Etrian Odyssey

Thats the only way to play

I heard it was mostly riddled with DLC so you would fork over more shekels, but I haven't played it, so there might be more.

Its fuck up i posted 5.

They balanced the game around the OP as fuck story mode characters, and almost everything is a massive HP wall.
also DLC riddled

There are other bugs, but that's certainly the most pernicious, there is still a chance to dodge though. Sniper's chase always does 100% damage for some reason. Blood surge is a multiplier on top of other buffs, rather than being additive, though that might be working as designed and simply unbalanced.

The Untolds are solid, many people (rightfully) dislike story mode, but classic is sill very good.

DLC, HP bloat, a couple of classes were made too weak to really be usable on expert. It's still good and worth a play, despite that.

It's a worse game than EO2, and unless you really want some QoL improvements like auto-mapping you're better off just playing 2.

When did you last play EO2? The 3DS QoL improvments (auto-mapping not included, it should be turned off) make the games much nicer to play. 2 didn't age as poorly as 1, but it still feels a bit stiff today.
The only reason I would recommend EO2 over 2U classic is if someone really loves Ronin.

Or class balance period.
Survivalists in U2 are as bad as they are in EO1. Not to mention they remove the entire gimmick of the superboss and then the DLC superboss looks fucking retarded
EO1 needed a remake just from how misbalanced the entire game was, skills were bugged, behaved weirdly, etc. EO2 could've used polish, not "make every enemy an HP wall and make picnic mode so easy a team of 5 landshnects auto attacking can beat everything sans postgame"

Does EOV have a translation yet?

Not offically. Im still waiting. Fucking voice acting in EO is bullshit. Why the fuck did they pull that shit.

imagine I put a picture of a smiling golden man as a picture as opposed to an EO2 wallpaper.
NEVER EVER, seriously it looks like atlas isn't even going to attempt, there's a fantranslation in the works though

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Fucking why. I got a fucking 3ds for EO4 and 5. Atleast i have persona q. there seriously needed to be more dungeon crawlers released on ds/3ds. I think ive played just about all that have been offically released in NA

I disagree that the class balance in 2U is any worse than the original's where Ronin and Hexer trivialised the game. It's just unfortunate that Survivalist and Ronin were hit so hard.
HP walls and pattern bosses are unfortunate, but I don't think they impact the core game enough to discount all the other improvments. At least not until post-game.
Picnic mode was a mistake, but at least it can be entirely avoided. If expect had to be unlocked or something like that, I would definitely have recommend EO2.

You can find all the mechanical information online, but the rom can't be patched and repacked at the moment.

The force system in general in U2 is broken as fuck, the story mode dungeons are completely out of place, and the grimoire system is back to make anywhere from broken ass combos to stupid long grinds

The 3rd and 6th stratum got watered down compared to the original EO2, I suspect the former due to the on-cart DLC.

Oh cool, if they are priming the fanbase that English announcement must be around the corner

I find it unlikely that they won't release it here. Although I thought it would be happening by now.

Where should I start with EO?

Three is perfect. It has most of the main improvements to be modern enough. Play it, you'll be glad you did.

2,3,4,U1,5.
Vanilla 1 aged like vomit. And the QoL stuff in the later games makes it a bit difficult to work backwards if you're not on board with the series

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not until someone figures out how to repack the .HPB file
its very slowly being worked on with Kuriimu and Karameru.

EO4 falls apart after the first stratum as unless you're a retard you'll have figured out how to become too powerful for the game and will just be stomping FOEs and bosses rather than having to proceed carefully. EO3 has the same problem.

EO3 had an ocean battle that you will always win the first turn if you do it first thing after loading with only one character. All the easy grind strategies are there for the late game as a QoL thing. Just have self control.

I must be a retard because the second boss gave me a hard time. What's your secret?

The only trick I remember about the second boss is that a Ranger's Snipe skills always hit, which is really useful against Hollows in general. Should have Black Mist by then iirc so just bind and cheese. Cook some food if you need it to be even easier.

EO3 only falls apart later, when you get into subclass cheesing. EO4 difficulty just felt undertuned in general.

Subclassing is fun as hell though

In EO3 i had a fortress/ninja. I would use that shadow copy thing and be able to protect both lines at the same time.

Am I the only one who gets anxious about upgrading guys? EO4 expects absolute precision from the first skill point due to the instant branching into extremely specific specializations. On the other hand they give you just some flavor text to decide on, no numbers or shit.

Kind of a shitty system for people who don't want to keep a good open at all times.

*keep a guide open, sorry.

Yeah, but with the retire+rest system the penalties for messing up aren't that bad. And once you play the series for long enough you just kind of pick up on what's going to be good/bad

Alright, so I'm playing Etrian Odyssey 2 for the first time. When does this game pick up? I'm level 4 and I get my ass handed to me from almost anything on the second floor of the first stratum, not to mention the boss enemies which will kill everyone in my party with a single hit. Am I missing some mechanic which makes me not suck?

Post team and builds

At level 4, party composition and "build" is basically not a thing.

I think he's just complaining more about the general difficulty of the series. In which case he just needs to git gud.

Generally you don't want to fight the wandering boss enemies for a while. Are you keeping up with sidequests?
Also post your party.

Those wandering bosses are FoEs you're pretty much supposed to avoid them until you're either higher level or have a very good grasp of mechanics

so is Etrian Odyssey 5 coming to the west, ever? Because if not, I'm gonna be really sad.

Untold 3 would be cool too

With the voice acting in 5, i doubt it. 3 senarios can happen:

You take that back. I swear on me mum I will turn this thread right around, boyo.

EO with voice acting is cancer and you know it. Unless you were that user a while back that refused to buy it unless it had your waifus voice acting.

Still ain't buying it without all the seiyuu.

A u t i s m

People do that?

You don't understand. A game that has Saorin's heavenly voice removed from it is a lessened and inferior product. Not only would you be getting a shittier product than the original, but the decision itself clashes with the direction of the game. The Nippians wanted customization to be a feature. Removing aspects of said customization goes directly against the spirit of development.

I won't support that. Saorin deserves more.

That what that user said.

Is this copypasta or is it really you?

post lewd EO stuff

There is always CFW for that fam.

You faggot casual.

Of course. I won't deprive myself of whatever fan-made patch comes out to restore glorious seiyuu, should the worst case scenario comes out. Nobody should monetarily encourage such dogshit practices either, though. If they don't have the courage necessary to fund for the entire game, then they just might as well not bother.

I'd honestly put more faith in the ongoing fan translation, it hit a bit of a snare, but don't underestimate autism. They went from 0 to near fully translated in a month for MH:X.

Sounds good. Do they have a website I can keep an eye on, or is it buried in gbatemp or somewhere like that?

GBATemp seems to have more info, they're using a lot of the MH:X tools but the encryption is slightly different so that's the snag.

Sorry for the late response, I was not available.
I don't expect to have made all the right decisions. This is a blind run for my first Etrian Odyssey playthrough. I just want to make sure I'm not wasting my time and doing something incorrect (much like my playthroughs of the Wii and GC fire emblem games)

EO should be played blind, except for skill guides to tell you what skills actually do because the games are terrible at telling you. Some damage percentages don't make a lot of sense, so you can easily invest in skills that seem strong but really aren't.

What is with the fucked up pixels?

I'm not sure. The resolution is a bit higher than the DS was capable of, so that may be why.

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remember that increasing the skill ranks of skills increases their TP cost. Aside from that, nothing of note for level 5. Also you (unless you know explicitly what you're doing) should not be fighting FoEs when you first encounter them

They'll probably just keep the jap voices like they did with 7th dragon.

Desmume fucks up the text in Etrian Odyssey and Strange Journey because its a shit emulator. You need to enable a hack for Etrian odyssey

some strange combination of settings fixes the graphical errors in strange journey, at least from what i remember.

Huh, I had no idea. Thanks for telling me that, though; I would have felt like it was a resolution problem otherwise.

which emulator is better?

Original hardware DSi XL

oh, you're one of those people?

Its true though. Pixel perfect ratio, and touch screen. Have fun emulating all that.

They can't be happy unless they trick some goyim into buying another jewtendo scam.

what would you need it for
you can use mouse, there are touchscreens for pc, also if you have a smartphone I'm sure there's some app so you can use it like that

Development on Desmume is stagnant so you'd have to wait for stuff like MelonDS or mGBA unless you want to pay money to emulate it on an android device.

well, what's the best one right now for Windows then?

emulating Drastic on an android emulator.
Believe it or not, it even runs better than Desmume.

well then, gonna check it out
but then I have another question, which android emulator is the best?

I've only tried Nox myself but be warned that its chinkshit that phones home.
you could wait for anbox as its foss.

I don't really want to wait as I've implied earlier

It still works okay on the DeSMu right? Just play it on that and ignore the graphical glitches, it seems honestly like the most straight forward option you have

never actually had compatibility problems with desmume but now that I've looked it up it seems hardly any games work, anyway thanks for your help, I'll just try drastic if something doesn't work

You are not supposed to fight the FoEs until later on, thats why they added the new items that attract FoEs to a square or put them to sleep for a few steps.
Also as a beginner tip, try to be at full health when gathering items or before doing those labyrinth events.

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Take a look at the game The Dark Spire, OP. It's a bit harder than EO, the story is shit, but as far as dungeon crawlers go it's really good

Like fuckin' clockwork.

Japan does it on a regular. It's actually a sales pitch; seiyuu are the selling point for what are a lot of niche/trash games. Neptune, for example, isn't popular in Japan because of the characters, after all.

Is it so much to ask to just make a good game? How much does it cost to hire VA like that vs making lots of smaller games with effort behind them? If they were that worried about profit, why not just make it with a smaller budget?

The bulk of the budget, speaking frankly. Advertisement campaigns consist by and large of seiyuu interviews and streams of the game, scheduled meet and sign venues, various contests to meet or shake hands with said seiyuu, and so on.

Head to the doujin market if that's your aim. Your only other option is mobileshit. And profit is the ultimate focus, here. Even those who want to just make a game will get swallowed and used up by moderate to larger corps with eyes on a quarterly profit margin. House of Atlus most-definitely is not about refining and perfecting any title that isn't earning Persona level returns.

Fucking hell. EO might be the last dungeon crawling series that makes games fairly frequiently. Im starting to run out, user. I might have to go back to m&m 1. I feel like dungeon crawlers are a genre lost to time.

Not all is lost, you know. Just that to continue, you'll have to learn moon. Crawlers are a regular customer to both 3DS and Vita—a lot of them never make it off Japanese shores.

Back to learning moon, for the 3rd time. Goddamn why does japan do everything i like, yet never translate it. my 3ds isnt on a hackable firmware, so i hope the vita has alot of DCs that are good. I know there was moe chronicles on vita, whs that one any good?

I never said it wasn't.

TDS is as unintuitive as it gets though. Playing blind, surviving and making decent progress is pretty hard.
RNG is a big issue in that game because drops are the only way to get good equipment and said drops have a very low chance of ocurring. (The right one I mean).
Getting the 4th Wall ending is also nearly impossible to do without a guide. Getting to the ??? Floor is one thing but 'Balancing' a character and not getting teleported out of the Extra Boss room is a whole other thing.
I surmise that the best party, basic classes and then advanced classes is: Fighter -> Fighter/Mage, Thief->Fighter/Thief or Thief/Mage, Priest->Mage/Priest, Mage->Mage/Priest.
I once got a Sylph Sword, got wiped at my next encounter without saving and then never got it again.

I did paladin, wizard, druid, druid.

Whatever ends up working. On the later floors you only ever get wiped by parties of dragons and their annoying breath attacks. I found that having as much of that spell that let you hit everything for medium-high damage worked the best for me.
TDS has an amazing soundtrack but as much as I liked it, the RNG is really atrocious.

The rng hasnt fucked me over too bad so far. Ive only died once to bad luck.

That is known as getting fucked by RNG you dolt

It's not limited to combat. I mean sure, you can get ambushed by a party of exhaling fucks and see your whole party dropping dead 15hp at a time before ever getting a turn but the RNG mostly fucks you over the drops.
Every party of monsters has a chance to drop a certain bag of items. Bags themselves have a chance of having or not certain of their items. If you aren't lucky, you won't get good weapons until much later when they end up placed in 'common' bags and drop all over the place.
On a minor scale, there's the gambling game that you need to win 5 times in a row for a sidequest. The amount of time it takes to complete that quest differs greatly every playthrough. You'll see people who claim they did it in 20 minutes as well as others who gave up after 3 hours.

I really dont see a need for weapons too much. I do heroic, so unless the back row has good bows, i dont use threm for phys attacks. Im mainly relying on magic to get me through fights.

Then you're set. I used the 2-2 formation and only switched to heroic when my thief had a decent bow. Getting an early Lighting Bow (and later Phoenix Bow) feels pretty nice but no weapon will allow you to attack whole groups as reliably as magic. Rage attacks are pretty damn worthless. You attack more than one target but it does shit damage with shit accuracy.

Apparently there is another Etrian Mystery Dungeon game coming out. Given that Persona Q2 was also trademarked, it seems like EOU3 might be on the back burner.

Is this game supposed to be terribly slow? I'm level 8 and I needed 3 focus attacks to take down the first FoE

Holy shit clean your fucking mouse.

I played one of the demos (the one with the roaming bolder pig), but didn't enjoy the map-making.

Is it OK to play these games without doing that? Or is it part of the experience? Custom party or story party?
There was also a sequel quickly after IIRC (something to do with a statis cube and an astronaut suit. If youtube was right, the first boss was some kind of demon camel).

So EO 4, or other EO games on 3DS?

4's the best one on the 3ds. But if you can get it for cheap Untold 1 is the best way to play 1. 2U's pretty awful for DLC and health bloat

The Millennium Girl?
Is it a sequel to 4- or is it OK to just jump in?

Remake of the first game. In addition to the usual upgrades (graphics, sound, ironing out flaws), it has a casual story mode with preset characters to make it more like a regular RPG. The games' stories aren't connected so it's okay to start anywhere.

Neat. Now the 3DS is winding down, I might get them for cheap.

Thanks man! Time to see amazon blacksmith girl again.

if you don't like the map making there's a lot less reason to like the games. they're still pretty solid dungeon crawlers but i'd argue there are better ones to choose from if you don't want to draw maps.
the map making was what really got me into the 3ds games, since it's so well done.

because most are blatant shitty waifu sims that have gameplay take a secondary or even tertiary seat.

Strangers of Sword City was fun, that translation was pretty barebones though.
Grimrock 2 is one of the better ones but it's not turnbased so that can be a turnoff.
Wizardry is a classic series, and if you have a Vita there's some more options.
Of course if you know Japanese EOV is probably one of if not the best EO game.

i was desperately waiting for localization, but i might just get the nip copy at this point. i can figure out the menus at least.

Honestly if you have a cracked 3ds just use that. It's been on freeshop forever

Realistically, a translation is never going to happen.

Any info on the fan translation?

Last I heard the text translation is moving along fine, they just are having trouble making the game run when they override the text.

So what skills are worth gunning for in EO4?
1st play through.
Currently In the Frozen mountains.
Should i add a new member to the party? Like Wufan lvl 28, Runemaster or a Dancer?

Runic flare apparently shouldn't be maxed out, last two levels give only a one percent damage boost, I like dancer's regen waltz+ wide dance for free end of turn healing + ability to buff attack or lower TP costs

Fuck that game orcs and elves shits on it.

Dancer is god in that game. Upgrade their bottom row (the skills that grant dodge, extra attacks), then get their dances that give follow up attacks, then combine it with follow up skills. Totally OP.

I just wanted to have fun.

If you like Etrian Odyssey then that statement is false

Well the real thing with the final boss is you need enough damage to kill him during the right phases, I mean hell you can do a 1 character run with shogun super easily

With a couple tries I managed to speed kill it with Berserker Vow boosted attacks. Knighthood from my Princess helped too.