Review: Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City (ATLUS, 2010)

It took long, but two days ago I finally beat The Drowned City's three endings, so at last I can say that this is, accompanied by Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, at the top of my DS charts by a decent margin.

Etrian III is built like a good post-rock/post-metal/prog album or song, as any decent game should be. A common thematic undercurrent and instrumentation (story, mechanics, general rules) encapsulates the whole, slowly progressing so it never repeats itself, revisiting previous moments with a new twist, and always insinuating the breaking points when everything will come together gloriously. Also, there must be something unexpected inbetween, plus new things to discover when we decide to play the album again.
EO3 follows this rules almost to the letter, with its level design getting more complex as time goes by. All of the 5+1 strati our guild must conquer start conservatively, introducing minor changes to the basics and new monsters to get used to. Once the player got used to the new environment, new game elements are introduced in the following levels (new FOE patterns, currents, mission types or traps) to expand the world as we go down, one level after the other, always yearning for the next surprise.

EO3 also feels like the great comeback from that band that so deeply dissapointed you with their second album*. After identifying everything that failed in Heroes of Laggard, ATLUS removed almost everything new, refined the formula and added some amazing new tricks.
Once sea exploration, weapon forging and the new classes are introduced at the beginning, all goes back to old style Etrian, until the real additions are revealed half way through: a second city, subclassing and story branching come quickly one after another, setting EO3 as a whole sequel, instead of the expansion feeling that surrounded all of EO2. And, eventhough story branching seems irrelevant at first, it is later put to good use at the end of the 4th stratum, when the consequences of each choice are finally introduced. And with this the pieces are set for the final feature introduction: meaningful replaying in a proper New Game+ mode for the first time.
All this together manages to make this third entry in the series superior to the original, including its amazing revelation of the 5th stratum.

Princess, Ninja, Pirate. Add water. Mix.

Subclasses alone have such an impact on the way the game is played and exploited that it is the core of The Drowned City. If the series was known for the freedom it offered when creating a party, subclasses add completely new levels of customization, making it quite hard to share more than one or two combos with everyone you know who playes the game (unless, of course, you all follow the same guides and dislike independent thought). The most common combos would include a cross between Ninja or Buccaneer and a Zodiac or Arbalist, plus a Monk/Ninja or Ninja/Monk, but that's already a few possibilities. Add in the other options and you can satisfy most RPG players' dreams. And, to top it all, there are few and unlikely choices that would produce a party unfit to beat the game.

Another addition, although less notable, is the existence of invisible areas,  where auto-mapping is disabled and in which FOEs don't show in the map. It is, however, quite a minor feature, requiring just a bit more caution and attention from the adventurers.

Things to iron out

Of course, Etrian Odyssey III is not completely perfect.

For starters, the experience system does not favour low level characters, so it is kinda impossible to finish the game using classes unlocked mid-game, unless you grind XP for days. It's a real pitty, because my Shogun was condemned to end all big battles dead, simply because I got tired of resurrecting a level 40 so-so shogun, my killing-machine-in-the-making, when the rest of the party were close to or at 70 and dealing about as much damage as he did.

First stop: death by giant bird

The sea faring, although interesting as a puzzle minigame, is not sufficiently linked to your progress through the labyrinth, so it feels detached from the actual adventure. The same happened with Persona 3, where the connection between story and dungeon crawling was way too tenuous, frustrating those players more interested in combat or school life alone. Persona 4 got that fixed, as I hope Etrian IV will, too.

Also, there are some times, mainly in the 3rd stratum (spoiler: awesome soundtrack), when the advance, find blockade, return to town, talk to someone, get to blockade again cycles are too frequent. It is specially frustrating in the second and third runs, when you already know what the outcome will be and only want to get as far as possible to the ending you wish to unlock.

It's all so post...

And then there's ATLUS' signature: post-game with absurd difficulty. There are, as far as I know, three optional elements: the 6th stratum, Cyclopean Haunt, where the Big Black Monster of Darkness resides; the Dragon God quest, comprising the Golden, Red and Blue dragons; and the post-game quests.

Meet Leviathan. Please, die now

Getting back to the rock album simil, Etrian III's post-game sections are a band's compilation of B-sides and unreleased tracks. Yeah, sure, there may be some great pieces in there, but most of the unreleased tracks are unreleased for a reason. Probably only the most hardcore fans will appreciate them and the time it takes to learn to enjoy their nuances. Also, there is a certain lack of purpose in such compilations, in which you usually find experiments, diverging ideas and not so funny jokes.

Cyclopean Haunt is so hard and complicated that most players will just try it and leave with a taste of blood in the mouth, after savouring the splendours of the basic adventure. The dragons and post-game hunts will simply leave people dumbfounded, wondering how are they supposed to defeat a monster able to destroy half their kick-ass, level 70 party in one turn. The amount of character resets, material grinding, levelling and memorizing required to beat those marks is just insane.

But, to be fair, the original Etrian also suffered from this problem/feature, built to give hardcore players something much harder to sharpen their teeth with. I reached floor 28/30 then and have so far gone down to 23/24 in The Drowned City (running away from ~30% of the battles). I'll probably attempt an assault to the Black Monster of Darkness, just to see if it kills me faster than the dragons.

Conclusion

Pending Dark Souls and Megami Tensei games

Perfecting and adding to the original formula, but keeping faithful to the basics of relative difficulty, wide party configuration options and low grinding requirements of the original, ATLUS managed to create a masterpiece of the dungeon crawler genre. Few games have been able to keep me interested long enough to finish them three times and experiment with so many different setups and combos. And the icing in the cake is the superb level design** and balance. The game lends so little help that players will never feel they're going along for the ride, but enough so that they won't regret going back into the depths after an unfortunate death. I wish I saw this level of subtlety in games more often.



* Muse's Showbiz, then Origin of Simmetry, then Absolution would be my reference. What's yours?

** I want to use this chance to ask every publication and award ceremony to create a new category for Best Level Designer and award its 2010 instance to all involved in the Abyssal Shrine design. Hard to master, easy to skip once finished and filled with interesting puzzles and thrilling ambushes. Superb.

*** Just so you know, my parties:
First run:
Elora - Monk/Ninja
Shorsha - Gladiator/Farmer
IAintCute - Prince/Hoplite
Dualla - Ninja/Zodiac
Shilock - Buccaneer/Arbalist

Also tried
Queequeg - Wildling/-
Tried to replace Dualla with
Nagato - Yggdroid/-, but didn't last too long.

Second run: replaced Shilock with
Rubio - Shogun/Buccaneer, but when bosses got too touchy Shilock came back in.

Third run: created several farmers: Willow, Vohnkar, Meegosh & Kiaya. Rubio never left the party and is still at level 53.