I've always been put off by dungeon crawlers, even though RPGs are my favorite genre. Light on story? Making your own characters? How can I get invested without a fleshed-out narrative? I ain't no writer! That's the games job!

So I'm happy to report that I've fully reneged on this dumbass mindset after actually playing one for myself. Etrian Odyssey 3 felt like a perfect introduction to the genre, accommodating and easy-to-grasp but still providing a thoroughly challenging and satisfying experience.

The combat is simple enough at first, with each character picking one main class to start with, but opens up tremendously as you progress, becoming about as layered as the labyrinth itself. Between the different types of physical damage and the bind system that correlates to separate body parts and their related abilities to getting to allocate subclasses around the halfway point, giving each of your characters a second skill tree to work with, you're granted a lot of freedom in terms of how to deal with the increasingly difficult beasts the game throws your way. The toughest fights can be taxingly strategic, but the responsive menu-scrolling and animations keep the action snappy and decisive, adding to the frantic intensity of being caught in a jam but letting you breeze through encounters where you already know what you're doing. It's a great balance that keeps encounters engaging while letting you get right back to the dungeon crawling when you're just looking to explore.

Speaking of, the dungeon crawling loop is a well-oiled machine, with each trek filling out more of your map and finding shortcuts to make each repeat trip go faster, cutting down on the tedium of going through the same floors over and over again. The main game consists of five stratums with four floors, each with their own aesthetic and traversal gimmick, keeping things varied and interesting throughout, though some are more well-executed than others (Third Stratum with the lava tiles isn't very fun, Fifth Stratum with the blackout maps and teleporting gates can eat a dick. Does have my favorite song in the game though). The puzzles keep your brain sharp, and I appreciate them all regardless.

The core aspect of my enjoyment with this game was actually coming up with the characters I'd be using. Not just their abilities or specializations on the skill tree, but thinking up their backstories and characteristics that led them down those paths to begin with. I decided from the beginning that it'd be most fun to name all my characters after friends from a Discord server I'm in and try to interpret them as close as possible into the game. This immediately turned into a playthrough/creative writing exercise where I expanded on my party's exploits after each session, creating what essentially became a short novel abstracting my experience into a fanfic retelling of the game. I've never engaged with a game on this level before, every aspect feeling equally designed as both a piece of a video game and an instrument in the creative toolkit that lets you make your journey entirely your own. Kazuya Niinou, who directed the first game, made the bold mission statement that "The game itself isn't that big of a thing; what you imagine for yourself is much more fun." It's a sentiment I've always admired but never thought would apply to myself, caring much more about what a game wants to impart to me rather than being an active force in its creative process. It almost feels like a one-man TTRPG campaign. I've never been able to stick through a D&D campaign without getting bored and dropping out partway through, but Etrian Odyssey 3 helped me understand the creatively fulfilling experience that gets people so hooked on those things. They tricked me into being a writer and I fell for it. Those bastards.

The one big criticism I have is how the game handles it's multiple endings. There are three total that branch off based on choices you make throughout the story, with two of them relegated as "bad" endings that encourage you to go back and try again. New Game Plus lets you go back in with the exact same party at the exact same level, letting you essentially steamroll your way back through each floor until you reach another ending. It's good in the sense that you don't have to completely start over, but it's really boring to mindlessly clobber all the early enemies along the way. Each repeat took me a few hours to do, and while they're not necessary to access the postgame, the level curve is reliant on the experience you get from doing it to be ready for the superboss. I suppose it's more involved than regular grinding but it still left me in a daze of monotony for a good ~7ish hours until the sixth stratum breathed some life back in. It felt great to explore new floors again, but all the redos weathered me to the point of just wanting to finish the game already. Not a fun stretch of time by any means.

Overall though I'm really happy with Etrian Odyssey 3. It opened my eyes to new feelings and ideas of what I even want from a game, which isn't something that happens very often, and I'm extremely grateful for it. I'm deeply excited to play the rest of these games (with breaks in-between, this one took me 80 hours) and come up with new scenarios and characters alongside each one. It actually is pretty cool to try new things sometimes.