It’s an attractive paradox, and, rather than explode on contact, both series’ unique strengths coalesce into a grueling exploration of applied skill and tough love.
Early hours of Etrian Mystery Dungeon (especially if you’re as unfamiliar either series) are a trial by fire. There seem to be too many classes of characters, such an unreasonable amount of menus and options, and a ruleset that seems deliberately crafted to be vague and punishing. Before Etrian Mystery Dungeon allows any chance at penance, you’ve been wiped into nothing by the most non-threatening enemy available. Its ruleset seems unwieldy and overbeating. Its commitment to the fundamentals of roguelikes looks too sincere. Its responsibility to teach you anything about its more intrinsic aspects feels non-existent.
All of Etrian Mystery Dungeon’s first hours appear to be a process of weeding out the uncommitted. With time and a certain amount of trust, it’s prepared to reward patience and persistence with the unconditional satisfaction of a job well done. It’s not dissimilar from the relationship I have with From Software’s Souls games; your first step in feels like an uncompromising ode to self-inflicted misery, but time and diligence reveal a path to an outwardly rewarding fantasy. It’s a rough road, but my operating thesis with Etrian Mystery Dungeon’s is that pain would eventually translate into pleasure (or at least that’s the idea powering these sorts of games).
My early approach to Etrian Mystery Dungeon consented to the simplicity of brutality. I hastily assembled my party of one, found monsters, and I bashed them to death. This worked for one or two floors, and then Etrian Mystery Dungeon’s rules started to catch up with me. The game adapts (most of) the principles of a roguelike; movement is in real time, but every action also grants an action from any opposing force. You move, they move. You attack, they can attack. This is roguelike 101 for a seasoned crowd, but Etrian Mystery Dungeon systems of action and reaction are potentially bewildering for any newcomers.
Each dungeon is composed of multiple randomly generated floors, and soon enough my strategy of hitting things until they died wasn’t working on lower floors. I was dying. More importantly, I was dying and losing everything I had on me. Money, my equipment, and all of the items I had gathered were vaporized with my defeat. Soon I learned to store unnecessary items at Kasumi’s Inn, back in town. I also decided it would be a good idea to start taking other party members down with me in the dungeons. Confident I had learned from my mistakes and terribly unsure if I had mortally wounded my save file, I started Etrian Mystery Dungeon over from scratch.
My character was a Landsknecht, and I took with me a Dancer, a Medic, and a Protector. I was surprised to find my party move around me in a set formation, and further startled by the automated ability to engage an enemy. Etrian Mystery Dungeon manages an interesting system of placement and relies on AI control to dish out actions of character’s you’re not personally controlling. You can assume control of whoever you want with each passing turn, but basic dungeon navigation is reliant on the AI’s ability to not make a mess of things.
I seemed to be healing fine and getting a reasonable grasp on the Etrian Mystery Dungeon’s finer details, but I had forgotten to take other subtle variables into account. FP is a meter which represents your hunger, and it drops with every action taken. It can be restored by covering amber-colored tiles in the dungeon, assuming you manage to come across any (and it can also be restored by picking up bread and other items back in town). The Blast Meter basically covers some rather powerful skills, itself its own risk and reward. Using it to bail out of hairy situations is a welcomed reprieve, but not if you were saving it for the boss at the end of the dungeon.
The harsh penalties of failure can also be mitigated. An Ariadne Thread, as rare as it seems to be in early hours, is good for a single warp out of a dungeon. Storing unused items remained a great way to not risk everything all the time. With money and experience came the option for expanding skills and buying better equipment. You can also reinvest money into the town of Aslarga, which leads to a wider variety of services and options to buy better equipment. In Etrian Mystery Dungeon, it certainly pays to be selfless.
Whereas Etrian Odyssey traditionally issues harsh bosses in the form of FOE’s, Etrian Mystery Dungeon offers similar aggressors as DOE’s. The pun weakens a bit, transforming from a capitalized and large antagonist to something Homer Simpson yells upon abject failure, but the implied lesson is the same. DOE’s will wipe you out. DOE’s will also follow you back to Aslarga, or work their way up there if you ignore them, and wipe parts of that out. As if the prospect of losing everything on you isn’t enough, wrecking shops that otherwise allow you to better yourself is an even stiffer penalty.
The solutions to the DOE problem (and many others) are forts. Paying the stiff price for a fort in a dungeon serves as a blockade for a DOE that may have made it up to that floor. Stocked with enough guild members and they might repel the DOE. If they fall and/or the fort is destroyed, the DOE retreats for a bit. Given that I constantly struggled to not get annihilated by DOE’s, forts were a welcomed reprieve from the harsh realities of effective play. As a bonus, any party members I had in forts gained experience along with my active party. Given that I rarely had confidence in whom exactly I was supposed to have with me, that stood as a tremendous asset.
How well you respond to Etrian Mystery Dungeon might as well be a test of managing personal efficiency. Early on I had to go through dungeons, floor by floor, until I had the requisite capital to buy better equipment or the flourishing confidence to see it through to its end. I expected this process to narrow down to something more manageable as the game carried on, but I still found myself covering a floor at a time before returning to the surface. I’d go one deep, then two deep on my next round, then three deep the—you get the picture. My lack of experience in what I was supposed to be doing greatly contributed to the amount of time I had to invest—and often lose in failure—detailing its hard to reach angles.
Sometimes I wished Etrian Mystery Dungeon would just get to the point. Other times I wondered if everything I seemed to be doing and repeating was the point. The answer is probably somewhere in between. Etrian Mystery Dungeon undoubtedly wields an almost respectable fusion of the two disparate series it seeks to unite—a heady accomplishment in its own right—but not one that spoke to my specific needs or desires. Part of this is a fault in engagement (being a relative newcomer to both, I don’t feel like I’m the target audience) and the rest lies on my own responsibility to entertain and explore different types of games.
With that said, I recognize the brilliance behind what Etrian Mystery Dungeon tries to put on its table. It’s for people who are fans of party- perfected-grinding, Mystery Dungeons, roguelikes, and Etrian Odyssey. Hitting one or more of those descriptors checks a very important box, but Etrian Mystery Dungeon best serves those who match every single one. This doesn’t mean it’s impenetrable for others, but rather speaks a language that will require time and dedication to learn. Putting in the time, as I so dearly learned with Dark Souls, Eidolon, Cloudbuilt, or any other outwardly impenetrable game (be it through systems, presentation, or applied skill, respectively) is sure to pay off. Eventually.
