J-Eye of the Beholder

[davidn]

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.

Bernard the monk was the first of my adventurers to be completed (which is more than I can say about the game his namesake is meant to be starring in). The class description told me that they were healers, and I knew that you always need one of them, but as a welcome bonus, he turned out to be rather capable in combat as well. The game encourages you to use his bare fists instead of weapons so that you get the specific Monk abilities, but not being one to listen to these things too much, I gave him a big club instead and a 100-point increase in damage can't lie. He can intimidate enemies on his own even if his glasses, pyjamas and pudding-bowl hairdo make him look like an unemployed ex-Milky Bar Kid.

Cheech came next, and I'm not really sure why she was called that because she was named by Whitney. She's a ninja, and her primary talent at the start of the game was of being killed - I lost count of the number of times that I had to drag her back up to the town by the hair after she had been knocked unconscious by being slapped a bit with a fish. Eventually, though, I gave her some health upgrades and sort of discovered how best to use her - along with providing some extra damage and being a backup healer thanks to her ability to reduce the cost of her other special skills, she has an ability to copy herself and distract enemies with fighting clones, like the multi-Smiths from the Matrix.

I couldn't help noticing the Farmer class on the list, which was described as being a bit rubbish in combat. That, of course, meant that they must have other special abilities and I had to have one - naming him, of course, Joe Grundy. Quickly, he proved his worth by allowing the party to get materials back from the dungeon and sell them off at a profit, thus increasing the vital cash flow, and to instantly return to the town rather than risk trekking back with low health. But the part about being useless at fighting was absolutely true, so in place of a weapon, I gave him an item described as a "boring book" by the game, which has a high chance of sending an enemy to sleep when it's used on them. I like to imagine that he's hitting them with a Jeffrey Archer novel.

Being unsure of what I was really doing at this stage, the rest of my party were basically chosen on the strength of their hotness. The Arbalist class, for example, have two immediately obvious reasons why they should be in your party: one - they do not appear to wear any pants. Two - perhaps more useful in game terms, they carry a fecking great ballista as a head weapon. My siege-weapon-toting party member is called Tanya, as the only tough female name I could remember came from Command and Conquer (and she's actually dark-skinned, but I couldn't find that variation of the character picture anywhere). Despite her slowness, she's one of the primary damage dealers.

The other party member tasked with the role of hitting people hard is a Gladiator, who naturally is called Jet (narrowly beating out Scorpio, Nightshade, Tempest, Lightning, and Cloudy with Scattered Showers from the ITV production). She's also useful for small subtler things like reducing an enemy party's overall defence temporarily, but for the most part her task is just to whack people with her club. Therefore I find myself in a situation that's rather unusual for this type of game, with the women of the group being the heavy hitters and the men being the support regiment.

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.

Comments

[feralmuse.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. I may not be able to avoid this series much longer. Then again, Kjorteo caved and tried Minecraft so I guess it's only fair...

(In short, thank you for the review!)

[davidn]

Caved. Hah. Anyway. Yes, after my initial hesitation, I had been searching for something that promised to occupy me for a long time, and this didn't disappoint in that regard - even though it's immense, it always feels like you're about to do something important. And because you're given very little instruction in a game with so many possibilities, you feel the urge to share the effectiveness of your own approach.

Perhaps I will also try Minecraft eventually, but I've been trying to limit myself until I finish the game I'm supposed to be writing - I feel that once I get into it, there's very little chance of me ever getting out.

[quadralien.livejournal.com]

Does that mean I'll have to give up my player skin to you? :P
http://www.minecraft.net/skin/skin.jsp?user=QuadrAlien

[davidn]

That's quite remarkable :) Maybe I'll join it with something at some point...

Also, I have no doubt that you'd love this game as well. The first game is out in Europe just now, so I think you might also get this one within the next eighteen years.

[kjorteo]

I don't think you'll ever find a series where you get so much out of it for how little the game actually puts in. I've written before about how the minimalistic presentation gets your imagination to fill in the gaps and somehow that makes it even more awesome. And when you have a party made out of complete blank slate characters and there are so many options for how to put your team together, there's suddenly a strange pride in showing off what you've actually come up with... I can definitely understand why davidn devoted so much of this post to talking about his own party, as I would do the same, have done the same in many of my Teogames posts already, and want to do the same again now that davidn came up with the idea of including pictures.

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

I'd like to say "Gaaaahhh, not you too!" but in truth I drink these posts up. And would like to see more detailed party information, to boot!

[davidn]

I'm glad to hear it :) The desire to share progress information in this game is infectious, for the reasons touched on above - I hope you find the same when you start!

[kjorteo]

Here's how right you are about the whole concept of how much you've written without even scratching the surface of this game: at is core, if you were to boil and compress the entirety of EO down to two or three bullet points, you'd probably get something like this... draw your own map, make your own party, FOEs, murderous difficulty (well, the word "Atlus" is on the box, so....) For all you've written here, you neglected to mention a few of these at all!

If you wanted to keep us all updated about this game as it was happening, your journal would end up looking like mine. (Fair warning to everyone else who may not have known this yet: I go a little crazy trying to figure out subclassing options.)

Where did you get those pictures? Now I want to include those to properly show off my party. :)

Oh, and

"Being unsure of what I was really doing at this stage, the rest of my party were basically chosen on the strength of their hotness. The Arbalist class, for example, have two immediately obvious reasons why they should be in your party:"

I really was expecting this sentence to end in a way entirely different than how it did. This does confirm that we're using palette swaps of the same portrait, though--that picture you have to represent her, that's my Simone. :)

Oh, and one more thing. The Japanese EO3 cover (seen in your link to the zombie event music)--that Ninja in the upper-right corner. Every single time I see that picture, it always takes me a few seconds to stop seeing his hair as something else and wondering why there's a Garchomp in this game.

[davidn]

I'd meant to mention the FOEs... those got lost in the struggle to keep this down! Even the music, which I'd meant to make a point of, was a last-minute squeeze... and I haven't even talked about where my team's headed with their abilities. Or that Cheech has now been fired for being too useless and has been replaced with Prince Siegfried, or what a good feeling it was to work out a combination of classes that worked slightly better. Or my tentative subclass plans... you get the point. And I thought I'd written a game with an overwhelming amount in it...

The character portraits were from the screenshots section of http://www.intothelabyrinth.net , which I knew of through you... they have all the portraits but only one colour set for each of them - Tanya was just the only one for which this made a significant difference for me.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

Totally wish I could read all this, but I won't be done with Etrian Odyssey 3 until this time next year! Even briefly scrolling by the screen shots you posted seemed like too much of a spoiler. Grr!

Glad you enjoyed it [I assume]!

[davidn]

It's all safe to read - I even went as far as doctoring one of the maps to ensure it revealed as little as possible! I am enjoying it - but at the rate I'm going, I'm definitely not going to be finished until next year either...

[dr-dos.livejournal.com]

This game is exactly what I've been looking for. I wanted to find one of those old fashioned explore the massive dungeon games. I ended up putting the original on my flash cart and giving it a try at work. After getting wiped a few times I managed to hit level 3 and can now actually survive encounters.

However, being stuck with a flash cart I have no manual to answer what the time of day matters for. (I'm playing the original but I doubt it changes).

[davidn]

Well, I've found one "event square" in the third game's dungeon that is only available during the night - stargaze for an extra 20 HP. I think there must be more - and there are monsters in certain areas that only have a chance of appearing during the day, or night (I got used to making sure my party was nocturnal, on the second floor, as it had huge birds that always killed me during the day). But keeping track of what all of those are is yet another task that I've yet to get round to.

And it does take a couple of tries of over-reaching before you get a sense of what your party is reasonably capable of - another little thing that you get over as you learn the game on your own...

[dr-dos.livejournal.com]

Next question: There is a meter called Boost and I have no idea what fills it or what it means!

[kjorteo]

Is this the original Etrian Odyssey? In EO2 and 3 I think Boost was replaced with Limit.

Anyway in EO1, Boost is sort of like a limit break (the gauge builds up as you fight, then you can use it when it's full) only instead of an actual separate move, you pick Boost and then your move and it's just a superpowered version of whatever move you picked. It's sort of wasted if you Boost --> regular attack, but on any skill you use the game just treats it like it's five levels higher than what it really is. (Boosted Lv. 2 Immunize = regular Lv. 7 Immunize.) That includes going up to a theoretical pretend-Lv. 15 if you Boost a maxed out Lv. 10 skill.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

Oh yah, I'm right on time.

There are somewhat different enemies at night. Graphically the dungeon looks a little different. One character can get a bonus at night.