
What amounts to a tutorial dungeon offers players an opportunity to level up and get a firm grasp of all the character classes, the upshot being that everyone – new players and returning fans – feel more comfortable tackling the powerful monsters down the road. No longer are you asked to simply wander into the local labyrinth with your party of level 1 adventures and pray. It's not nearly as impenetrable thanks to a significantly reduced difficulty curve.
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With Etrian Odyssey 4, however, there are signs that the series is softening a bit. It's those elements that have earned it an intense, but relatively niche, following. The appeal has always been in figuring out class combinations – all of which feature skill trees with lots of options – and its raw challenge.

The mechanics have always been rather simple – it's a menu-based RPG in which you delve as deep into a series of labyrinths as possible before coming up for air to heal and sell your loot. Party members are mostly generic characters recruited to a party guild, with their names, character art, and skill trees among the elements that can be customized. It even comes with its own touchscreen-driven map, which often requires scrupulous notation to avoid, say, walking into a wall of icicles.
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Like its predecessors, it is a deep first-person RPG that hearkens back to the earliest days of PC gaming, when we were still sketching out clumsy maps on graph paper. This way, at least, newcomers have a chance to see what really makes Etrian Odyssey great.%Gallery-181354% And make no mistake, Etrian Odyssey 4 is great. This is good, because Etrian Odyssey long delighted in simply tossing players into its trademark labyrinths, then watching them die. Not that it's overly simple or anything but compared to the first three games, the opening areas are a breeze.

The most important change, arguably, is that it's easier. But despite looking much the same as the original Nintendo DS games, changes are afoot with Etrian Odyssey 4, many of them for the better. It has a history of being very tough, and its story (such as it is) is on the sparse side. Fire Emblem is out, Pokemon X/Y and Shin Megami Tensei: Soul Hackers are on the way, and now we've got Etrian Odyssey 4: Legends of the Titan.Īdmittedly, Etrian Odyssey is not a series that I would necessarily recommend to everyone. This year is starting to feel like an embarrassment of riches for RPG fans who own the Nintendo 3DS.
