J-Eye of the Beholder

For about a year and a half, kjorteo had been saying that I should get into the Etrian Odyssey games, and told me (at often remarkable length) about his progress in them. But I had always been unsure of them, because from my point of view they appeared to belong to a genre that I historically loathed, the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons first person dungeon crawler. I first had experience of this type of game through Eye of the Beholder 2, which provoked in me an unusual mixture of fear and utter boredom - they seemed to involve jerking along through underground environments, examining every wall to see if there was a three pixel wide switch that did something, resting for several days at a time to recover hit points for going into another fight with four-frame horrors in combat based around the model of two people in a pitch dark basement trying blindly to hit each other with fifty pound lump hammers.

But of course, once the Japanese had a go of it, it was inevitable that their approach to this type of game would make substantial improvements. Once again, for reasons that are only briefly touched on by way of introduction, there's a huge labyrinth waiting to be explored, and your overarching objective is to form a party to get to the bottom of it. Unlike many other JRPGs, there are no preset characters - your entire team is made up of people of your own creation, who all wear blatantly insufficient clothing for adventuring and could hardly be more gender-ambiguous if they were snails. It took a good ten minutes of staring at the portraits before I worked out which ones I was safe using for the names that I'd chosen, and even then I was only about 75% sure of a couple of them.

( Interlude while I go on for absolutely bloody ages about my adventuring party )

And once you've chosen your party, you're spun around three times and then booted into the dungeon. You're expected to draw your own map as you go along - doing this is the point of the very first mission, just to make sure that you understand what you're doing, and you quickly become fascinated with keeping the bottom screen up to date as you explore the first-person world, trying to work out how best to record your progress with the symbols available to you. You step along, cartographing as you go, watching the pulsing symbol in the bottom corner that varies between blue and not-blue depending on how close you are to getting into a fight (which take place in hallucinogenic turn-based dreamspace rather than in the game directly like the AD&D games).

Despite the lack of instruction, I was able to grasp various elements of the game quickly - the combat is through the usual JRPG menus, with status modifiers that are of the usual fare from Final Fantasy and the like. Confuse causes you to lose control of a character, Blind reduces your accuracy back to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons standards, and it has the harshest Poison I have ever seen in a game, easily taking about half your heath off per turn instead of the four or five hit points I'm used to. The major difference from my previous experience is that outright disabling magic with Silence is replaced with the concept of Binds, which disable abilities that use the legs, arms or head separately. And apart from brief moments of lunacy where you can do things like bind the legs of a boat, the system makes a lot of sense.

After some marvelling at it and going "Wow, this is like Eye of the Beholder, except good", I realized that despite the superficial similarities, it's not really like the dungeon crawlers that I never understood - it's more something like Diablo, treating the dungeon as a resource mine that you can dip into and come out of hoping to turn a profit. It would be an understatement to say that there's a lot to do in the game - you're given your main mission from the Senatus at the town on the surface, can pick up further special requests from the bar, go in and gather items with chop/mine/take skills and sell them off, work out how to get rare drops from monsters that unlock further equipment in the shop, and so on - and rather than concentrating on one thing at a time, you always seem to end up going in and then playing all of these objectives at the same time, in some small way. The sense of exploration is quite wonderful, especially as you're left to draw your own map - getting further and piecing together more of the dungeon seems like a real achievement. There's a Civ-like drive to keep going because your next big objective is never more than just around the corner - you're always about to discover a new area, or get a new weapon, or be able to unlock a whole new cache of abilities in one of your classes' technology trees. Then you can throw them all out and start again with people who work together better.

And throughout, the retro stylings are quite wonderful - the greatest of these touches is that the music was composed on a PC88 from the 80s and then ported over, to give it the authentic sound of an older game. It also has the scariest event music I have ever heard, and the almost Shadowgate-like writing style of the dungeon text ("Tread carefully but don't delay if you want to leave this room alive!") makes me think of Treguard watching over your shoulder.

As I have observed and indeed just demonstrated here, something that you may consider a disadvantage of the game is that you tend to get rather involved in it. I usually write a post about a game when I've got enough of an idea to talk about it, and then again when I finish it, but this is huge. I got it for playing on the plane in November, and while that didn't work out, I've been playing it constantly ever since - I've been going for well over a month and would guess that I'm about a third of the way through. If I were to do updates on it as I discovered pivotal moments in the game, then my journal would turn into Arnold Rimmer's Risk Campaign Book and nobody would read it again, ever, but even in this enormous introduction I've barely touched on what I've been doing in it.

For example, I haven't even mentioned the sea voyages yet. Yes, if the above tasks just aren't enough for you, you can visit the town's port and go sailing to chart the islands around you instead, gradually gathering cargo that allows you to travel further and faster. During one of these voyages, an event came up that invited me to take some time off and go swimming. After I agreed, it detailed my team stripping off and diving into the sea - then gave me a scare by having one of them go missing, and to cut a long story short, it ended up with Tanya dragging Jet out of the water and giving her the kiss of life. Yes, it invited me to activate a game event with no purpose but to practically write lesbian fanfiction about itself.

I love this game.