I only discovered this series around twee weeks ago because of my girlfriend and I immediately ordered a 3DS with Untold 2 and picked up EO4 from the eShop. I'm actually confused why I have never really looked at them before, because they have so many amazing systems. It feels like a perfect marriage between western and Japanese RPGs/ dungeon crawlers. It's also kind of amazing to still be able to find such 'hidden gems'. (no idea how popular they are exactly, but I had never noticed them before)
I love the map making for example. It's so strange to me that many games don't allow you to interact with their maps in any way whatsoever or only let you put down a single marker and it's one of my pet peeves. Games like the newest Zelda and the whole Divinity-series do it quite well, but so many other games don't, while they would be instantly improved if they did. And they don't need to go the full Etrian route, but just let people mark spots, let them add their notes, add some simple icons that can be put on the map. Really just quality of life features that are mostly absent in games.
Moreover, the whole create your own party and just enter that dungeon really appeals to me. I don't play games for their stories anymore and many JRPGs drown you in exposition and cutscenes every 10 steps. Not here. The game just lets you go wild from the beginning and doesn't dictate you how to play, besides some short tutorial pop-ups. Explore! And if you suck at choosing the right skills or have a crappy team composition, well, that's your problem, isn't it? Think before you act. The amount of customisation for your team/characters is frankly refreshing.
Also the combination of having both 'random' encounters and threatening foes that are visible and have their own behaviour is also quite brilliant. The FOEs feel like enemies from dungeon crawlers like Grimrock and its predecessors, but it skips the (to me) annoying combat where you have to dance around the enemy and poke at them, but replaces it with tactical turn-based strategy.
But I especially adore how so many battles are great experiences.Now, maybe this is because I'm still bad at the games, but I've had so many close calls in dungeons like the time when I had only my medic and runemaster left with no magic whatsoever who finished a Foe with a 2 damage hit just before they would have been wiped out. Or the time I had explored a huge part of a dungeon, unexpectedly lost my last Ariadne thread in an event, took a wrong turn and got into an unnecessary fight with only several of my characters left and no resources to win the battle, so I tried to escape but it failed over and over again until I had only one man standing and just before the finishing blow he managed to finally run away and I made it home, tattered, but I made it! (it does feel like escaping is easier with fewer characters still standing, is that a thing?)
Other things I appreciate
- you can't easily abuse the store, because you need the parts of enemies to buy all the good stuff. It limits the ways in which you can break the game and ties in neatly with the whole dungeon crawling.
- no quest markers
- events that can have bad consequences. Sometimes your curiosity just gets you (almost) killed.
- the constant threat, you need to go in prepared or you won't get much done or even get wiped as a reward for your carelessness.
So yeah, I'm glad to have been made aware of this series. There is so much much to love here. I'm just astounded by how great its systems are. Pure bliss. Noob out! :D
