This has been out in Japan for a while now (and getting great reviews; Famitsu gave it a 35/40) but has finally been announced as coming to the US officially in the fall of this year.
EOV features the most robust character creation system in the series, with lots of races and class combinations to play around with this time. The gameplay is largely the same, mapping out the levels by hand while battling enemies in a turn-based Wizardry style combat, but I will say the visuals and effects/animations have never looked better - a lot of care seemed to have gone into the production quality, and it shows. Of course, all the videos are in another language, so I have no idea what’s going on, but it looks great.
I didn’t dislike the overland/air ship stuff in 4, but this quote from the RPGamer Import Review might give you some hope.
…According to the director, this game is an intentional throwback to the simpler days of the original games, and one can see the results of that in both the more straightforward plot as well as the lack of any gameplay other than pure dungeon crawling…
I really should look into getting the remastered 2nd one for the 3DS. It was a lot of fun when I had it originally on the DS but my DS took a shit on me before I could get far into it. I ended up just selling it and it wasn’t until 4 came out I played another EO game. Everyone seems to agree 2 (especially the new version) is the best in the series.
I had this same thought. I’d love this on the Switch, a new entry in the series specifically designed for the Switch that maybe does away with hand mapping but allows for map annotation. Heck, even V has an “auto-map” feature I read, so you don’t really have to draw walls in by hand if you want to opt-out.
Anyway, so now some of us wait for a date on when … or if … there’s a EU/AU release date. Often the Etrians are delayed by 6 or more months after US release. And the 3DS is still region locked. :(
Yeah, that damned region locking is just miserable. Why they have never addressed that I’ll never know. There are quite a few JP games (mostly shooters and such) that I think look cool but no reason to ever buy from Play Asia or the like. My cousin, a JP speaker who visits the country fairly often as his wife is from there, sold his 3DS because he didn’t want to bother maintaining two from the two regions.
What I read about the fifth game is that it was one, big dungeon, and that there was none of those extra activities (while I liked the ship exploration for the first part in III, it quickly became more of a skill tree in disguise and I just wanted to ignore it later on).
I didn’t know there was a demo out for this, very cool. I’m going to hold off though, too many things on my gaming plate atm with Divinity, Dishonored, Tactics Ogre and I haven’t even opened Mario+Rabbids yet. Also, the Octopath Travel (or w/e) demo is on my Switch unlaunched, too. Gah.
I’d love any impressions from the demo any folks care to offer up though. It’s on my list of games to pre-order when funds become available.
