IIRC Etrian 1 & 2 on 3DS are just remakes of your DS games with a bonus dungeon and low/mid-quality story.
They all have hour-long demos. Try them and come back later. :)
Get Nexus. Newer, heaps of content, quality of life improvements. Great game.
It’s easymode remix of the previous games. Again, why play this series if not to be punished?!
So I checked out Infinite Adventures while fooling around in Mary Skelter. It’s an indie take on part of the Etrian formula.
The good: adjust encounter rate on the fly. There is an unsophisticated auto battle. Class skill trees are decent. Quality auto map I don’t have to waste time drawing.
The bad: some people like this, but I am not a fan of the Etrian “harvest shit from dungeon spots/monsters and combine with occasional boss drops to unlock new gear” system, which this uses. The skill trees have more than a few “traps” in them, although there’s a respec that is affordable after early game. Also, they aren’t quite as colorful/involved mechanically as what you get from later Etrian games. There’s a weird class upgrade system that doesn’t feel especially necessary, which also ties into the “retire/rebirth” system. Which probably isn’t needed, although IDK I’m not even halfway through the dungeon. Levels can be a touch bland, and the voice acting is all over the place.
There’s something in the dugeon like Foes but they don’t move around, and overall they are a little more vanilla in terms of design. There’s also “party skills” which don’t belong to a single person: gathering skills, unlock, decipher, search, and maybe one other. These have been a mild disappointment. There just hasn’t been much in the dungeon I couldn’t handle once I arrived at it, and the two times I had to come back the rewards were super lame. There’s also a class that sort of boosts this aspect, giving free levels in stuff.
There is also a system where you can enter portals to procedurally generated dungeon levels to go kill a boss. It’s very random what you get as a reward but you can get some nice gear - eq can both be enchanted with something that boosts specific stats as well as enchanted +1/+2 etc up to I can’t rmeember what. Resources to do that, so far, are scarce so far(these one off dungeon levels have chests that can contain the ruins you need though).
It’s decent overall. There are much worse ways to spend 15 bucks (or less if you can catch it on sale).
Saviors of Sapphire Wings is now out.
It’s got mixed reviews although those are partly due to issues that maybe got fixed after release. I haven’t seen any controller issues yet, and one complaint was that there was no way to access options from the Sapphire Wings main screen but I could do it.
I can say I enjoyed Infinite adventures a good bit, usually goes on sale for 10, but haven’t seen lower.
I have no interest in the sapphire wings part, but the the Japanese reviews of the stranger city part are current, and an absolutely horrific read.
NIS true to itself seems to have no idea how to port to PC. I’ll get it on the Switch!
I have anger towards NIS, not just because they butcher PC ports, but because they took from a friend who was one of the best PC porters around for older games (she’s still got plenty of work so she’s ok though)
Curious if this actually turned out to be your thing.
Nice. I think I’m gonna get it next time it goes on sale.
That thread needs another title because it’s the one I was wanting to bump the other day but it didn’t pop up. “Blobbers”, ugh.
Clearly, we can’t call them “Wizardries”:
Very sad news.
God what a dumb name for a subgenre that is essentially all wizardry-clones.
Via Giant Bomb:
Slang term for first-person party-based RPGs in which the player controlled ‘entity’ is meant to represent a party of individual characters, but is literally an invisible blob with arms and legs.’
This also explains JRPGs which the party is usually represented by one character on-screen until combat or a cutscene starts.
Admittedly I don’t really play these types of games very often and they sort of tire me out. Also they are all too similar (of the ones I have played, which again isn’t a lot) Eterian Odyessy is I think the only one I actually finished and I never made it past the first floor of the sequel becuase I felt I already played enough of that game.
It is dumb. I believe it was originally intended as a derogatory term, by people sneering that it didn’t allow tactics like flanking and what-not. Popularised on rpgcodex…
All genre names are dumb. Like Adventure games - as opposed to what, Boring games? Or Real-Time Strategy that actually means military tactics games with base building and resource management, don’t you think that Sim City or Crusader Kings or Combat Mission are RTS. Or RPG, a genre idea design to screw your mind because Fallout 2, Final Fantasy 8, Skyrim, Wizardry 8, Dark Souls and Disco Elysium are all kinda similar.
Not if you play Combat Mission the real way.
As for this genre, surely it should be called First-Person Party-Based Dungeon-Delving Adventure, or FPPBDDA, pronounced “fuhpuhpubduhdah”.
Some of them aren’t party based.
That’s not the issue here, m’lord. The problem is that a fan of the genre, the most important one in my own case, me, never hear of that term and can’t understand what it means or relate to without Roguefrog explaining it - for the xxth time in this very thread.
You’re discussing scope, when the denomination itself makes no sense in this case, and prevented this one to find the topic using the everso powerful Discourse search.
Praise be to Wumpus.
It’s not about scope. All the terms I’ve listed are misleading and incorrect. If you hadn’t heard the term Role-Playing Game you’d think it’s some kind of theatrical multiplayer simulation. It’s a niche genre so you didn’t know the name just as you wouldn’t be able to find a game in any other genre till you’re told the agreed term.
Nope. I am calling it. Blobber is stupidest genre name ever produced.
First Person Shooter
Real Time Strategy
Role Playing Game
These at least give high value concepts. The first two also are called that because before then, shooters weren’t traditionally first person and stragtegy games weren’t real-time, and those were genre defining aspects.