Etrian Odyssey 4 quicklook tomorrow

And from the looks of it, Patrick actually enjoyed his experience with it, if his twitter is to be believed.

It was always kind of disappointing how the last EO game to get a quicklook via Matt Kessler and Ryan was a travesty that served little more than be part of the on-going joke of staff antagonism against Matt instead of actually introducing the game. Hopefully tomorrow's spends a bit more time exploring the game itself.

I quite enjoyed the Matt/Ryan QL of the last game. I also am a strong Kessler supporter so I may be biased. :)

The overall reaction to game so far has been pretty positive in general from what I've seen. Honestly it feels kind of weird to see this series suddenly getting more exposure like it is because it's such a niche genre. I guess it's kind of this tense moment where you expect people to come along that don't appreciate the genre to start dumping on it, but it hasn't happened yet.

I think it's a combination of having a very good demo available and there still not being a huge amount of great 3DS games available.

@rastopher: This particular entry has certainly been the most "mass-market friendly" out of all previous ones, and I don't necessarily mean the casual mode. The game structure has received enough of a change in both large and small ways, from letting you gather resources from any node regardless of having those proficiency skills, to making the skill tree more visually intuitive, and finally to giving the world an overworld map that makes farming for money quite easy, all makes it seem as if its trying to break out into a larger niche designation.

Honestly, its only real barrier to accessibility remaining is its lack of raw numbers and percentages attached to the skills. Would be quite helpful to know just how much extra healing, % wise, the steady hands buff gives, without needing to view a third party website that has the information probably via data mining.

Yeah, this also ruined the Dragon Quest IX quicklook as well. I mean, Kessler sucked, but their childish crap made his quicklooks even more unbearable, which is a shame because Dragon Quest IX was a really great game.

@turambar: Their revamping of how the skill tree is presented is by far my favorite improvement. Now it doesn't take me forever to figure out how to allocate my skill points. Can't believe it took this long to get it right :P

I watched the Kessler and Ryan QL of the third game, but it seems like you have to draw your own map. Do you have to do that in all of the games? I'd like to try them out but drawing my own map on the screen, or even drawing its walls, sounds like a real pain.

oh come on they barely gave strange journey a shot how did you expect anything but open disdain for etrian odyssey?

The original game was made to invoke the old school dungeon crawlers where you had line paper in hand in order to chart where you were going. Drawing the map is at the core of the game's DNA. The game's auto-mapping feature will automatically fill in tiles on which you've walked, but nothing else. Walls, water, points of interest, pit falls, teleportation spots, treasure chests, you name it, are all filled in manually through drawing tools and pre-fab icons on a grid.

The end result is, just as everyone's characters might be a bit different through its very high degree of skill customization, every map may look a bit different too depending on how complete your maps are (whether you fill it all in, or just get enough to get through a level. Both options are fine as there is no in-game completion percentage), your icon choices, etc. It gives the map making a very personal feel, though certainly isn't for everyone.

Strange Journey was Jeff and Vinny, who probably went into it blind, and finally cut it off because they didn't quite realize how slowly the game opened. The EO quicklook was poor on multiple levels, between the faux antagonism between the two that dominated the actual conversation about the game, to Matt's poor choice for a spot to begin (a spot that required him to fix a rather dumb mistake on his part), to a complete dismissal of the game's RPG elements, with Matt asking "would you like to look at my skill points" and Ryan responding "No." Yeah, it was a really bad quick look.

@turambar: yeah, but I'm saying it would've been bad any way, considering the tastes of the crew

I wouldn't quite say that. It doesn't take overt enthusiasm to give the mechanics of a game comprehensive coverage, and the staff have certainly done so before.

Never liked this style of 1st person JRPGs. I like seeing my dudes and animations.

I agree that it was a poor QL but it gave me a lot of the information that I wanted to know about the game through what they showed and not what they said.

Meanwhile:

The original game was made to invoke the old school dungeon crawlers where you had line paper in hand in order to chart where you were going. Drawing the map is at the core of the game's DNA. The game's auto-mapping feature will automatically fill in tiles on which you've walked, but nothing else. Walls, water, points of interest, pit falls, teleportation spots, treasure chests, you name it, are all filled in manually through drawing tools and pre-fab icons on a grid.

The end result is, just as everyone's characters might be a bit different through its very high degree of skill customization, every map may look a bit different too depending on how complete your maps are (whether you fill it all in, or just get enough to get through a level. Both options are fine as there is no in-game completion percentage), your icon choices, etc. It gives the map making a very personal feel, though certainly isn't for everyone.

Put that way, it sounds potentially interesting. Maybe I'll try the third game after all, since I don't have a 3DS yet.

@believer258: just know going in that this game is hardcore. I only got to the second strata (area, that is) before quitting

Like Nocturne hardcore or "makes Nocturne look like baby's first JRPG" hardcore? Does it sometimes feel cheap or is it a good difficulty?

I just picked up the first 3 games, since I just found out they were reprinted and had been looking for them for a while. I jumped into the first game (even though I heard the 3rd is probably the best) and I was strangely and instantly addicted. Now I jumped in blind and wound up restarted after about 3 hours and followed a character build guide. It's pretty fun. I don't know if I'm going to get burnt out on it quickly, but I'll keep at it. The only thing that held me back from playing all day today, was that my curiosity into the grid based RPGs had brought me to play Legend of Grimrock all day. Go figure.

Looking forward to this quicklook though, as I almost bought a 3DS to play it and Fire Emblem. I just recently bought a Vita, so I can't really justify the purchase right now, but I've heard a lot of positive things about the new one.

Do I want this? I've never played an EO game, but I loved Grimrock.

If you loved Grimrock, you'll most likely enjoy this game as well. This game is much more difficult than Grimrock though.

I really can't wait for the quick look. I hope it's Vinny joining Patrick for this one since I think he would appreciate this sort of game more than the other guys. Actually, didn't Dave do the Grimrock QL? He would LOVE Etrian Oddyssey.

It's a pretty fair difficulty I'd say. You'll have to make good decisions with your party, but you shouldn't really need to look up spoiler builds or anything. Just consider how an ability is going to complement your party's overall combat ability, and what role and possible synergies you want your characters to fill, and you'll be good. Going in mostly blind in 3, I only felt the need for any grinding right near the beginning, and at one later boss that was just being a huge pain. Even then, it was probably a half hour grind at most.

I was so dissapointed with the other Quick Look. Kessler is great and a lot of the wierd antagonism stuff, and general staff disinterest in RPG's, seemed to ruin it. However, if they would give Kessler access to a capture kit (plus let him into the office) and left him alone id totally love that (never going to happen).

I wish I could save my map of the frog dungeon in the second land. I try to be very cautious of FOEs 'cause I don't want to get effed so I try to avoid them as best as possible. When I entered that dungeon I put blue circles over every space I saw the frogs jump to because I didn't notice their pattern right away. I decided to keep going with it just to be safe and now that map is roughly 1/4 blue circles.

First person dungeon crawler is a very western genre actually. Wizardry is just a bit of a gaming fluke as a western franchise that made it huge in Japan.

Was it the teleportation spots that got you frustrated? Just start numbering them off and it becomes easy to manage. Stratum 3 has the always well loved floor tiles that damage you when you walk over them. (They are not well loved.)