![]() You can still pull up the full map on the rare occasion that you need to drop in a specific note. When you select those options, the map itself reverts to a small box in the top corner, and Etrian Odyssey basically plays out like a standard dungeon crawler. In the end, I found the best solution was heresy auto-mapping and full screen. ![]() Related reading: Another excellent dungeon crawler collection worth considering on Switch is the Stranger of Sword City/Saviours of Sapphire collection. Etrian Odyssey HD and its two sequels are, unfortunately, diminished. The split-screen approach is, apparently, the best solution the team could come up with for an impossible problem. When you drop into a battle or the menu screen – those places where you don’t need a map – the screen reverts to a full-screen view of the action. Aesthetically this is so much less pleasing to the eyes than the stacked approach on the DS and 3DS. The left side of the screen is used for the first-person window into the world, and the right-hand side of the screen displays the map. Most frustrating of all, however, is that in both cases, the Switch screen is split in half. Meanwhile, button controls (for when you’re playing docked) are held back by an almost shockingly clumsy, cumbersome UI. When you play the Switch in handheld mode, you can use the touch screen, but sketching out neat lines and colouring in the spaces is far less precise when you’re poking at it with a finger, compared to pencilling it in with a stylus. Mapping in these remakes is nowhere near as pleasurable on the Switch as it was on the dual-screen handhelds. I did not think that the mapping function would work anywhere near as effectively, and sans an enjoyable and functional mapping system, I thought that Etrian Odyssey would be greatly diminished. Especially on a console where the touch screen is not driven by a stylus, as with the DS and 3DS. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this several times on the podcast, and on Twitter, and basically to everyone that will listen to me: I did not think the dual-screen experience on the DS and 3DS could be effectively ported to a single-screen console. However, as much as I love Etrian Odyssey I have remained firmly on the sceptical side. The genre’s never been healthier, and Atlus wanted a piece of the pie, hence these HD remasters for the Switch and PC.įans have been waiting for this series to move into the world of single-screen gaming. The success of that concept launched the series and revitalised the entire dungeon crawler for consoles. It was that quality and experience that Etrian Odyssey so successfully tapped into, simply by implementing the ability to draw a map on the DS’ touch screen as you explored. Many early-era RPG fans still have those booklets buried in boxes at home. And so early dungeon crawlers gave players a fix of tabletop gaming for when their friends weren’t around. It was appealing because mapping was also a big part of the early Dungeons & Dragons experience. What was a flaw in game design became a defining quality of the genre. You needed a map, so players would buy grid paper books and carefully draw out maps as they journeyed. The labyrinth designs were quite complex, and the first-person perspective could be disorienting. Yes, the genre was genuinely loved for lacking a feature. What did people like about the dungeon crawler? Well, in the early days, a major part of it was that there was no in-game mapping tool. Our review.Įtrian Odyssey turned that around almost singlehandedly, and it did so by using the DS’ unique dual-screen hardware to take the genre back to its roots. Related reading: Atlus later used the Etrian Odyssey engine to produce the spectacular Persona Q dungeon crawler. After the NES and SNES enjoyed robust support from the genre, things dropped away significantly, and while there were still PC titles produced, it seemed that the once mighty approach to RPGs, frontlined by the likes of Wizardry and Might & Magic, was on the wane. At least as far as consoles were concerned. The original Etrian Odyssey, released in 2007, was something of a lifeline for the dungeon crawler genre.
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