Etrian Odyssey 1 & 2: the little RPGs that are too hardcore to go on!

I was telling my husband about Etrian Odyssey: "You get to make your own map!" This is a thing all the reviews point out with glee. HE thought this meant you laboriously create and design your own dungeon.* Not so much – you just do some junior cartography on the bottom screen, illustrating your charted territory in the mazelike dungeons. Thought I'd clear that up first.

Bottom screen: creating your own map. You draw the places you've been, and you can place icons for doors, stairs, locations of extra-difficult monsters, + many more! Top screen: Note how many of the characters have died a cruel, cruel death already. Also: what kind of a name is "Gerald" for an RPG character?

These two games, which are pretty similar, are wicked old school RPGs that are both awesome and frustrating. Classic stuff – encounter baddies, destroy baddies, get killed way too many times by baddies, eventually level up and maybe not get killed as much but maybe even more, etc. I pretty much don't swear at anything but 'Iron Chef America' and video games, and this one has a lot of cussable moments. A lot. But it's really exciting, too, even after long, long grind sessions. Is it Stockholm syndrome? Casino effect? Am I one of Skinner's pigeons, fighting villains for the intermittent, random pellet? Or is it just really well made? Some of each, but mostly the latter.

I started out playing the first Etrian Odyssey, because, you know, it's the first one. It got mediocre marks from game-review type places, but I figured I should begin with that one.

Both games feature a really slow, cruel initial upward climb toward leveling up and earning enough $$$ to get decent weapons and armor ("en" is what they call money – at least it's not the way too commonplace "gold"). One of my five little characters would inevitably die every half hour or so, which is to be expected in a game like this. But the prices for reviving and resting at the inn to restore HP/magic points increased like crazy after every single time you did it! A revive started out at 15 en, not too bad. But the third or fourth was like 250 en! (I want to say it increased exponentially, but I don't want to do the math to make sure that I can accurately use the term "exponentially." Let's just say prices zoomed up without reason.)

So reviving and resting were practically unaffordable, especially given how one earns money in the game. You don't get gold for killing monsters, like in many other games. After you fight monsters, maybe one in three will drop items, and the starting-out type items they DO drop sell for 5-8 en. Minor HP-increasing items run about 50 en. So doing anything to keep my characters alive quickly became prohibitively expensive.

I am always ridic conservative in RPGs – I make sure I've levelled up beyond belief & bought all the gear available before I try the next tiny increase of challenges. Naturally, I used this policy here, but I still kept dying to death. Seriously, you have to get to around level ten before you can even battle weak first-level mosters without having to hang on for dear life. It was terrifying, especially since I knew there was no way I could afford saving them. Just had to cross my fingers. For hours. And hours.

I started the game over, knowing this go-round to try and never die or stay at the inn if I wanted to be able to not hit a point of no return. It worked out quite a bit better – I had a more balanced line-up and was a lot more careful with enemies. I love a punishing RPG but after reaching the fifth level or so (out of 30), I just got worn out. I had lost all will to go on.

"Why not check out the second one, then?" I thought. It did have better reviews, after all. But none of them mentioned what I thought was the best improvement of the second game: it didn't cost 8 zillion en to revive your character after their third or fourth death. I was terrified from the first one that I would quickly be drained of all my scant resources if a charcter died. But if one of your best characters dies, it's not like you can just walk around with this great, but dead, person in your party. At the second revive, I was ready to shill out 100+ en, cringing and worrying at the prospect. But it cost the same amount! Same with the inn stays! In fact, the cost of each is just 5x the level of your highest character. (Level 15 = 75 en inn stay. You have no idea how excited and relieved this STILL makes me, even after 20+ hours of playing. I have Etrian Odyssey 1 PTSD or something.)

There's some other nice changes. You have almost all available classes at the start of II, whereas you had to do a lot of tasks in the first one to get new classes. (By 'classes' I mean types of character: ie strongo warrior, healer, bow-shooting chap, and my favorite – sad panda.)

"Beast" class. You get four character designs to choose from for each character you choose. They all work the same, no matter which design you choose. The beast I like is the SAD PANDA, who looks just like this guy, but sad. And a panda.

Honestly, I didn't care about the extra classes being available at the start. Balancing character classes in Etrian Odyssey is way more difficult than in your typical RPG, but I don't really need 30 choices to start out with. It made some people happy, but it's sixes for me.

The map options are way tricked out in the second one. This I appreciated. The best part is now the option of three different colors for the floor. Not too impressive, right? Wrong. You can have a color for "oh crap those poison floors that remove extra harsh amounts of HP" or a color for "okay here's the exact way I can walk through here without dying for the 800th time."

The colors, children, the colors! Though why they added six different traffic arrows is beyond me. Maybe this is explained in the instruction manual, which I don't have.

SUMMARY for those with TLDR syndrome:

• These RPGs are wicked harsh compared to a lot of modern ones, but the ramped-up challenge makes them a lot more rewarding, IMO.
• The first one is so mean that it's practically unplayable. So I'd start with the second one and if you find it laughably easy (I don't know how you'd do that), then pick up the first one.

Interesting note: This game is made by ATLUS, makers of Trauma Center. The character design is really similar, meaning they're all bafflingly androgynous. Half the time I could not tell if I was picking a boy or girl. No bigs either way, it's just...odd. If you can relate to being a scrawny person in a giant trenchcoat, with pink hair and indeterminate gender, you'll feel right at home. Or if you look like a sad, sad panda.


*Did anyone ever play RPG Maker for the PS1? If so, you will know what I mean when I say: thank my lucky stars you don't have to create your own dungeon.

Lower than the eukaryote....

I plan on doing more than reviewing games here, but that's the main thing I've been doing so far. All I can think when I do this is: do the people who write 'for real' game reviews actually PLAY the whole thing through first?

I mean, it would be wicked easy with a puzzle game. Those things take 15 minutes max to get the complete story. So that's one thing. And I guess you wouldn't HAVE to finish an FPS. You basically know the hows & whys of the shootenany in an hour or so, max. But some platformer? An RPG?

I've definitely got the impression they actually do, with some RPGs, anyway, or how else could they advertise a '40-hour playtime' or such? (My finished time to completion is always way longer than theirs.) But 40 hours – that's way more than even a book. And with a game they REALLY HATE, do they feel obligated to see it through? Especially when writing one of those seven-sentence capsule reviews?

I haven't finished any of the games I have talked about here. I don't feel like I'm cheating anyone here, but OTOH I am not getting paid and I don't have the suffocating self-importance of the '
professional game reviewer' (I think the latter may be a bigger factor in feeling obligated to complete a game. The Power Glove; it is so sweet.).

Does anyone know if they do or not?

Life Signs: Surgical Unit = ;_;

Maybe some of you have played Trauma Center, the challenging and exciting game of surgery, with your stylus as a scalpel. It's the kind of thing that made me want to get a DS – in fact, it was the first game I bought for it. It was innovative, it was unique, and it was ambitious (video game characters have been to college, apparently, since the arcade days of Root Beer Tapper and Burger Time). Also, it was wicked fun, the most important factor of all.

So naturally, when I found out about "Life Signs: Surgical Unit," I was antsy to get my hands on it. Surgery! Right in the game's title. Hello.

Maybe not so much, title of game! There's surgery, maybe 20 percent of the time. The rest of the game is as dullsville and confusing as the worst old-style text adventure games. The order of operations (hur hur) has as much logic as a drawing colored by a three-year old.

I guess I should have been warned by the absolutely guano loco opening tableau. Title doctor (I can't even remember his name) has a picnic with a female hospital admin so hyper-sexy that she makes House M.D.'s Dr. Cuddy look like Nurse Ratched. Other, even sexier (and super teenaged-looking) hospital employees show up one by one to complain THEY were supposed to be the romantic picnicker. And, of course, it was all a dream...

Even during waking hours, the patients and employees are stupid sexy. Just ridic sexy. (Exception: babushka-looking, gossip-crazed head nurse. lol fattey!) When examining patients, you can 'accidentally' touch their barely-clothed boobs. ("Doctor, that's not where it hurts!")

Not an O-face

So the game has a lot of "fan service," executed in a really silly fashion. Not my thing, but not an obstacle to being a good game either. But, like everything else in the game, it takes forever to figure out where it is and how to achieve it.

The game mainly consists of getting handed things by various people, and trying to figure out who needs to get one of your random goods in order to tell you what's happening next. You'd think a surgery would be top priority start if someone's dying. No, it appears to be more important walking from room to room trying to find something (you aren't told what, you just hope you happen upon it).

That or trying to find someone, a person invariably impossible to find. Everyone you meet who isn't your sought target has wicked juicy gossip about employees two-timing or having crushes! zomg! It's like some bad junior high dream where you can't find your locker, but with the added element of a bunch of really boring, chatty people with eye-popping decolletage.

Trauma Center delivers the goods in fast, generous doses. You have a few soap-operatic asides, but they're truncated by operations. Trauma Center had me shouting the game's boldly delivered catchphrase, "Let's being the operation!" at my dog. The only thing Life Signs has me shouting is "What the crap is this for crap?" (Not at my dog, though, which I'm sure he appreciates.)

Summary: if you want to play a surgery game, there's two Trauma Centers, though I would love if some other, quality ones came out. If you want to look at drawings of semi-naked women, I'm sure you can be imaginative enough to find that without having to sludge through this game. If you want to be vexed most sore, there's always Life Signs: Surgical Unit.

How did all these game characters get so freakin' precocious?

Certain people in their 20s have a vibrant, ambitious air – just out of college, on the bottom rung of the career ladder, but full of the confidence and energy needed to climb higher. I'm 25, and still in college, but I've got my goals in motion and I'm fully stoked on living forever, lighting up the sky like a flame, etc. What I mean is, I don't hate myself too much. In fact, I feel pretty good!

But good old Phoenix Wright and Trauma Center are kind of making me feel like a slug with a minor case of retarditis. These are worlds where young, stripling Dougie Houser legends are the norm, not the exception. All these district attorneys and lauded surgeons are a few years younger than I am, and I am by no means even half old.

Look at Phoenix Wright – he and his semi-rival attorney, Miles Edgeworth, are barely old enough to go to a bar for sloe gin fizzes after a hard day in the courtroom. And Edgeworth already holds the second highest prosecuting position in his district. Dr. Stiles, star surgeon of Trauma Center, is (IIRC) 21. Did he start college at age 16? Even then, that's cutting it close to get through med school by age 21, if that's even possible. What is this fantasyland where I'm already an old maid?

I know this is videogame fiction. In real life, surgeons don't have the magic ability to slow time by drawing a star in the air. In real life, spirit mediums aren't decisive witnesses. (Well, actually, that's not always true.) But in real life, star lawyers are definitely not too young to be able to rent a car! And, real life or not, I spend a lot of time with these video games. A lot of time that kind of makes me feel..."special."