Etrian Odyssey: Not as Hard As You Think

Very recently I replayed and finished a game called Etrian Odyssey on the DS.  The game was released in 2007 and is a dungeon crawler where the player is tasked with entering a labyrinth and solving its mysteries as they progress down 25 floors of danger.  The game came out in 2007 so this isn't going to be a review but I want to address something people have always said about it's difficulty.

Etrian Odyssey can be a challenging game to a new player, you have a number of classes to pick from who each have their own unique skills.  Then once you've made your team you have to gear them out, go into the dungeon and start to get them to a higher level.  Once you level up you get points to put into a skill and the lists of skills are so long that it would surely overwhelm a lot of new players, it sure as hell did for me my first time round.

So the things I hear the most regarding difficulty is that the encounters can be tough and dying makes you lose a lot of progress.  Well the second one might be true, since save points inside the dungeon are quite few and far between death can me a pretty hefty setback depending on how long you were exploring but encounters, even the special enemies and bosses become disgustingly easy once you get your head round the characters skills.

In my replay I managed to remember all the points required for the best skills and I realized that a great deal of the skills on the characters list are completely useless.  For example, the games version of the warrior has all these skills called things like "stunner" or some whirlwind thing that hits adjacent enemies but it's all crap.  Max out the attack, HP and All Slash skills and he can deal with most of the standard encounters alone.  Another example would be the survivalist who only really needs one skill called Apollon which does massive damage after 3 turns to a single foe.  You can take such a massive chunk of health from a boss in such a short time that the fight becomes almost trivial.  Couple that with a medic who has a maxed Salve 2 and the the game becomes almost too easy.

Granted, you would never know to do all that shit the first time round but I went back to this game with memories of having a hard time but my replay was just pathetically easy.  Even the final boss stood absolutely no chance and I beat him stood in line for a ride at a theme park and barely paying attention.

So what I discovered essentially is that a number of the skills are a bit unbalanced and break the combat a little bit and once you figure out what those skills are the game becomes a cake walk.  I'd recommend Etrian Odyssey since its a great little RPG and fans of dungeon crawl games might get a kick out of the whole draw your own map feature using the DS's lower screen.  It's become a big series too and I've not played a lot of the later ones so I'm curious to see if the later titles are as easily broken as this one.

Please Stop Moaning About Difficulty

There needs to be a rule when it comes to video game reviews, where reviewers should not be allowed to talk about a games difficulty at all.  This seems like and incredibly stupid and unreasonable thing to say, but what choice do we have when almost every reviewer is wrong about difficulty in games.

Let's talk about Castlevania for a second here.

A good majority of people think Castlevania is a hard game, and they would be right.  The level design and enemy placement is fiendish, the bosses are tough as nails and with no save or password system it can turn into a bit of an endurance test if you die a lot.  On top of that, you sort of have to know whats coming so that you can make educated choices about your sub-weapon.  This isn't bullshit because the games fairly kind with checkpoints, but overall, castlevania is a hard game.

Now what about Demons Souls, or even Dark Souls, are these hard games?  No, no they are not.  Everything in Demons and Dark Souls is designed to kill you and make your life a living hell if you are not willing to play by the games rules.  It's a game where you have to learn the mechanics well, take in your surroundings and above all be careful and observant.  If you do all these things then chances for survival in Demons and Dark souls is actually rather high, and while it's still a rather challenging game, the levels between these games and basically everything in the 8/16 bit generations is massive.

Let's take another example, Etrian Odyssey 4

Etrian Odyssey is a series of dungeon crawlers designed as a throwback to games like Wizardry and it falls in a genre known for it's difficulty.  A few weeks ago I was made aware of a review on IGN basically panning Etrian Odyssey 3 for being too difficult and unfair.  This is of course bullshit and really it was a case of the reviewer not being arsed enough to learn how the game works and getting frustrated when things didn't go his way.  Etrian Odyssey 4 on the other hand got a great review, because the person in question played it on easy mode and didn't have to learn the ins and outs to get by, and this is sort of sad in a way.

He's right, its a great game but not because there is an easy mode that makes it accessible to newcomers.  That is a great feature but that isn't the reason the game deserves the score it got.   Dark Souls is a challenging game but all the hyperbole being thrown around regarding its difficulty caused people to turn away.

Panning a game for difficulty, especially when you are wrong about it, is not good.  It gives the developers this false idea that people don't like challenging or even hard games.  If you as a reviewer find a game kicked your ass into next year, then say so, but don't pan the whole game because you assume that everyone else is like you and isn't willing to put in time to improve at it.  Until reviewers can talk about difficulty in a mature way, and not just throw a low score at a title because it beat them, discussion of difficulty should be disallowed from reviews.

I swear to god if Dark Souls 2 is ruined because of shit like this I'm going to be rather upset.

THOSE Moments in Games

So today I'm playing Etrian Odyssey on the DS, a cool little dungeon crawl that involves drawing your own map and exploring a vast network of tunnels filled with equal parts treasure and danger.  I thought this game was pretty awesome until I got a certain side-quest, a side quest to spend 5 in game days on the 8th floor of the dungeon. 

That means moving 3600 steps, which means patrolling in that 3 square little space for 5 game days because otherwise I have to fight boring monsters that I can kill in one hit!

This got me thinking, there are a lot of games that have THOSE moments, you know the ones I mean, the moments that throw a dirty big wrench into an otherwise really enjoyable game.  The most famous example that comes to my mind is the Ocarina of Time Water Temple

People love the shit out of this game but this dungeon is one of the most hated things in all of gaming. 

While most of these sections usually involve a sewer, this doesn't quite qualify as a rant on sewer levels because there are a good handful of games where these sections take place outside of those infernal underground pieces of shit.

The problem with these sections is that it can really kill the replay value of a game.  There are plenty of games in my collection that I would actually love to play again, but as soon as I go to play it, I remember THAT bit and suddenly I don't want to play anymore.  I don't know why these are so common as well, I'm sure developers know that what they are putting in kills pacing/fun, so why do they do it?

Fucking. Stop it!

Now that's some bullshit #9: Infinitely Respawning Enemies

I can't believe I've been reduced to making a post about this fucking topic, it should be obvious to developers that putting in an infinite amount of enemies in a section is bullshit, so why do they fucking do it?
So let me tell you a story, about how I became all frustrated and red faced about this topic.  I am currently playing Etrian Odyssey on the DS, a fun little dungeon crawler sort of similar to that Legend of Grimrock thing, but the combat is all turn based and encounters are random and character management is completely different....OK so it's NOTHING like Grimrock, but you have to draw your own fucking map so shut up.

Anyway, to illustrate my point, I'm going to show you a picture!

So you see those two purple arrow things?  They are called FOEs, and they are basically big nasty monsters that you can kill for better rewards and shit.  However in this case, the monsters are just ants, ants with high defence and the ability to call for help.  Now that doesn't sound so bad, it's not exactly uncommon to have enemies in RPGs that do this kind of thing, BUT, when you kill one of these FOEs, another one will take it's place straight away.  It's fucking arse because the ants in this particular corridor have something like 3 different respawn points, so it's almost impossible to make any fucking progress.  On top of that, if you manage to be unlucky enough to fight them on one of the respawning squares, you're just fucked, the fight will never end and you should just run.

But you know what?  As I'm sat here venting about this particular corridor, which I'll get through by the time the next subway trip is over, I can't actually think of another game that has this, apart from fucking Doom, and even then it's only on the highest difficulty. 

I know they exist, I've seen it, experienced it, raged at it before but I can't bring another title to mind right now.  But the point still fucking stands, don't have your enemies respawn till the end of time, it brings everything to a fucking standstill and does nothing but piss off and bore the player as he or she kills the same fucking enemies a million times over.

So if you are a game developer, and you put this kind of thing in the game, go and fuck yourself with a burning cattle prod.