Etrian Odyssey survives the transition to HD and proves it's still a great dungeon crawler on PC.
Sadly exploration, the central pillar of the series, makes a bad first impression. Whenever you enter a dungeon you're not greeted with a fullscreen HD view of a lush forest where water trickles down stone and beautiful flowers sway in the breeze. Instead you get a rather squished screen where a good third is occupied by the full map and a zoomed-in section, one stacked on top of the other.
On PC especially it's easy to see all the more elegant choices not made here: Why not make the map transparent, or tuck it away in a little auto-minimising tab? Why not place it in its own resizeable, moveable window, the way The Legacy: Realm of Terror managed to do on DOS machines all the way back in 1992?
Once I did put the full map away and get a good look at my surroundings, Etrian Odyssey's art direction shone as brilliantly in its new PC home as it always has. Everything has been redrawn rather than batch-upscaled or mindlessly AI'd to hell and back—even the 3D environments have been tweaked rather than simply rendered at a higher resolution.
The music falls along the same lines as the graphics, for better and worse. The familiar melodies and thrilling battle tracks are as enjoyable as ever—not all that surprising considering they were once again created by industry legend Yuzo Koshiro —and they've been subtly yet thoroughly improved in a way that makes you think they always sounded this good.
So the first three Etrian Odyssey games are finally free of an increasingly awkward and now unsupported home. Aside from my worries they wouldn't quite work in this new form, I also wondered if anyone would really care.
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