Etrian Odyssey II HD

Genre: First-Person Dungeon Crawler / Turn-Based JRPG

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in the Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection, along with Etrian Odyssey HD and Etrian Odyssey III HD)

The Etrian Odyssey series is a franchise of games that combine First-Person Dungeon Crawler navigation with Turn-Based JRPG gameplay, with a strong focus on cartography – that is to say, one of the major mechanics of these games is that players draw out the maps of the dungeons they explore within the game itself, making note of landmarks, hazards, and charting pathways to follow. Previously, the series was only found on the Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS platforms, but with the 2023 release of the Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection on PC and Nintendo Switch, the series is finally seeing release on a platform that can play on a big screen, with this collection including HD remasters of the first three games in the series, and with these games also being made available for purchase separately.

Before going on, I will note that many of my observations about these three games are similar, so I will be copying parts of these reviews.

With this shift to a hybrid platform, series fans had some major questions about how well these games would work. The earlier games made heavy use of the Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS touchscreen, so how would they fare when played in docked mode using traditional gamepad controls? Would the less-precise nature of the Nintendo Switch’s capacitive touchscreen cause problems in handheld mode? And how would the graphics and sound fare in full HD, a far cry from the tiny screens of the Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS.

Etrian Odyssey II was originally released on the Nintendo DS in 2008 with the subtitle Heroes of Lagaard, and was later remade on the Nintendo 3DS in 2015 in the form of Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold: The Fafnir Knight, meaning that this release would be compared not only to the original, but to its earlier remake. And unfortunately this latter comparison really hurts Etrian Odyssey II HD.

What this release has opted to do is to take the original game’s anime-style 2D artwork and render it in smooth, clean HD. What’s more, the 3D dungeons have had their textures improved as well, making them look much cleaner and more detailed. If we’re just comparing Etrian Odyssey II HD to the original release, this is a major improvement… but next to Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold, an eight year-old game, Etrian Odyssey II HD looks outright primitive. That’s because Untold brought us fully 3D enemies, complete with full animation that gave them lots of personality. After seeing this, the static images in this game seem… well, lifeless. What’s more, this game retains the poor draw distance of the earlier games in the series, even though Nintendo Switch could easily render far more, meaning this game has plenty of pop-up. Disappointing.

It’s not just the visuals that compare poorly to Untold. This game’s music is also derived from the original game’s soundtrack, and while the sound quality is improved over the original, it still sounds extremely tinny and artificial. Alternately, Untold’s instrumental soundtrack was beautiful, and this definitely feels like an enormous step backwards. Think I’m exaggerating? Check out the rendition of the standard Battle Theme in Etrian Odyssey II HD, then compare it to the same theme in Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold. The difference is staggering, and it’s astounding that this release doesn’t at least include this instrumental music as an option, something that would require far more minimal effort than updating Untold’s visuals to HD.

Sadly, the negative comparisons to Untold don’t end there. While most Etrian Odyssey games have players creating their own party of characters, Untold also gave players the option of playing through the game with a cast of characters with their own personalities and stories… and none of that made it into this game. And while not everyone may have wanted to play as these characters, I don’t doubt that many will be sad to see this content cut from this release of the game.

Okay, so that’s all the bad news, and it’s a lot of bad news. However, there’s good news too.

First, it will relieve series fans to know that this game’s controls work pretty well. I wish the game afforded players more options to alter the controls and maybe reassign buttons, but what’s here is good. The game has control schemes for using the traditional gamepad, the touchscreen, and a hybrid of both. With the gamepad, much of what players would have done with the touchscreen and stylus in the original game is now done using ZL/ZR and the right analog stick. It’s not a perfect replacement for the touchscreen, but it is a sufficient one.And for those worried about the capacitive touchscreen making map-drawing less efficient, this game’s designers have helpfully included the ability to zoom in and out of the map to aid in the accuracy of your map-making. Given the limitations of the hardware and the fact that this interface was originally designed for a different platform, I think this is about as good as we could have hoped for from a console port of the game.

The other good news is that despite all the issues and compromises with the content and presentation that were made here, the excellent core gameplay still shines brilliantly here, with the enjoyable map-making and the excellent grindy goodness of the RPG elements working just fine in this release. This is, at its core, still an outstanding RPG, even if this isn’t the best version of that RPG.

Oh, yeah, there it is. At this point, it will undoubtedly come as no surprise to you when I say that this is undeniably a worse remake / remaster of the game than Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold on the Nintendo 3DS. From the graphics and sound to the content, Etrian Odyssey II HD can’t hold a candle to a version of the game that released eight years ago. Having said that, this is still a great game, even in this compromised form. If you’ve never played the Etrian Odyssey games before, I still highly recommend this game. For fans of Dungeon Crawler JRPGs, it doesn’t get much better than this. Well, unless you own Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold…

tl;dr – Etrian Odyssey II HD is a remake of the 2008 Nintendo DS Dungeon-Crawling JRPG with a heavy focus on players mapping out the dungeons within the game. It’s still a great game, and the controls on Nintendo Switch work surprisingly well, but this release is pretty pathetic when you hold it up to the 2015 Nintendo 3DS remake, Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold. If you’re a fan of Dungeon Crawler JRPGs, this is still a superb entry in the genre, but this is sadly nowhere near the best version of this game.

Grade: B

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