ETRIAN ODYSSEY DS SERIES
For many years, the entire Etrian Odyssey series was playable in an updated form on the 3DS… except Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City. For those unfamiliar with the history, Etrian Odyssey I & II previously received remakes on 3DS. Of the three games offered in the Origins Collection, I was looking forward to Etrian Odyssey III HD the most. The underwater world of Etrian Odyssey III truly shines in this remaster. While the seamless and tactile nature of the cartography suffers, this new HD adaptation manages to preserve most of the core experience while expanding the series’ reach to new platforms. Now, after four years of uncertainty, the series has finally made the jump to both single-screen and HD with a collection of HD remasters of the first three titles. The series clung to life on the 3DS for as long as it could, with Nexus as the last release on that platform in 2019 (long after the Switch had taken over the handheld market). The combination of nail-bitingly difficult turn-based combat, careful resource management, and player-driven cartography endeared the series to old-school RPG fans and introduced newcomers to the first-person dungeon crawler genre.Īs the DS handheld line came to its end, many fans feared that the series would end with it because the dual screen format is so central to the series’ identity. Instead, players could chart the maps on the bottom screen using the stylus while the exploration and battles occur on the top screen. However, the true innovation of the series is the unique dual-screen features unlike the dungeon crawlers of old, reams of graph paper and hand-sketched maps became obsolete. The series takes the classic dungeon-crawling formula of games like Ultima and Wizardry and updates it with colorful anime-inspired visuals and pumping tracks composed by the great Yuzo Koshiro. Few titles embody the ingenuity and novelty of the Nintendo DS as well as the Etrian Odyssey series.
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