talking about Yuzo Koshiro, so there's nothing much to say here, they sounded great on the DS' small speakers, they sound even better on decent speakers today.
Now, the interface. Developers did everything they could to bring Etrian Odyssey to double-touch-screen-less systems, and the result works. It takes a bit to get used to though, whatever your previous experience with the franchise is.
For my first go I used my laptop, a Surface Book because it has a touch screen and pen support. The game cannot be controlled entirely with the mouse/pen, you need the keyboard to control the party in the labyrinth, and the interface isn't exactly mouse-friendly: controllers/keyboards are clearly the primary focus here, given the interface is exactly the same as on the DS (adapted to a single 16:9 screen). But I did this specifically for the map drawing part, and with a pen it's basically the same as on the DS: left hand to control movement and inputs, right hand to draw the map (you can change dominant hand in the options). I then switched from pen to mouse and the experience didn't change much, though I settled in using the directional arrows for movement and WASD for secondary movement (strafe and so on).
There are keyboard (and thus controller) shortucts for pretty much every part of the interface, but I think this plays better on PC or on portable Switch with touch controls: the interface is clearly thought for something more than buttons, and no matter how many shortcuts you introduce, it'll never be as good as in the original. Think Darkest Dungeon on console: sure, you can do it, but mouse/touch controls are oh-so-much immediate that there isn't even a contest.
You can forego map drawing completely if you so chosse with the fully automatic map drawing function in the options, but that removes a huge part from Etrian Odyssey. This lets you play with the "game" (the upper DS screen, the one where you see the labyrinth) set to full screen, rather than sharing the screen with map and zoomed map.
As the game goes...I've just started EO1 and is the same as before, therefore I summon the threads of old.
Etrian Odyssey
Etrian Odyssey II
Etrian Odyssey III
Etrian Odyssey Untold
Etrian Odyssey Untold II
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