Partially due to my upcoming plane trip to Seattle (PAX, here I come!) but also out of sheer curiosity, I went to ye olde GameStop a few days ago and picked up a little DS RPG called Etrian Odyssey 2: Heroes of Lagaard. This game has been billed as retro old school to the core, throwing a high difficulty level in your face along with tons of level grinding and an unforgiving battle system that refuses to hold your hand. So, yeah, gaming like it used to be. Like it was meant to be.
I popped that sucker in my DS and dove right in. I was immediately impressed by the concise storytelling. No long-winded tales or tutorials, just a few paragraphs introducing you to the game’s mythology, then you’re thrown in the adventurer’s guild and forced to make a party. Almost nothing is explained to you during the game, which I love, so I cobbled together a party composed of five neat-looking classes and set off to explore the labyrinth.
The top screen is a 3D first person view of the labyrinth with all town commands (visiting the shop, the inn, the tavern, etc.) accessible from a text menu. Battles are turn-based and random and are easy enough to jump right into. Spending skill points to hone your characters’ abilities is where the real strategy comes into play, and I hope to Zeus I’m not leading myself down a rough road with my choices thusfar…
To make money to buy equipment you must gather things from the labyrinth and sell them back in town. It’s difficult to raise cash to buy very much, so conservation is the name of the game. Etrian Odyssey isn’t afraid to make you work for every piece of armor, every dagger, and every point of strength you raise.
Probably the most satisfying aspect of the game is making maps of the dungeon. All you kids with your automapping don’t know what it’s like to play a game like Zork, stopping every few seconds to scribble some lines on a piece of graph paper. Yes, real graph paper sitting on your real desk. Etrian Odyssey does the next best thing and sticks a map on the touch screen, allowing you as much or as little customization as you like. There’s something oddly fulfilling about RPG cartography…
Anyway, Etrian Odyssey 2 is great, and this little baby should keep me quite entertained as I zip along above the clouds. Assuming I don’t strangle the passenger next to me when something particularly evil wipes out my party, I might just pick up the original game in the near future.
Thanx for pointing this game out, my wife recently bought me a DS and I have been reluctant to purchase many games. I bought this for the plane trip from CT to western Canada. I have been playing it tons ever since. Although it is aggrivating a lot of the tiem.. dieing after an hour of play for example. It reminds me a lot of the old Wizardry games, dungeon goes up instead of down, but other than that….
I have still only made it to the 5th floor of the first stratum, and have remade my party 3 or 4 times (Is the Protector ever any good?), but can still see myself playing this game for a long time. find me more games like this,l My collection on the DS now includes this game and Mario Kart :(
Sidenote: I’m pissed to have left town the day after Super Mario RPG hit the VC.. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
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