As of the time of writing, I have just finished the game's story, and postgame still awaits.
Warning: Though there are no story spoilers in this review, it does explain one mechanic not accessible at the very beginning. If you care for that, do not continue reading.
Personally, I largely enjoy the way Atlus straddled the line between a more dedicated story and the more dungeon delve-focused experience of past titles, with a "frame" for your actions being provided by what's guaranteed to happen in the game and your party getting a little bit of character added to them by various small events.
Examples for such events include, but are certainly not limited to:
- entering a particularly pleasant-smelling room and deciding whether to stay or not, for it could be restful or a trap
- unexpectedly finding a cat and deciding whether or not to pet it and how long
- stumbling into an ambush and figuring out how to prepare for it
While admittedly, a fair amount of these choices can feel rather binary, and the overwhelming majority of them are partywide, this gives you the opportunity to characterize your guild as a whole through these events, but leave individual members' personalities to you. Leaves room for RP without being too intrusive to people uninterested in that, I like it.
In visuals, the game is certainly an upgrade to its predecessors; in terms of music, it's considerably more subjective - admittedly, I like EO5's music a little less than most of the other series entries, but it's still great music to my ears. Your mileage may vary.
In gameplay, it's more or less the usual Etrian Odyssey fare - this means delving into and manually mapping out a sprawling dungeon of many, many floors, carefully navigating around puzzles and minibosses referred to as FOEs in the process while ensuring you manage your resources well enough to return to town outside of a casket - though individual floors feel as though they were designed more with returning to specific areas in mind compared to other series entries, and I am of the opinion that the floor puzzles tend to be more heavily based on FOEs than usual.
There is one caveat to this with character creation and building, however: though EO5 offers perhaps the most in-depth customization the series has had up to its release, it splits classes among four different races, which are exclusive on character creation; and skill trees are split into the base class, the class' legendary path and the racial section. This, alongside with class design, results in two noticeable issues for me. The first of these sounds like a nitpick, but please bear with me.
Warning: Wordy, in-depth explanations ahead. Skip to second bolded line for conclusion.
The game has ten classes, four of which are available for the Earthlain race (basically humans), and two each for the other three races - Celestrians (elves), Therians (beastfolk) and Brouni (gnomes, sort of). Each class has access to two different legendary titles, which take one of the two things the class focuses on and specialize in that further.
Without delving too deep into the specifics of race choice, the races do provide different stats. Earthlain are bulky, but mediocre mages, Celestrians are excellent mages, but fragile, Therians are fast and fragile physical bruisers, Brouni are well-rounded save for awful STR and excellent WIS, rendering them best as supports.
However, this does not mean that each race is necessarily best at the classes it has access to. For example, Brouni are better Warlocks than Celestrians despite it being a Celestrian class, and the Brouni's Botanist can be better in certain aspects if wielded by a Celestrian. The Earthlain-exclusive Fencer actually synergizes better with Therians.
Overall, while it doesn't make for specifically bad choices to keep the original races, it makes optimizing a bit of a chore because you have to deliberately create a character of the wrong class, then immediately reclass them, and given that the Etrian Odyssey games have never been designed to be innately easy, dealing with this would likely be a daunting task to most newbies.
It's also counter-intuitive - frankly, I would've rather just been told that the game doesn't have a portrait for combination XYZ and been fine with it. As mentioned, this seems like a nitpick, but the game doesn't pull its punches, and chances of the player having to adapt their party and reselect classes here and there are fairly high, especially due to the second problem.
The second issue is rather more problematic in my opinion: Despite the game technically having the largest variety of classes in the series if you consider Legendary Titles separate entities (20 vs even Nexus' 19), all of them are extremely specific in their usage, causing the game to feel as though it has the smallest party-building variety in the series as well.
As mentioned earlier, every class has two Legendary Titles (Legends for short from here on). Unfortunately, nearly every class and/or Legend comes with a major caveat to throw a wrench into variety. For just a few examples:
Even before Legends come into play, Necromancers, Rovers and Dragoons all have abilities that create summons, but there are only three summon slots. Rover wants two of them, Necromancer ideally wants all of them - Dragoon can live without, but this effectively means you can only have a Rover or a Necromancer without self-sabotaging.
The Blade Dancer Legend, if played as intended, is extremely squishy and can be outright one-shot by many enemies throughout the game. It necessitates damage mitigation and/or enemies being directed elsewhere, which only three of the 20 Legends excel at.
The Impact Brawler legend will necessitate direct healing due to its skills actively consuming the Impact Brawler's on health, which is extremely difficult to provide with anything that's not a Botanist.
In-depth section ends here. TL;DR and conclusion below.
Overall, I am simply of the opinion that a lot of teambuilding in this game involves factors that feel outright mandatory, which feels overly restrictive compared to all other games in the series in my personal opinion.
To sum things up for the entire game, the rating I gave is for someone already intricately familiar with the Etrian Odyssey series, and looking for more. Despite my issues with class design in EO5, it's still what I would consider a very good game and a worthy successor. To anyone else, I would strongly recommend starting with literally any other game in the series, maybe excluding Nexus, because the restrictions on teambuilding could lead to repeated frustration.
Warning: Though there are no story spoilers in this review, it does explain one mechanic not accessible at the very beginning. If you care for that, do not continue reading.
Personally, I largely enjoy the way Atlus straddled the line between a more dedicated story and the more dungeon delve-focused experience of past titles, with a "frame" for your actions being provided by what's guaranteed to happen in the game and your party getting a little bit of character added to them by various small events.
Examples for such events include, but are certainly not limited to:
- entering a particularly pleasant-smelling room and deciding whether to stay or not, for it could be restful or a trap
- unexpectedly finding a cat and deciding whether or not to pet it and how long
- stumbling into an ambush and figuring out how to prepare for it
While admittedly, a fair amount of these choices can feel rather binary, and the overwhelming majority of them are partywide, this gives you the opportunity to characterize your guild as a whole through these events, but leave individual members' personalities to you. Leaves room for RP without being too intrusive to people uninterested in that, I like it.
In visuals, the game is certainly an upgrade to its predecessors; in terms of music, it's considerably more subjective - admittedly, I like EO5's music a little less than most of the other series entries, but it's still great music to my ears. Your mileage may vary.
In gameplay, it's more or less the usual Etrian Odyssey fare - this means delving into and manually mapping out a sprawling dungeon of many, many floors, carefully navigating around puzzles and minibosses referred to as FOEs in the process while ensuring you manage your resources well enough to return to town outside of a casket - though individual floors feel as though they were designed more with returning to specific areas in mind compared to other series entries, and I am of the opinion that the floor puzzles tend to be more heavily based on FOEs than usual.
There is one caveat to this with character creation and building, however: though EO5 offers perhaps the most in-depth customization the series has had up to its release, it splits classes among four different races, which are exclusive on character creation; and skill trees are split into the base class, the class' legendary path and the racial section. This, alongside with class design, results in two noticeable issues for me. The first of these sounds like a nitpick, but please bear with me.
Warning: Wordy, in-depth explanations ahead. Skip to second bolded line for conclusion.
The game has ten classes, four of which are available for the Earthlain race (basically humans), and two each for the other three races - Celestrians (elves), Therians (beastfolk) and Brouni (gnomes, sort of). Each class has access to two different legendary titles, which take one of the two things the class focuses on and specialize in that further.
Without delving too deep into the specifics of race choice, the races do provide different stats. Earthlain are bulky, but mediocre mages, Celestrians are excellent mages, but fragile, Therians are fast and fragile physical bruisers, Brouni are well-rounded save for awful STR and excellent WIS, rendering them best as supports.
However, this does not mean that each race is necessarily best at the classes it has access to. For example, Brouni are better Warlocks than Celestrians despite it being a Celestrian class, and the Brouni's Botanist can be better in certain aspects if wielded by a Celestrian. The Earthlain-exclusive Fencer actually synergizes better with Therians.
Overall, while it doesn't make for specifically bad choices to keep the original races, it makes optimizing a bit of a chore because you have to deliberately create a character of the wrong class, then immediately reclass them, and given that the Etrian Odyssey games have never been designed to be innately easy, dealing with this would likely be a daunting task to most newbies.
It's also counter-intuitive - frankly, I would've rather just been told that the game doesn't have a portrait for combination XYZ and been fine with it. As mentioned, this seems like a nitpick, but the game doesn't pull its punches, and chances of the player having to adapt their party and reselect classes here and there are fairly high, especially due to the second problem.
The second issue is rather more problematic in my opinion: Despite the game technically having the largest variety of classes in the series if you consider Legendary Titles separate entities (20 vs even Nexus' 19), all of them are extremely specific in their usage, causing the game to feel as though it has the smallest party-building variety in the series as well.
As mentioned earlier, every class has two Legendary Titles (Legends for short from here on). Unfortunately, nearly every class and/or Legend comes with a major caveat to throw a wrench into variety. For just a few examples:
Even before Legends come into play, Necromancers, Rovers and Dragoons all have abilities that create summons, but there are only three summon slots. Rover wants two of them, Necromancer ideally wants all of them - Dragoon can live without, but this effectively means you can only have a Rover or a Necromancer without self-sabotaging.
The Blade Dancer Legend, if played as intended, is extremely squishy and can be outright one-shot by many enemies throughout the game. It necessitates damage mitigation and/or enemies being directed elsewhere, which only three of the 20 Legends excel at.
The Impact Brawler legend will necessitate direct healing due to its skills actively consuming the Impact Brawler's on health, which is extremely difficult to provide with anything that's not a Botanist.
In-depth section ends here. TL;DR and conclusion below.
Overall, I am simply of the opinion that a lot of teambuilding in this game involves factors that feel outright mandatory, which feels overly restrictive compared to all other games in the series in my personal opinion.
To sum things up for the entire game, the rating I gave is for someone already intricately familiar with the Etrian Odyssey series, and looking for more. Despite my issues with class design in EO5, it's still what I would consider a very good game and a worthy successor. To anyone else, I would strongly recommend starting with literally any other game in the series, maybe excluding Nexus, because the restrictions on teambuilding could lead to repeated frustration.