#2 Etrian Odyssey IV Legends of the Titan
Edit: Mods stop shrinking my images. They are no larger than anybody else's in this thread. If you continue to do this I will report you to site leads.
Turn based JRPG combat has a lot of potential, but most developers just don't take this combat engine to it's fullest. Real challenges aren't ever presented to the player, because the developer hasn't added enough complexity to give the player more than one option. Beating a truly hard enemy in a JRPG usually comes down to using the same OP tactic. There's no room for finesse or being original. The Etrian Odyssey series changes all that by *gasp* allowing you to do to the boss anything you can do to a regular enemy. Normally bosses resist status effects like crazy in JRPGs to the point where using them is a bad strategy. But in Etrian Odyssey bosses can be... Poisoned, given concussions, turned to stone, tripped, tied up, paralyzed, confused, blinded, and much, much more. Now, I know what you're saying. That sounds like the bosses would be too easy to beat. Yeah, well EO bosses deal a ton of damage, can inflict the same status effects on you, and usually come with a downright devious twist. Oh? Did I mention that bosses don't wait for you to fight them in this series? Bosses actively hunt your party down. Movement in this game is grid based, and everytime you move bosses can move as well. When you are in combat each turn you take let's the enemy boss move closer to you. So you can sit there in a fight with normal enemies and suddenly a super scary boss (that you weren't really ready for) finds you!
EO IV gets the top spot in the series for multiple reasons. First off, this entry introduces cross classing. Each character has a main class, and a secondary class. You get access to exactly half the skills in your secondary class, as you get in a main class. So if you go Ninja main, and Black Mage secondary, you can only level up your Meteor to level 5/10, but can level up your Ninja Stars to 10/10. Anyway this leads to combinations that would normally be super OP, but not in an EO game. EO IV also has an open world that is explorable in an airship, unlike previous games, and it was the first EO game to take the series from lazy unanimated 2D alphamaps to full blown 3D. Finally the music in this game is just a cut above the rest of the series.
Oh, and I'm quoting Mnementh here because almost everything he says about EO Untold applies to EO IV as well.
Mnementh said:
As ARandomGamer correctly guessed on the second place is Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millenium Girl.
I really love the Etrian Odyssey series. So in a way this game stands for all of them. This game is a remake of the first game with the modern engine of EO4. It also slightly enhanced the gameplay with newer elements. Additionally you have a new mode with a cut-scene driven story and pre-generated party. But you can play classical too. The basic Etrian Odyssey gameplay is a great dungeon delver. You create multiple characters from different classes and choose five of them iinto your party (every time you go back to town you can switch active characters). You explore the labyrinth while drawing maps on the bottom screen of the DS/3DS. You have to fight regularly in turn-based RPG-fights. You gain experience and level up your party. You have to fight bosses to get deeper into the labyrinth.
The map-drawing with the touch-screen is an integral part of gameplay, you even get an early quest to draw a map.
The games all, so this one too, have the great level-design Atlus-RPGs usually have. As you explore the labyrinth, you encounter puzzles to move on and unlock shortcuts so that you don't have to move through known parts again and again. As an improvement on the original game your skills are now presented in a tree, although the dependencies were already existant in the first game, but not graphically represented.
In the original and classic mode on certain events while exploring a dialogue with anime-faces would pop-up.
In the remake they added the story-mode which has real cut-scenes and additional story though.
This is an great example how a remake can enrich and add to the content of the original game while retaining it main identity and strengths. The game itself manages to keep me invested through the gameplay, the great colorful monsters and environments. I really love the hell out of Etrian Odyssey. Wikipedia, MobyGames, OGDB, IGDB
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Excellent choice for #2. I'll be picking up EO Untold sometime next year. Have you played EOV yet?
Last edited by Cerebralbore101 - on 30 December 2017
