The 3DS's stylus-driven lower touch screen becomes a stack of virtual graph paper once you enter the dungeon, each floor giving you a separate 35-by-30-square grid on which you can mark down the location of any and every point of interest you encounter. Yes, you can activate a rudimentary auto-map feature, but the going ultimately gets far easier (not to mention more satisfying) if you come up with your own personal code and standards for placing available icons to indicate the presence of hidden passages, resource-gathering points, and campfires for preparing food. Its immense dungeon spans dozens of floors, all neatly gridded, and the game demands you plot out your own map by hand. Most of all, Etrian Odyssey 5 calls back to the days before in-game auto-maps existed. They amount to generic fighters that you build from the ground up from a pool of four races, 10 combat classes, multiple portrait selections and a handful of custom color palette options. Your heroes never speak for themselves in fact, they don't even constitute proper characters. Plot in Etrian Odyssey 5 exists mainly for flavor, playing out in sparse dribs and drabs as you delve into a sprawling 30-floor labyrinth. Here, the combat breaks up exploration, not story. It calls back to the days before CGI cut scenes, Social Links and dialogue tree romance options redefined role-playing games as a story-driven format spiced up by occasional combat.

Etrian Odyssey 5 hearkens back to the role-playing games of the early ’80s, when the genre mostly involved grueling dungeon crawls through winding labyrinths and it relies on the dual-screen format of the DS/2DS/3DS family to make its demanding designs work.įrom the beginning, the driving concept behind Etrian Odyssey has been to take the RPG concept back to its formative years. A great deal has changed with this latest Odyssey, but it remains faithful to key principles the first chapter of the series established a decade ago. Of these, Atlus' Etrian Odyssey 5 may well prove to be the most unforgiving of the bunch. At the same time, however, you’ll also find a modest selection of unflinchingly difficult games geared toward seasoned players. On one hand, the platform is largely propped up by all-ages titles geared toward kids who have come into possession of 3DS systems as its price drops and their older siblings move along to livelier platforms. Etrian Odyssey 5: Beyond the Myth does a number of unusual things, but perhaps nothing about it is so remarkable as the way it showcases the strange duality of the 3DS’s twilight days.

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