I mistakenly turned off my DS tonight on my break, thus destroying a day’s worth of exploration. Etrian Odyssey can only be saved in town, necessitating a trip up, and I’d been merely closely the DS lid and letting the sleep mode keep my place. It isn’t a huge setback, but I’ve lost a full inventory’s loot, a couple of levels, and a whole lot of map.

Earlier tonight I wondered why I was writing this: a diary of a DS game from last year. Part of it is searching for a topic. Four years in, and I’m still struggling to find just what I want to talk about here. I’ve written about video games before, but I haven’t quite found my voice on the matter. It is likely I never will. The real reason I feel compelled to write about Etrian Odyssey is how personal I find it to be. I touched on this last time in regards to the map. Somehow, it just feels like my game.

Etrian Odyssey is very deliberately tailored to be personal. The characters in your party are blissfully mute. Any personality they have is based solely on the portrait and the player’s decisions. Somewhere in the director’s diaries on the official site there is a post that covers this issue¹. The director wants you to bring your own story to the game, filling in the unspoken camaraderie of the explorers.

What dialog that does exist in Etrian Odyssey is very Dungeons & Dragons. Flavor text that could come out of the mouth of a seasoned Dungeon Master is sprinkled sparsely around the labyrinth. Much like a well-planned tabletop campaign it gives you a sense of the world without telling you what you ought to be thinking about it.

So, my team is at about level 14 and had I not thrown out a day’s exploration I’d be at the 5th level of the dungeon. I get the sense that this is probably the last level of the first “Strata” (the dungeon seems to be divided into groups of levels eliminating the need to start afresh every time). I’ll need to be doing battle with a wolf named Fenrir before too long.

One thing I didn’t quite get about the game until some time into it is the importance of item gathering skills. Every character class in the game has a set of skills he or she can learn. Each class has at least one item gathering skill that can be used at certain point in the game. Depending on the number of points sunk into this skill that character can extract a certain amount of randomized material per day. These points come at the expense of boosted stats, special attacks, or magic. With each level I raised, I looked at these skills and thought I would do better with a boosted attack. Now I’m not so sure.

Item collection is important, because finding money is difficult. In a rather sensible break from RPG tradition monsters do not carry any money. Instead you sell the skin, teeth, horns, eyes, and other assorted parts carved off of their inert corpses. It’s a bit like a MMO. Likely, the MMO games borrowed this from the original RPGs. This loot is also the manner by which new items are added to the game’s one and only store. Using the monster parts and gathered resource you sell the shopkeeper can make new and more powerful weapons and armor.

What I’ve found the strangest so far is the Etrian Odyssey‘s insistence that your party is the last and least noteworthy of a teeming horde of adventurers to brave the dungeon. Everything about the game thus far has communicated a sense of loneliness. The dungeon hardly feels well-traveled. From the unfinished map to the filing of new monster encounters with the local constabulary, the dungeon of Etrian Odyssey feels like unexplored territory.

¹ I’d link directly to it, but Atlus is insistent on Flash sites for their games that aggravatingly eschew any sort of permanent link.

My copy of the DS game Etrian Odyssey arrived last Thursday — I finally broke down and ordered the damned thing on eBay. I’ve been playing it with some regularity since it showed up in my mailbox. Thus far I’m very, very happy indeed.

I’ve been wanting to write about it, but I’d rather not just dump yet another review onto the interwebs, particularly when I’m not even close to any kind of conclusion. Instead, I thought I might write a little about what it’s like to play it. I suppose it’s a bit like a diary.

First a little background: Etrian Odyssey is a DS RPG released by Atlus. The entire game is centered around a single massive dungeon. There’s only one town with a single shop for all of your standard RPG needs. Battles are turn based with the participants taking one action per turn roughly in order of their speed. It’s pretty much the very same system that has been in place as long as these sorts of games have been, well, video games.

And that’s just it: the most refreshing aspect of Etrian Odyssey is its dogged use of formula. It’s almost soothing, in a way. Now I can see why Dragon Quest has been such a consistent draw in Japan. It’s like video game comfort food. I know that when I pick “attack” my dude will attack as soon as he’s allowed. I can set down the DS at this point, leave it for as long as I want, and when I pick it up I won’t have missed anything. I didn’t need to play a little rhythm game to get more damage. I didn’t lose any actions because I wasn’t paying attention. I can sit back and contemplate strategy. Or not.

The other big thing about Etrian Odyssey is the map. You have to make it yourself. Because it’s a DS game there’s that second screen to do something with. Instead of using it to move or enter commands the touch screen always displays the map, which you draw with the stylus. Because everything is at 90° angles it’s not too difficult. It makes the labyrinth seem that much more sinister and rewarding. I really feel like I’ve found something when I peek around a corner and scribble it onto my map.

After naming my guild — Badger, after my rambunctious 3-legged cat who in turn was given this name due to the badger’s tenacity and burrowing prowess — I made one each of the game’s 7 character classes¹ and put together an expeditionary force of 5. My first team consisted of a Landsnknecht (what other games might just call a “warrior,” he’s a straightforward attacker), a Protector (or knight), a Dark Hunter (a debuffer), a Survivalist (woodsman type that uses bows), and a Medic (the necessary healer). I played this team for a little while before realizing that I was probably going to need some magic and swapped the Dark Hunter for an Alchemist (this one casts spells like the ubiquitous fire and ice). Then a bit later I swapped out the Survivalist for the Dark Hunter again. I thought those debuffs might come in handy. Her poison strike certainly does when it hits. I’m still not quite satisfied. Once I get those last 2 classes I’ll probably do some more rearranging.

¹ There are actually 9, but I’ve yet to unlock the others.