Etrian Odyssey III HD

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

Players: 1, Local Wireless Content Sharing, Online Content Sharing

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Review:

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

Unlike the prior two games in the Etrian Odyssey series, Etrian Odyssey III (originally bearing the subtitle, The Drowned City) has never been remade or ported to any other platform after its initial 2010 release on Nintendo DS, and so I can’t make the same complaint about this game that I made of the other two games in the Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection trilogy – there’s no definitively superior version of Etrian Odyssey III to directly compare this game to. However, we can certainly compare this game to other entries in the genre (including those excellent Nintendo 3DS remakes) and come to much the same conclusion about the relative quality of this remake compared to other contemporaries.

As with the first two HD releases on Nintendo Switch, 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. While this definitely compares well to the original Nintendo DS game, 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.

Also on par with the other Etrian Odyssey HD remasters on Nintendo Switch, Etrian Odyssey III HD features music derived from the original game’s soundtrack, and while the sound quality is improved over the original, it still sounds extremely tinny and artificial. However, I do think the soundtrack this game pulls from is marginally better than its predecessors, making this game’s music the most passable of the three, though I definitely still wish this release went with instrumental music like the Nintendo 3DS entries in the series.

In my reviews of Etrian Odyssey HD and Etrian Odyssey II HD, this is where I would rant about features that were in the Nintendo 3DS remake that were removed from this version, but of course that doesn’t really apply here. Quite the contrary, not only does Etrian Odyssey III feature multiple new features that are a significant improvement over the first game, but this release actually adds some nice features that weren’t in the original version.

Much as in the original release, Etrian Odyssey III expands on the earlier games by introducing a slew of new classes, new “limit break”-style moves that can be equipped to characters, subclasses, new seafaring cartography… while I think many of these elements would be further improved in Etrian Odyssey IV, I think there can be little doubt that Etrian Odyssey III is one of the biggest leaps in options and content that the franchise has ever seen. Plus, this version of the game adds the ability to trade resources with other players, which isn’t a huge addition, but it’s definitely more than I would have expected from this remaster.

And as with the other Etrian Odyssey remasters, 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.

In the end, there’s definitely a part of me that wonders if my opinion of this game would be harsher if it too, like its predecessors, received a Nintendo 3DS remake that put this version to shame. However, even comparing this release to all of the great games on Nintendo 3DS, I still think Etrian Odyssey III HD fares better than those earlier games, thanks largely to the fact that the core game this is a remaster of is such a noteworthy improvement over the prior games in the series. And while I definitely wish that more had been done to improve the presentation in this release, overall I’m delighted to see this excellent game make it off of the Nintendo DS. Fans of Dungeon Crawler JRPGs should definitely give this game a look – it’s a bit dated, but it’s still one of the highlight of the genre, and absolutely the highlight of the Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection.

tl;dr – Etrian Odyssey III HD is a remake of the 2010 Nintendo DS Dungeon-Crawling JRPG with a heavy focus on players mapping out the dungeons within the game. This is the first time this game has seen any sort of port or re-release, and while the HD-polished presentation here is still dated, this is nevertheless a strong step forward for this series that’s still great to this day. If you only get one game in the original Etrian Odyssey trilogy on Nintendo Switch, this is the one to get.

Grade: B+

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