Etrian Mystery Dungeon

Genre: Top-Down Dungeon Crawler

Players: 1, StreetPass Support

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Review:

Etrian Mystery Dungeon is a Top-Down Dungeon Crawler released on Nintendo 3DS in 2015, this is a spin-off of the Etrian Odyssey series of First-Person Dungeon Crawlers, and while it features a separate story from any of those games, it is filled with aesthetic touches and other nods to the series that inspired it.

Everything from the menus to the character classes to skill progression to the enemies in this game are clearly pulled straight from Etrian Odyssey, even down to the way the game starts with a brief trip to the local dungeon followed by introducing you to each of the town’s major residents. It’s a pretty extensive list of elements that this game brings over from the Etrian franchise, given that it completely abandons the Etrian series’ central elements – no first-person exploration, no traditional JRPG combat, and no map-making using the Nintendo 3DS’s touchscreen.

Or, to put it another way, Etrian Mystery Dungeon copies the Etrian Odyssey series’ most superficial elements, and rips out its guts and replaces them with… well, a Mystery Dungeon game.

I’ll be honest, I have never found the Mystery Dungeon franchise to be particularly enjoyable. Time and again it has been mixed with one franchise or another, and the result is nearly always the charming presentation of the franchise of the moment just plastered on the same tired shallow gameplay we’ve seen time and time again, whether it’s starring Chocobo or Pokemon or Pokemon again, or Pokemon yet again (or even Pokemon again once more)…

Etrian Mystery Dungeon is no different. It preys on the love Etrian Odyssey fans have for that franchise, presenting a dull game with… yeah, a really good presentation. The series’ typical anime-style character portraits are joined by a detailed but simple 3D presentation featuring chibi-ified versions of those characters. However, it’s the music here that’s really something special, with moving instrumental themes and stirring fast-paced battle themes. For some examples, check out Ever-Scarlet Forest, Memories of Days Past, Hoist the Sword and Pride in the Heart, and The End of Raging Winds.

But then, all this great presentation is trapped in a game where you move through randomly-created blocky-looking dungeons, stopping when encountering an enemy to trade blows back and forth with little nuance or thought. As it happens, Etrian Mystery Dungeon fares a bit worse than the average Mystery Dungeon game in this regard because it suffers from some nasty difficulty spikes. And just to be clear, I am well aware that the Etrian Odyssey series has a reputation for being difficult, but when this game has me encountering enemies I topple in one hit on one floor, only to be followed by enemies that kill all my characters in one hit on the next floor, it just seems absurd to me.

I don’t know what I expected here, perhaps that my love for the Etrian Odyssey series might help me to tolerate the shallow and dull qualities of the Mystery Dungeon franchise? Whatever I expected, what I got is a game that does what all Mystery Dungeon games do – it wraps the wonderful presentation of its source material around Mystery Dungeon’s typical dull gameplay. And while that presentation is quite lovely here, it’s further balanced out by nasty difficulty spikes. If you’re looking for yet another Mystery Dungeon game on Nintendo 3DS… well, this is one of those. But if you’re looking for a game that brings the wonderful spirit of the Etrian Odyssey games to a different genre… well, you’re gonna’ have to keep looking.

tl;dr – Etrian Mystery Dungeon is a Top-Down Dungeon Crawler that has a lot of the more superficial aesthetic elements of the Etrian Odyssey franchise and applies them to the Mystery Dungeon franchise’s typical gameplay. This makes for a game that looks good and sounds wonderful, but the gameplay is dull and shallow, and suffers from some pretty nasty difficulty spikes. Unless you’re a Mystery Dungeon fan already, skip this one.

Grade: C

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