atelierpenny | Annoying girl traps you in a room with her and talks about 3DS games (my Etrian Odyssey loveletter)

Ok so in Etrian Odyssey 3 Zodiac, the traditional mage class, has this as its ultimate spell:

Meteor	Call down meteors to deal strike damage to random enemies.	Bash

Now any seasoned RPG player might see this and say, “who the hell is every going to click this expensive physical damage spell on their premier elemental damage dealer?” and yeah, I mean most players will and should just try to hit those elemental weaknesses with their big buffed stats. But lets humor the game on this one. How about we subclass our Zodiac as a gladiator to get the damage on this spell to be HUGE.

Berserker Vow	Sacrifice HP to raise physical attack power for three turns.	Support Skill

Charge	Use one turn to increase damage on the following turn's attack.	Special Skill

Stack a few other buffs for physical damage and some glass cannon gear and congrats! You will almost certainly two-shot most threats in the game at worst. But well, alright. That is a lot of asterisks. You're making the already squishy Zodiac into a glass cannon that is constantly damaging itself to get those big numbers. Well, it is not too big an ask to get a healer and a tank and just make them babysit the Zodiac the whole time. Those classes have other utility. But even then, meteor is a damn expensive skill! Sure, you defeat everything in sight, but you can only do two or so fights until you are outta TP. Well, a Ninja in your party subclassed as a Zodiac has a solution for that:

Dark Ether	One row of allies will be able to use skills at no TP cost.	Special

Keburi No Sue (Mystic Calm)	Ninja skill that reduces TP used. No attack penalty from back row.	Class

Not only can you reduce your meteor's cost to zero, the ninja passive will make that reduction itself cost a mere one TP at max level! This is how I played EO3 the first time I played it. I saw this stupid meteor skill and thought it was funny and made a big spreadsheet to make this build fully centering on supporting the flagrant spam of one goddamn spell. It was so, so fun, especially in the tougher early boss fights where I only had the party half put together due to a lack of skill points or not having subclasses yet.

To someone unfamiliar with the series this may sound like one stupid gimmick strategy that no one should do when they could just play a well rounded party that can do everything decently. Do not get me wrong, EO is still my favorite game series even when played with the safest, most responsible party one can make. You can make a lot of interesting decisions within the battle too! Few gaming feelings match fucking up a puzzle in EOU2, running into a yellow or red ring FOE and pressing that force boost button and hearing this god damn Yuzo Koshiro masterpiece come out of the 3DS speakers.

youtu.be/-rWgTtq1qk4

But I bodily need to make the games weirder by spending time in the wiki and spreadsheet mines before I even start the game. If you see the lines you can craft a party out of nearly anything (in fact, since I heard EO4 was the easiest game in the series, I chose my classes and subclasses at random). I have not done this build myself, but likely the most famous EO video on the english speaking internet is this build involving a skill that scales off of the total overheal of all party members.

youtu.be/46Ny7gIyf04

As the series goes on, they had a lot of fun with the skills scaling off of weird shit. The class Hero in Etrian Odyssey Nexus has three I'll mention for example: a skill uses a cutting attack followed by a volt attack, where the volt attack scales off of the cut resistance of the target; a multi hit single target skill that scales the number of hits based on the other enemies you are not hitting in the fight; a fire attack which always goes last and scales off of how much damage the rest of your party did that turn. All of these can be used for tomfoolery in one way or another. Maybe I will make a run off of one of these stupid scaling skills in tbe future. I probably will.

My current run of Nexus has a way cooler Hero build. Hero's class identity centers around afterimages, temporary party members automatically created whenever a Hero uses an attack skill. The afterimages use the skill that summoned them (on the same target if possible) and then they disappear. Cloning skills and the like are pretty much always broken in EO games. The afterimages draw aggro, deal damage, retain the passive skills of the original hero, and constantly are nearly at full health since they get resummoned so often (my next EON run might be a hero only run with the skill that makes afterimages last more than one turn, just to see if it could actually clear the game on a hard difficulty). However I have a different way I prefer to use the clone army. More skill points invested into the afterimages increase their max health, up to matching that of the original hero. I actively wanted the clones at lower HP. A ninja passive that is usually a complete joke is Nikudan, a once per battle skill that launches an extremely powerful firebomb at the enemy who kills the ninja. The skill does in fact work with the afterimages, even better in some ways since the constant recycling gets around the once per battle restriction, though it does not proc when they disappear naturally. Though, level one afterimages are at a pitiful fifteen hp, and with some passive skills to draw more aggro, the little bombs are dying on cooldown and printing damage.

Nexus is a celebratory title, reusing a lot of the best dungeon gimmicks from throughout the series. I figured on a replay or retread of these gimmicks, I would end up getting tired of them. But they keep finding new ways to use these mechanics! The shrines plus the last dungeon all play with elevation, and each one has something fresh in addition to combining the new mechanics with the ones from the old shrines. I played an indie game inspired by a lot of old school dungeon crawlers recently and I think I got too spoiled by EO's fantastic hand crafted puzzles and dungeons cuz I just could not hang with the procedural generated dungeons.

If I am not playing Etrian Odyssey I am thinking about it. I already want to replay EO5 to use its cute little sprite editor to make more of my original characters. I wanna make like a billion gold off of the restaurant management sim in EOU2 again. I wanna try the original 1 and 2 for DS since I started with the untold games. I wanna do the human side route of EO3. I wanna do the robot route of EO3 again but this time make a full party of robot girls to launch missiles at Norse deities. I wanna play through EON again and tell more of my dear friends whenever I do a dungeon event and the character I made of them drinks poison for fun. I wanna play those stupid Persona spinoffs. Writing this was a bodily need for me. If you have spent any time around me in the past few years I have probably trapped you in an annoying conversation about these games. I'm sorry. It will happen again.