Currently on the fourth stratum, but it's honestly an instant classic. I'm sure the sequels improve on a myriad of things but this still works very well as an entry point, and I always kinda enjoy the simplicity of a franchises early points. I imagined there'd be a lot of grinding but it's actually not too bad. There might be some points where you run into a boss that'll just kill you in one hit, but it's usually a good opportunity to try to get some more materials or do some quests and in the mean time hopefully you'll get a level or two and it should be much more doable (even when I've been purposefully not taking advantage of the immunize glitch.) I think the game loop just works really well cause there's always something you can try to work towards, with barely any points I've felt like I was just mindlessly grinding. Maybe the early level curve could've been a bit quicker cause the beginning was a bit slow but it's not a huge deal.

You get to draw maps.

I own and have played the entire series, so naturally when I saw there was a Steam port of the DS titles with updated graphics and controls, I had to end up buying these as well. I've invested several hundreds of hours into this series already, so I felt compelled to leave a review. Aside from all the exposition regarding why I like the game below, and why people should play it, I'd like to disclaim that my opinion is biased, as I've been invested in the series for nearly 15 years. I adore Etrian Odyssey 1 in particular, and first learned about it from the Let's Player Boltage Mcgammar back in the day. Since then, EO has been by far my favorite game series, and I'm overjoyed that it is not just ported on to Steam and Switch, but it's also a solid port.

I would encourage everyone to at least try this series once; even if it's not your thing, the time to begin playing is very fast, and you'll likely know if you want to continue or not within the refund time. My hope is that these remakes got enough attention that the 3DS games (EO4, EO5, EON, EO1U, EO2U, and the MD titles, but those don't really count) get ported to Steam/Switch as well, especially for the health and well being of the series: as the series went on, it became more palatable for newer players, and I'd argue that they might be more your speed if you don't like EO1, EO2, or EO3. To add to that, if you've got a Steamdeck, you should get the game, because it plays fantastically on it.

For the uninitiated: If you haven't played the original version on the DS before, Etrian Odyssey was based off of the classic Wizardry games from the early 80s to the mid 00s, which in turn inspired the classic SMT games, like SMT 1 & 2, and Persona 1 & 2. Because of this, Etrian Odyssey as a series, and the first game in particular, were designed to cater to the groups of people that were really into that old school style of dungeoneering, making your own map with pen and paper, being free to make your own discoveries and failures, and bashing your head against the wall; these are all touted as "features of the game", and the learning curve is part of the appeal.

Because it uses this template for design, you as the player will have a massive amount of freedom of choice in what you do, what skills you invest into, and how you make risky choices; will you keep trying to go to the next floor, or is your progress good enough to go home for today? Did you invest in skills that help you stay in the labyrinth longer, or did you invest into skills that let you take down bosses and harder encounters down? Did you put some points into gathering materials from the forest, or are you making your money through mowing down normal field enemies? Big game hunting can be very profitable, but do you have the right setup to do it effectively?

The answer to each of these questions is entirely on you, and this is what makes Etrian Odyssey hugely rewarding as a series: the game will start out kicking the ever loving crap out of you, but as you play more and more, you're going to pick up on what is or is not broken, you'll start noticing interesting skills you can get on your characters, and you'll notice the series' open invitation to break and cheese it as you please. When you start doing that, what comes off as a brutal, masochistic game becomes your own personal sandbox to play around in, and you'll start to kill bosses in a few turns that may have bodied you in the past. Don't be discouraged when the game knocks your teeth in; it's telling you to hit back, and especially in the first game, there are combos you can pull off that can deal a few thousand damage each turn.

If you have played the original Etrian Odyssey on the DS: this is the same game, but with some newer quality of life improvements. Auto paths from the later games have been added, and the ability to strafe from EO2 on has been back ported as well. On top of this, EO1 also shares its map icons with EO2 and EO3, and now the Warp icon has been replaced with the Camp Icon. Does this affect the game in the grand scheme of things? Not really. If there was a way to set the map icons back to the OG EO1 ones, it wasn't readily obvious on the UI.

There's also the "feature(?)" of Quicksaves only deleting themselves when you load a normal game save, and the game even tells you that the file will be deleted when you load a normal save. What this means is that you can savescum boss drops by reloading right in front of them, among other things. This has stayed in the game for over a year now, so it's clearly not a bug or intended to be patched, which is just weird; you can be a purist about abusing it or not, it's a single player game, who cares. I personally used it when farming late game to finish out the drop catalog, since most of the late game drops are only a base 5% to 10% chance to drop (an issue that was largely fixed in later entries), but refrained from using it during the main game. Once again, player's discretion, some people might be offended I did it this way, I personally don't think it matters.

They also added the graph view of your skill tree from the Untold Games (but they did not back-port the auto-allotment system, the skill system itself has not been changed from the originals), so you can clearly see what you need to unlock certain skills, without having to click on each individual skill to review its requirements. It just makes things cleaner to look at, and I appreciate that.

All in all, a good game is still good, and I enjoyed playing through it again, on both my PC and my Steamdeck.