Through the forest of eternity

[davidn]

Sorry about going dead for the last while - I had an onset of vertigo that had been getting worse over the last week and for the first time in my life, didn't feel like using the computer more than was absolutely necessary. Now the dizziness and apathy is lifting and it seems to have morphed into a bad cold - as my 28th birthday is tomorrow, perhaps this is just what flu does to you as you get older. When I was awake over the weekend, though, I dipped back into the first Etrian Odyssey game to see where I was, and I'm going to see if I can talk about that for a minute instead of about five days like I usually do.

The DS hasn't really been getting the attention it deserves since I stopped commuting by bus and train and I had stopped playing this game just after reaching the second stratum (the seventh floor), but I was surprised by how little time it took to remember who my adventuring party was and what I was doing with them. Before long, I had refamiliarized myself with my party's general dynamic, the current mission, and the girl in t'item shop who talks like t'is which I think is meant to make her sound Jamaican but unfortunately just gives her a thick Yorkshire dialect.

I've hacked my way down through a few more floors now, and on balance, I'm actually very glad that I started my experience of this series with Etrian Odyssey 3. When going backwards through a series of games, useful features seem to drop away to be replaced with slightly more awkward ones, and you can tell that they made some adjustments to the balance in the later games. Everything in Etrian Odyssey 1 now feels like an expert-mode version - having five floors per stratum instead of four, the introduction of damaging floor tiles much earlier on, and even being encouraged to defeat current-floor FOEs as early as the fourth floor rather than heeding your taught instinct to stay a million miles away from them.

And all of this on top of an exponentially more vicious economy where you really have to struggle to keep yourself in supplies for a long time at the start of the game. There are a lot of little things that add up - using the inn to heal yourself completely costs 9en per level of your highest-level character, and that's a huge increase over the 5en that I was used to, and healing and magic items are extremely expensive compared to the returns on the loot you'll be taking out of the dungeon. A couple of money-saving measures are necessary to make progress - finding a skill for the Alchemist class that warps you to the last used submagnetic pole (and therefore gives you a free route out of the dungeon) saves 100en each time on Warp Wires, and when your medic gets the Revive ability instead of having to drag people up out of the dungeon and put them on a slab in front of Dr. Hoffman every time, it really does feel like you're becoming a lot more self-sufficient. The level designs are also characterized by long, boring corridors with pointless dead ends and sky-high encounter rates - I actually wonder whether I would have had the patience to get as far in this as I currently have if it had been my introduction to the series.

But I'm really glad that I did. For all they had yet to get completely right at this stage, the feeling of satisfaction at venturing further, of completing a map or doing the next little mini-quest is incredible - as is the frustration when you over-reach yourself and die due to being trapped by monsters beyond your ability. The labyrinth is vicious, but it makes conquering each part of it just feel like a real achievement. And it's nice enough to warn you of approaching major encounters, like confronting me with the text "This spring seems peaceful, but you sense an evil presence - returning would be unwise." If there's something I'm most glad that starting with the third game taught me, it's that when Etrian Odyssey warns you about something you bloody well listen to it.

Comments

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Even on your birthday, F.O.E.?

[kjorteo]

You know, that's actually another adjustment the series made that makes it feel like expert mode if you play the games backwards; slain FOEs respawn a lot faster in the first game (3 days for normal FOEs, 7 for bosses) than in the second and third (7 for normal, 11 for bosses.) I can even think of one point in particular where this difference becomes ... important.

[davidn]

And in the case of the ants, about four seconds.

[dr-dos.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile I am a stubborn mule who whenever possible refuses to play games out of order so I dove into the first one and didn't stick around.

I can tell there's a fun buried somewhere there. Maybe I'll check out the 3DS one when that comes out (if it hasn't already).

[kjorteo]

I played the first one when it came out, so the sequels weren't even there yet, and I absolutely loved it (except for the postgame bonus stratum, which used a lot of level design tropes that I'm pretty sure either ZZT Syndrome or ZZT Crime already warned against.) Then EO2 came along and was basically EO1 but with all the small quality of life adjustments I never even noticed how desperately I needed, so I loved it even more. (And then EO3 was mostly along those lines but took off in its own direction, too, and that one was also excellent but kind of beside the point.) Now, looking back at, say, having to map EO1 floor 16 without alternate floor paint colors/arrow icons/etc. strikes me as a "HOW DID YOU PEOPLE EVER LIVE THIS WAY" deal, even though I was one of them. I still have extremely fond memories of that game, but I'm honestly surprised DavidN is having so much success with playing the series backwards; I was sure the best way to enjoy the series was to start at #1, just so you can take the decent standalone game for what it is without noticing all the areas in which the rest of series was eventually improved but not yet.

Looking back, I think EO2 might actually be my favorite in the series to date, but EO3 is extremely close. Given how closely any game in the series becomes tied with your party--each game is your story more than the central one--it could just be that EO3 is technically a more solid game but EO2's Team Marble saga pushed it over the top. I don't know, it's actually really hard to separate those and be able to tell. (Though I can say that EO2 has the best music in the series to date, so there's that, too.)

[davidn]

Rare post-ZZT examples of ping-pong paths and invisomazes :) I am suddenly inspired to just go downloading random ZZT games again like I did before the zzt.org era, seeing if I can find gems outside the incredibly well-known ones (that contain neither of the above features).

I'm definitely having difficulty deciding how to map water compared to walls, especially on the huge lake level (and this is only floor 13) - there's a lot that I miss, but... at the same time, the third game taught me how to cope with what this series wants from me and so I'm making far fewer frustrating mistakes than I otherwise would have. Things like knowing to warp out immediately when in unfamiliar territory with FOEs on both sides even if my party appears healthy - even if it really slowed down progress through extremely hard places like floor 7 with the first appearance of damaging floors.

[davidn]

Here's a more simple question I just thought of - did you think Etrian Odyssey 3 was a noticeable step down in difficulty? (At the start of the game and during the early stages, I mean. The post-game material speaks for itself.)

[kjorteo]

It's ... hard to say. I want to say that the denizens of the labyrinth weren't anywhere near as capable of eviscerating me as those of the first two games had been, in exchange for being significantly hardier themselves. EO2 (and to a lesser extent, EO1) made me used to battles that were over in four rounds with three people dead, whereas EO3 fights seemed to last all day but there was much less danger, and more of just a "make sure I keep everyone healed while I chip the enemies' health down" thing. On the other hand, that's probably because the offensive/defensive capabilities of my EO3 party were the exact opposite of my EO2 one.

Of course, you meant the early early stages, like the first floor or so, before anyone learned any moves that contributed to anything I just said at all. I actually felt like EO3 had what would have been the most unfair "map out enough of the first floor to prove you know what you're doing before we let you pass (and start selling you Warp Wires)" quest yet, except that I had To Market, which completely nullified the difficulty in a way I obviously couldn't enjoy in either of the prior games. And I'm still mad at EO3 for breaking tradition and not Venomfly-ing you for making a poor decision on floor 1.

[davidn]

Yes, I'm really looking forward to that one - most likely a release-day buy for me, and I never, ever thought I would say that about a dungeon crawler game. This series has... done something to me.

There is a lot objectively wrong with the design of this game, especially compared to the more refined Etrian Odyssey 3 (I can't speak for 2 as I haven't played it). There's a point very late on that kjorteo described to me years ago, the first hidden floor which is full of invisible pits that you have to stumble around falling into and marking on your map then traipsing up to try again - but if you mark them all, you'll run into the limit on the number of objects you can have on your map. At the time I tried to say that perhaps they intended you to do it some other way, or to make the limits of the game themselves a challenge to be overcome - but now it's much easier to believe that at this stage that they just had absolutely no idea what they were doing.

I can't really remember how slow the start to Etrian Odyssey 3 was - I definitely overstretched myself a couple of times but learned what my limits were fairly early on, and I think that the levelling and sense of achievement at getting things done were both slightly faster in general.

[davidn]

Especially on your birthday, F.O.E.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Speaking of birthdays, congrats on reaching Level 28! :D