“Etrian Odyssey”

Platform: Nintendo DS

Developer: Atlus

FYI grade: B-

For those who remember the awesome sense of adventure while exploring dungeons in the classic first-person role-playing games of yesteryear, “Etrian Odyssey” will come as a pleasant surprise.

The game’s story is fairly shallow – a mysterious labyrinth appears on the outskirts of a humble town and it’s up to you to challenge its depths and to win fame and fortune.

You’ll form a party of five adventurers, and, like many Dungeons & Dragons-inspired games, you’ll create them from scratch. Nine character classes with various typical RPG skills – such as healing or agility – can be chosen from for each character.

Once you’ve got your party formed, you’ll navigate through the menu-based town in order to receive missions, such as finding a specific item in the labyrinth, for a cash or item reward.

While in the labyrinth, the game switches over to a first-person view in a 3-D environment. You’ll only be able to move in four directions, one block at a time, giving the game that classic first-person dungeon crawl feel, akin to “Wizardry” or “Might and Magic.”

With many games of this type from back in the day, players would acquire their own graph paper and map out every game area by hand. “Etrian Odyssey” makes excellent use of the DS’ dual screens and designates the touch screen as the place to draw your own maps with the stylus over in-game grids. This may not sound appealing to gamers who are used to having their games automatically map out where they’ve traveled for them, but it’s kind of nice to have the sense that you’ve accomplished something while exploring the game world and have left no stone unturned.

What RPG would be complete without battles with fantasy creatures? “Etrian Odyssey” delivers here, but sadly with the standard turn-based random encounters that many gamers have been sick of for the last decade. Of course, beating monsters nets you experience and items, and there’s nothing here you haven’t seen before in an RPG.

The game’s visuals are somewhat hit-and-miss. Atlus did well with having a fairly nice-looking 3-D environment to explore. However, enemy encounters present static images of foes, and character portraits are just that – portraits, and nothing more.

The music in “Etrian Odyssey” is done by one of my favorite composers, Yuzo Koshiro, who also worked on “ActRaiser,” “Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin” and “Ys,” to name a few. However, most of the compositions here are fairly forgettable and oddly enough, extremely synthetic sounding – like what you could expect out of a Sega Genesis.

Sound effects also feel ripped from the Genesis era. There’s just nothing particularly interesting here audio-wise.

In this day and age, it’s odd to see “Etrian Odyssey” being released on the Nintendo DS. With a high difficulty level and the necessity of making your own maps in-game, it’s likely to put off modern gamers. But for those with fond memories of ’80s dungeon crawlers, this game should pique their interest.