Now Playing: Etrian Odyssey

The Gamestop in Petaluma is a weird little shop: when I couldn’t find Etrian Odyssey a year ago because it had sold out everywhere, I found that the Petaluma shop had several copies in stock. Now that Etrian Odyssey 2 is out,  I once again couldn’t find the game anywhere – until I went to the Petaluma Gamestop. The curious thing is that now that I own Etrian Odyssey 2, I’m playing the first part again, while saving the new one for an undetermined upcoming vacation.

I was hooked on Etrian Odyssey last year. Played it night and day, ignoring the big consoles and all books I’d been reading at the time. After many years, I was addicted to an oldschool RPG again. I mapped out dungeons, I killed monsters, I leveled up. Etrian Odyssey’s gameplay is a tried and true formula that appeals to our basic need to explore – something that Clint Hocking explained much more eloquently than I ever could in his 2007 GDC talk.

Much has been made of Etrian Odyssey being a spiritual successor to the old Wizardry games. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I never played the old Wizardry games! But I did play a ton of Bards Tale and Legend Of Faerghail, which are of the same breed as Wizardry. As is Etrian Odyssey. It perfectly executes the old formula: Explore the dungeon. Fight monsters, which gives you experience and gold/items. Which let the party grow in strength. Which allows you to explore deeper parts of the dungeon with previously overpowering enemies that can now be defeated. Which gives you experience points that let the party grow in strength… Etc. pp.
As you’re doing that, you’re exploring more and more of the dungeon. And you find extra items and special encounters as rewards. And in Etrian Odyssey you get to map out the dungeons, right on the DS! This is right up my alley, I had loved drawing up maps of the dungeons back in the days. There’s still a big binder with all the old charts somewhere in Germany.

When I stopped playing Etrian Odyssey last year I had gotten to the 13th level of the dungeon. I wasn’t really burned out on the game, I just had too much trouble correctly cartographing the rivers that showed up in this level of the dungeon. Instead of just treating them as walls (which they functionally are), my mind insisted on marking the water correctly everywhere (which is a big pain in the ass). So, instead of wrapping my head around it and keep playing, I did what ever self-respecting gamer would do: walk away from the game and give up on it.
I shouldn’t have. When I got back to the game last night I expected to be out of it. I had forgotten about my party, what the items did, what my mission was. And yet I picked up the game right where I left off. I got sucked right back in by the formula – I took a few steps, fought some monsters, leveled up, and kept playing for an hour.

So now I’m back, playing an oldschool RPG that should have been made extinct by the more sophisticated entries that the genre has seen since the old days. Hell, even when Bard’s Tale III was released games like Ultima IV were already showing us the future of roleplaying! But the basic dungeon crawler gameplay worked back then, it still works today, and will keep working in the future. Because we like to collect things. We like to see our abilities grow in strength. We like to explore. And because, just like you gotta catch them all, you gotta document every last space of that Etrian Odyssey dungeon. It’s a compulsion I find incredibly hard to resist.