Etrian Odyssey HD Review Summary

Balanced & Flexible Difficulty: The game offers a well-balanced difficulty experience with multiple options, including a new 'Picnic' mode for casual players and an 'Expert' mode for veterans. This allows players to tailor the challenge to their preference, making the game accessible to newcomers while still providing a demanding experience for those seeking it.

Satisfying Map Drawing Mechanic: The unique manual map-drawing mechanic is a significant highlight, offering a deep sense of exploration and accomplishment. The remaster successfully adapts this feature for PC, making it comfortable and intuitive with mouse and keyboard, and even offering auto-mapping options for convenience.

Engaging & Immersive Gameplay: Players consistently found the game to be highly immersive and enjoyable, praising its engaging gameplay loop, atmospheric visuals, and overall fun factor. The core experience remains compelling even years after its original release, providing a rewarding adventure.

High-Quality Remaster: The remaster is lauded for its high quality, successfully updating graphics, fixing bugs from the original DS version, and adding significant quality-of-life features like fast-forward and quick saves. It maintains the original game's essence while providing a polished modern experience.

Excellent Dungeon Crawler RPG: The game is highly praised as an excellent dungeon crawler RPG, fulfilling the fantasy of exploring intricate labyrinths and developing characters. Its well-designed dungeons, engaging combat system, and character progression mechanics make it a standout in the genre.

Outdated and Unpolished Gameplay: Many players found the game to be outdated and lacking modern quality-of-life features, making it a frustrating and boring experience. This includes issues with balancing, difficulty spikes, unintuitive systems, and a general lack of polish expected from a contemporary title.

Frustrating Late-Game Dungeon Design: The design of later dungeons, particularly the 6th stratum and post-game content, was heavily criticized for being tedious, convoluted, and overly reliant on frustrating mechanics like teleports, pitfalls, and hidden passages. This led to a significant drop in player enjoyment and motivation.

Excessive and Tedious Grinding: The game requires excessive grinding for experience and money, especially for new party members or to overcome difficulty spikes. This grind becomes tedious and unrewarding, particularly in the late game and post-game, detracting from the overall enjoyment.

Confusing Skill Tree and Descriptions: The skill tree is poorly designed, with vague descriptions and unintuitive layouts that make it difficult for players to plan builds or understand skill effects. This often leads to wasted skill points and a feeling of being punished for experimentation.

Unfair Boss Difficulty Spikes: Certain bosses, especially in the late game and post-game, have extreme difficulty spikes and often require very specific party compositions or classes to defeat. This forces players to grind or re-specialize, which can be frustrating, especially for achievement hunters.

Challenging Difficulty Options: The game offers multiple difficulty settings, including 'Expert' which replicates the original DS version's challenging experience. While the main story takes around 30-50 hours, the post-game content significantly increases difficulty and playtime, often requiring strategic preparation.

Unique Map Drawing Mechanic: A defining feature is the manual map-drawing system, allowing players to chart their progress and mark points of interest. While an auto-mapping option exists, it still requires manual annotation for important features like doors, chests, and gathering spots, offering a rich and customizable mapping experience.

Classic Dungeon Crawler Gameplay: The game is a classic first-person dungeon crawler, emphasizing exploration, mapping, and turn-based combat. Players navigate intricate labyrinths, fight monsters, level up, and manage resources, following a core loop of dungeon exploration and town visits.

Strategic FOE and Boss Fights: FOEs (Field On Enemies) and bosses require strategic thinking and planning, often featuring unique mechanics and significant difficulty spikes. While random encounters can be handled with less thought, these major encounters demand careful preparation.

Accessible Difficulty and Auto-Battle: The 'Picnic' difficulty mode significantly reduces challenge and provides an experience boost, making the game more accessible. This mode, along with an auto-battle feature, allows for quicker progression through minor encounters.

Excellent Steam Deck performance: Players report excellent performance on the Steam Deck, noting smooth gameplay and extended battery life, making it ideal for portable play. This includes good battery life due to static images and limited animations.

Robust display options: The PC version provides essential display options, including adjustable screen resolution, high frame rate support up to 150 FPS, and V-Sync, allowing players to customize their visual experience.

Fast combat animations: The option to speed up combat animations greatly enhances the game's flow and comfort, allowing players to progress through battles more quickly and efficiently.

Seamless cloud saves: Cloud save synchronization works seamlessly between PC and Steam Deck, ensuring players can continue their progress across devices without interruption.

Automatic wall mapping: The inclusion of automatic wall mapping is a significant quality-of-life improvement, reducing the manual effort required for map completion.

Niche Audience, Specific Appeal: This game caters to a niche audience, specifically fans of classic, grind-heavy dungeon crawlers and turn-based RPGs. It is not recommended for players seeking a strong story, character development, or modern RPG conventions, as it can be off-putting to those unfamiliar with its style.

Start with Etrian Odyssey III: Many players suggest that Etrian Odyssey III is a better starting point for newcomers to the series due to its more polished experience. While the first game is worth playing for historical context, it's often recommended to begin with later, more refined entries.

Good Value on Sale: The game is frequently recommended, especially when purchased on sale or as part of a bundle. While some find the full price too high, a discount makes it a worthwhile investment for those interested in the genre.

Compelling but Demanding Gameplay: The game's stripped-down gameplay loop can be compelling, but it's not for everyone. Players are advised to manage expectations regarding graphics and potential backtracking, and some suggest taking breaks or adjusting difficulty if frustrations arise.

Solid Dungeon Crawler for Veterans: The game is a solid entry in the dungeon crawler (DRPG) genre and is highly recommended for veterans of this specific type of game. However, it may not be the best entry point for beginners to DRPGs due to its demanding nature.

Classic Atlus Remaster: The game is a classic Atlus title, specifically a remaster of a 2006/2007 Nintendo DS game, Etrian Odyssey. It's seen as a great introduction to the franchise, with many callbacks to earlier entries and features from later ones, appealing to both long-time fans and newcomers.

Minimal Story, Mixed Reception: The game's narrative is generally minimal, serving more as a backdrop for world introduction. While some players found it enjoyable with decent twists, others noted the lack of dialogue and voice acting, contributing to a feeling of a prolonged prologue rather than a rich story.

Beautiful Anime Art Style: The game features a beautiful and refined anime-style art, with charming character illustrations and a well-integrated font. This unique aesthetic is a significant draw for many players, contributing to a cozy and appealing atmosphere.

Gameplay Can Be Boring: Some players found the gameplay potentially boring, suggesting it might not appeal to everyone. One reviewer felt the game was overpriced at $40, valuing it closer to $20, and expressed a loss of trust in the company for future purchases.

Extensive Post-Game Content: The game offers substantial post-clear content, which some players felt was as extensive as the main game itself. It includes numerous side quests and super-bosses, with a guide often recommended for navigating this challenging post-game content.