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"Etrian Odyssey" Best old school RPG?

  • ZPE
  • 08/14/2007 08:39 PM
  • 2706 views
When Heroes Realm won the best old school RPG in the Misaos, I decided to give this game ago. I mean I'm really fond of old school RPGs and the screenshots pretty much confirmed this.

Although it's not complete I decided to dedicate a lot of my time on this game. At the start the generic situation of the King wanting you see occurred. Having expected this I wasn't frustrated at all. If anything it brought back memories of Dragon Warrior on the NES and those were fond memories indeed.

At the beginning you need to pick a party of warriors and other combatants that can achieve your goal. I sneakily found some "secret" classes which proved to be way better than the standard classes.

At this point, I realised the game was inviting me to er...dig around in pots and bookshelves. I practically rinsed the entire town dry of items! Item acquisition was a joy to watch, the animation glittered as the item flew in the air.

Ok onto the graphics, not much to say really except the smaller than usual sprites were charming as were the mapping done by Kentona. It really felt like a well-done game and it captured that Dragon Warrior feel quite brilliantly. The Final Fantasy rips were well implemented too.

The music and sound effects were spot on. I'm no musician but everything seemed in the right place. Some midi files sounded like they were taken from some SNES game I can't put my finger on though.

The battle system uses RPGmaker 2003's default one but it's pretty well used. Battles aren't tiresome and random battles make good old school games! Also the battle character sets from Final Fantasy are very neatly used here.

There are many side quests you can do in this game. I found them vital to being able to afford some of the weapons in the shop. There's also a well in each town but I'll leave that up to you to decide what they're for.

The game also implements a day/night system which the NPCs respond to rather well. A vital part of the storyline requires you to visit someone at night.

And now here's the thing that stopped me from carrying on playing after the end of Chapter One. I must have spent several hours to beef up my characters only for them to be taken out of Chapter Two. I was gutted, all my work was wiped and I had to literally start over. Only this time with some female dancer...I guess this style was taken from Dragon Warrior.

This is how far I went into the game but I'll probably continue sometime in the future when I get hyped up again.

To answer the question ""Etrian Odyssey" Best old school RPG?" So far, yes!

Posts

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Thanks for the review! You should really finish playing the demo - the next 3 chapters are even better (in my humble opinion). It leads up to chapter 5, wherein all four of the teams you make join together to save the world.

The only game music that I use with any consistency is from E.V.O., otherwise they are original works I've found from MIDI sites on the internet. And I use Dragon Warrior 1 village MIDI for shops.
Ah yes it I think it was E.V.O. The midi did seem very appropriate for the game. Kudos to you.
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