During my years in undergraduate college, I discovered a Nintendo DS RPG from Atlus entitled Etrian Odyssey that attempted to recreate the style of old-school first-person dungeon crawlers such as the Wizardry series. While it was not without its faults, I enjoyed it enough to play most of its sequels and remakes up to the apparent concluding entry, Etrian Odyssey Nexus on the 3DS. The following decade came the unexpected announcement that Atlus was remastering the first three mainline entries for Steam and the Nintendo Switch under the moniker of the Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection, allowing a new generation of gamers to experience them.
For those unfamiliar with the franchise, the structure of the first three games in the Etrian series consists of a hub town (two in the third installment) where the player creates a guild of playable characters of different classes, with five allies organized into front and back rows, each with the maximum of three adventurers. In town, the player can also purchase equipment for their characters, sleep at the inn to recover the party, and obtain missions from the tavern or whoever runs the town alongside which each entry’s Yggdrasil Labyrinth exists that have rewards such as money, items, and in the third entry, experience for the active characters.
Players can create characters from various classes, some overlapping throughout the games, sometimes with different monikers, such as magicians that can cast elemental magic. Each has a skill tree where the player can invest points into active and passive abilities that unlock advanced skills. Some classes are more effective on the front row, where they deal more yet receive more physical damage; in the back row, they receive but deal less physical damage unless they have a ranged weapon in which certain classes are adept; or, in a few cases, either.
Once ready, the player can head into the town’s adjacent Yggdrasil Labyrinth, which consists of first-person navigation of its various floors, upward or downward. Central to exploration is the dungeon map the player can create while wandering the multi-floored dungeon’s various Strati, with options allowing visited tiles and walls to be automatically mapped, somewhat reducing the legwork of the in-game cartography. Players must still manually place icons indicating elements like doors and secret passageways. While on the DS and 3DS, they could do so with their respective styluses, the developers adopted the mapping control surprisingly well for the Steam versions I played, even when using a controller.
The battle mechanics are also central to the Origins Collection, with fights randomly encountered. However, an indicator changes color from blue to red, which reduces the unpredictability of random battles. Combat utilizes a traditional turn-based style where the player inputs commands for their five characters: these include attacking with an equipped weapon, using a TP-consuming ability, consuming an item from the inventory, executing a limit break (which comes in different forms throughout the trilogy), or attempting escape, with up to five chances to do so if players select the option for each ally.
Victory nets characters who are still alive experience that allows them to level up, which gives allies skill points to put into their respective trees. Enemies also may drop parts that the player can sell at shops to unlock new consumables, weapons, armor, and accessories for sale, akin to Final Fantasy XII. What happens when the enemy obliterates the party depends upon the difficulty setting; on Picnic mode, the game transports them back to town with nothing lost, while on higher settings, death results in a Game Over with a chance to save progress made on the in-game cartography.
In all three games, powerful enemies known as FOEs wander each floor of the Yggdrasil Labyrinths; avoiding them upon first encounter is usually a good idea on difficulties above Picnic. Only in the second game do they not reward players with experience, but they still may drop materials across the whole trilogy. Bosses terminate each Stratum and may respawn after a few in-game days, providing more opportunity for extra experience and maybe a drop the player initially didn’t receive from them. Finding certain enemy drops to fill the compendia may necessitate the use of the internet, but luckily, obtaining all isn’t necessary to complete the main quests.
The game mechanics remain solid throughout the entire collection, with certain classes working well with one another; for instance, abilities that allow a single character to act first in a round can nullify the typical turn-based RPG issue of healing for allies with low health coming too late. Significant mechanical differences in the trilogy come in the third game, with the sea exploration to sail the waters around Armoroad and the eventual ability to allow one class to branch into the skill tree of another. The accommodation in the anthology to players of different skill levels is a big feather in its cap as well.
As mentioned, the developers adapted the cartographic control well to the Steam versions, which comes from my experience with a controller playing them on my television via the Steam Deck’s dock. Furthermore, because of the gameplay structure, there usually is no problem finding out how to advance the central storyline. However, I did come across a few points, most recently in the third game, where I had to consult the internet. The setup of the menus remains the same throughout all three titles and is easy to handle. However, fans of RPGs with highly interactive overworlds and town exploration will be in for disappointment.
The narratives of each Etrian are self-contained, with minimal connection; moreover, while it is up to the imagination of the player regarding the backstory of whatever playable characters they create, there are many stories within the Yggdrasil Labyrinths, sidequests, and especially the sea exploration in the tertiary entry which contain a great deal of thought and lore. The translations are top-notch, as one would expect from Atlus, despite a few rare awkward lines, and don’t mar the plot experience.
Yuzo Koshiro composed the soundtracks for all three games, with many varieties of tracks that have superb digitization and make for excellent aural experiences.
The art direction is also pretty, with the designs for the characters and enemies having polished appearances. However, the latter in combat have many reskins and are inanimate, with battles remaining strictly in the first person, like older installments of the Dragon Quest series. The three-dimensional parts of the visuals have a smoother look compared to the Nintendo DS versions. Still, there is slight blurriness and pixilation in the environmental textures.
Finally, one can blaze through each game in as little as twelve hours; however, side content such as postgames, Steam achievements, and filling the item and enemy compendia can boost playtime well beyond twenty-four hours per game.
In summation, Atlus did a superb job remastering the first three mainline Etrian Odyssey games, given their engrossing combat and mapping mechanics, lore-laden narratives, and solid audiovisual presentation. The accommodating difficulty settings will appeal to players of different skill levels, for the novice taking the edge off their old-school brutality and for the masochist providing a good, risky dungeon-crawling challenge. The Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection was a series of remasters I didn’t see coming. However, the developers did the games justice, and I can’t recommend the anthology highly enough.
This deep look is based on playthroughs to the standard endings of each entry on a Steam Deck using the television dock.