Etrian Odyssey III hits Tuesday!

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City Available September 2010 for Nintendo DS

Its coming with a nice 60-page artbook. I still would have preferred an OST, which Japan got, mostly for this cover, which also references Persona 4



Preview videos can be found on the Wii Nintendo Channel and the EOIII site, I'm posting some music from the game a little ways down because that's part of what's so great about the series.

This time its not just about navigating a labyrinth, but navigating the ocean and mapping it as much as the islands you come across, explore and find the dungeons within. Ten totally new classes with a subclass system (think subjobs), Limit attacks and local multiplayer. They also added more refinement to the mapmaking system.

Here's some of the music, by series composer Yuzo Koshiro. You may know him from Streets of Rage, Ys, Ys II, Revenge of Shinobi and many others. He also worked on Smash Bros. Brawl and the music for Dragon Ball Online.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGRxsqajkw0]YouTube - Etrian Odyssey 3 - Battlefield - The First Campaign[/ame]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdlBj-hUD74]YouTube - Etrian Odyssey 3 - Battlefield - Those That Slay and Fall[/ame]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPvBxglPNRI]YouTube - Etrian Odyssey III - Music: Their Own Brand of Justice[/ame]

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Etrian Odyssey III hits Tuesday!

Started poking around this sequel for a bit.

The Classes are surprisingly less traditional.

Monks are the healers of the game, but also viable melees. You have the farmer who's useless in combat, but good at fixing status ailments, resource gathering, improving drop rates and sensing enemies. Ninjas actually appear to have replaced the Paladins, but favoring evasion and shadows to draw attacks (sounds familiar). Buccaneers can use guns and rapiers, they're your crit specialists. Gladiators are straight-up melee, but have some nifty debuffs and do good damage considering they have practically no defense to speak off.

What hasn't changed is getting raped in every corner of the game. For a game so whimsical and borderline moe-ish, this series really shows no mercy. I helped a baby animal out of a hunter's trap and its parents showed up and killed my party

[Firewind]

Re: Etrian Odyssey III hits Tuesday!

Looks interesting and even though I have a big backlog of games to play I will probably end up importing this at some point is Nintendo doesn't screw over my local importer again.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Etrian Odyssey III hits Tuesday!

Yeah, this isn't one to put at the top of your queue if you have a big backlog, but it is quite a good game, albeit a time-consuming one. Its still a hard, unforgiving game, but they smoothed out some of the rough edges.

Stuff like healing, MP recovery, buffs are a bit more accessible. I don't have to go back to the inn every day to recover MP. Plus exploring the sea on the side adds some more income, as you can go fishing as such. I may have a tough time going back to the first two games after playing this.

I can't say enough good things about each class they designed for the game. There's so much you can do with each job, especially when subclasses come into play. Its just they're a little shrewed on the skill points. One per level up per character.

They did make leveling up a bit more generous, though. FOEs (NMs, basically) used to not give EXP, just drops. Now they give EXP. Quests now give EXP as well, so that's good, too.

[Firewind]

Re: Etrian Odyssey III hits Tuesday!

Well my current backlog is something like this:

FFXIV (Obviously but since leves have a 48 hour cooldown on them the game is hardly a timesink)
Valkyria Chronicles 2 (Not too far from the end)
My Max S.Link run for P3P (To be fair this can be put on hold)
Dragon Quest IX (Pretty close to the beginning)
BlazBlue Continuum Shift (Rachel's Story has brickwalled me)
Demon's Souls (Not too far from the end though)
Dead Rising 2 (Haven't actually started playing this yet since the friend who bugged me to buy it had had his 360 RRoD on him)
Dragon Age Awakening (Not too far from the end of the content though)
Civilization V (I have a lot of friends who keep dragging me onto this game, making it a big timesink. They do stop bugging me if I'm on FFXIV though, then I just get jealous looks for having a PC that can run it )

EDIT: Oh and Recettear. That game is a lot of fun.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Etrian Odyssey III hits Tuesday!

Here's some thoughts on the game from Tycho at Penny Arcade. It rings pretty true:

Etrian Odyssey III couldn't have arrived at a better time; I wasn't able to get out of bed, but my thumbs were in top form. The third entry in a series with callbacks to the PC dungeon crawlers of yore, it marries incredible art (no, really) with a heap of interlocking systems and then tells you to fuck yourself. Not everyone wants that - not everyone wants a game to continually reinforce their unworthiness. But this is all I want now, these mean as hell, spit-in-your-mouth grudgefucker games, and this is certainly that.

In the rounds of Civ V I've played (and enjoyed, to be sure) I've got a good "feeling" by turn ten how this shit is going to shake out. Real quick, just for the curious among you, it's going to shake out with me atop a mountain of of bones, crown wobbling dangerously to one side as I really go nuts on a femur. Maybe I should turn up the difficulty? Which one is the right one, which is the one where it starts to cheat? Etrian Odyssey III only has one difficulty, and that difficulty is motherfucker. There is a cat you might see five, maybe six minutes into the first level of the dungeon that will wipe out your entire party. TPK. Get past him, and there's another one waiting in a tree. Your time, your wealth, and your optimistic young adventurers bleeding optimistically on the forest floor.

[Armando]

Re: Etrian Odyssey III hits Tuesday!

Etrian Odyssey III only has one difficulty, and that difficulty is motherfucker.

Never played the games but this line made me giggle.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Etrian Odyssey III hits Tuesday!

He's not kidding. Even with all the tremendous improvements to the system and classes compared to the last two games, after having completed the first floor, I've decided to do more exploring at sea and grinding on that first floor because I took one step into the second floor and died to the first lil beastie I came upon.

And there was a FOE waiting around the corner. FOEs are what you really dread because you can actually see them on the field, unlike a normal encounter. They want you to fear them.

My team is level 7 now, so I must be brave and decend further. I kinda want to put my Monk in the back row because she has no defense, but I need the Ninja and Buccaneer back there more because their DEF and HP sucks more. Plus my Ninja can make a copy of herself to the frontline - a shadow that can be commanded to attack, no less - but its only worthwhile if she's in the back so it can appear in the front row.

[Armando]

Re: Etrian Odyssey III hits Tuesday!

I generally take him very seriously, it's just that I imagined picking New Game, then having to choose the difficulty, except there's only one option and it reads "MOTHERFUCKER."

Is this the sort of game you can play without having played the previous 2?

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Etrian Odyssey III hits Tuesday!

Yeah, there's really not a story to this other than the quests you're given. This is "reach the top of the tower/bottom of the labyrinth" kind of story. Except you get to chart out the ocean to find an ancient sunken city as well.

The story is largely that of your experience, I like to make notes of that story on my maps. And like old vector dungeons and MUDs, the only things that might alter the text scenarios within the dungeons are who you decided to bring along.

For example, my gladiator observed a bush of berries and reached out to try one as food because that's what I decided. My farmer stopped the gladiator, since he had knowledge of plants and animals due to his job class. They were poisonous. Some of these events also have random results. I tried to free a baby animal for a hunter's trap and its parents may or may not decide to attack me.

The nice thing is, succeed or fail, you can save your map data if you die, so your work as a cartographer is never lost. They also added a feature that you can use to autonavigate places you've already been. So if you're just trying to get to the next floor quickly, you can map out a path to get there and just let it automate the process of walking there. You'll still have random encounters, but it saves time.

Once you complete a tier of the dungeon, you can always automatically advance to the next one, skipping the prior tier. You'll get items and abilities that let you teleport back the entrance of a floor or back outside of the dungeon entirely if things aren't going well. So while its a pretty harsh game, its does its part to minimize backtracking and traveling where it can.

[Firewind]

Re: Etrian Odyssey III hits Tuesday!

Because it's relevant:

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB_PVPyn6n8]YouTube - [IOSYS] F O E! High Quality, English subs[/ame]