Etrian Odyssey And The Magic Of Roleplay, Headcanon, And Exploration

Hi, gang! Last time we spoke I had a long wistful talk about Final Fantasy, specifically number 10 but also with a nice long-winded nostalgic memory from 25 years ago in which I first encountered number 6 in Grand Bank, Newfoundland. Since then, I actually got to return there for a summer holiday! 9 days of rest, relaxation, fun festivals, and exploring damn near everywhere that part of my island had to offer. Oh, and in my downtime over there I picked up another RPG and played a bunch of it. I'm still playing it, in fact, but there are things about it which sparked my imagination and motivated me to sit down in front of the computer on a Sunday morning and bang out some words. So let's be terribly insightful, as I sometimes am, and talk about Etrian Odyssey for a bit.

Etrian Odyssey is one of my favorite game series of all time. If you're unfamiliar, the concept's pretty simple: they're dungeon crawling RPGs that are throwbacks to the mercilessly difficult computer RPGs of the 80's that defined the genre in its infancy. Wizardry would be the most famous analogue here, but I'm sure there are countless other CRPGs in Etrian's DNA. What made Etrian really special was the fact that all of its games were originally released for the DS family of handhelds: three each on DS and 3DS. As such, they took the genius decision of using Wizardry's grid-based labyrinths that oldheads would have to map out themselves on graph paper and translated that in-game using the bottom touch screen of your DS handheld. You actually chart out your surroundings in the game as you venture through the dungeon, mapping out the haunted hallways of this deadly maze and noting down landmarks and hazards and all of that. There is a dopamine which activates in your brain while doing this that I cannot quite put into words. Surviving fight after fight, mapping out square after square, slowly building an accurate map of this vast unexplored maze, actually having the tactile feel of drawing every line and painting every stroke in the real world with the stylus in your actual human hand... it's a pleasant satisfaction. 

I almost, but not quite, have the perfect comparison for it. My pal and colleague Sean Dillon once famously tortured me with the claim that David Lynch's The Straight Story (which is not a science fiction movie at all, but instead a melancholy film about an old man driving across the American Midwest on a riding lawnmower) was the best Star Trek movie ever made, and then refusing to elaborate. I had to become an amateur comics critic for a year in order to wring the answer out of him. It was a good answer (one that was in our goddamn DMs the entire fucking time!), and it was fun to analyze the comics, but I bring up the story because I could almost make a similar claim of Etrian Odyssey: that it's the best set of Star Trek video games ever made. Unlike some people I could name (I lightly rib you in jest) I will now explain my reasoning for free. Recall that motto which opens every episode of both TOS and TNG, the mission of the Enterprise: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before. That ethos is what drives you in Etrian Odyssey. The labyrinths of the game are places that few have explored, teeming with flora and fauna that will kill any inexperienced wannabe adventurer stone dead. As you play the games and grow stronger and get deeper down, you map out these places and see sights never before witnessed by human eyes. You will encounter mysterious new nonhuman species deep within the labyrinth, some of whom are hostile and others who can be spoken to diplomatically. Above all else, you are explorers charting new territory, always learning and growing stronger from the experience, just like any Enterprise crew worth their salt.

That's a lovely sentiment of a reading, but it doesn't entirely work for a few reasons. Chief among them is that Etrian Odyssey is a combat-based dungeon crawling RPG wherein the primary play loop is mowing down hordes of monsters in order to level up so you can survive battling against subsequent stronger hordes of monsters. The Star Trek I love best is all about being diplomatic and using utopian understanding and communication to extend an olive branch. If I wanted Star Trek where we mow down lots of baddies I'd throw on one of the Big War Arcs they did, and (with all due respect to people who love those) that just ain't my Star Trek cup of tea. Moreover, there aren't many avenues to being diplomatic with the hostile sentient forces you encounter. I am uncomfortably reminded of the penultimate area in the first game, the home of an indigenous race of forest folk who protect their sacred land from the explorers trying to uncover the secrets of the labyrinth that the forest folk are sworn to protect. There's no talking it out option that becomes present here. You either fight 'em all to map out the dungeon and reach the final stratum to uncover the labyrinth's true secret, or you quit the game for good. There's an unpleasant whiff of colonialism present in this part of the story, and to be fair Star Trek does give off those rancid vibes at many points in its long tenure (I will not be bitching about the Prime Directive again at this time.). So, Etrian isn't the greatest Star Trek game ever made. It might even ethically crater itself in places. Nevertheless, there's a way out of this. A way to, as four really cool dudes once sang, take a sad song and make it better.

Etrian Odyssey is a role-playing game. Let's talk about what really made me want to write about the games: the transformative magic of that roleplay to create your own custom dungeon crawling experience.

The legendary heroines of Guild Kagami.

The Etrian game I'm currently playing, and the one I fired up while on my Grand Bank vacation, is Etrian Odyssey II. In order to explain how I came to understand the power of roleplay and headcanon in this game, in a way that made me want to write about it, I have to go back in time six months to my playthrough of the first game. I've been playing on the HD versions via Nintendo Switch, which do a good enough job of emulating the tactile map-making aspect of a DS's second screen by having a portion of the screen be the map which you can manipulate and draw on using the right stick and shoulder buttons. It just about works. Anyway, the gallant adventurers of Guild Kagami had made it to the final stratum of the labyrinth, the deepest portion of the dungeon wherein shocking revelations about the nature of their world were discovered. Stuff I won't spoil here. It was here wherein I unlocked a new set of sidequests: to level up two new character classes I had unlocked prior, the Ronin and Hexer. All game you have sporadically encountered a NPC duo of a Ronin and Hexer, Ren and Tlachtga, who have helped you in your explorations. Here in the final area, they will imminently become an obstacle to your exploration (and again, you can't talk it out but have to fight it out), but prior to this each have given you items which unlock the ability for you to make new characters of their class. 

Now, given that this was endgame, I already had a core party of five and none of them were Ronins or Hexers. Still, I wanted that sidequest for completion's sakes. So I created two new party members: Tsubasa the Ronin (named after the stoic swordsmistress of my beloved Symphogear, Tsubasa Kazanari) and Robin the Hexer (named for the protagonist of Fire Emblem Awakening, who also gives off dark mage vibes). It was amusing to imagine these new recruits drafted by three veteran adventures to dive down into the deepest and most elusive part of the labyrinth, to have to face the toughest monsters ever seen by humans, all to gain enough combat experience to satisfy the quest. A real trial by fire, if you will. Still, they survived. They got their level ups, I got my quest reward, and Tsubasa and Robin got to rest on the bench while my main party delved to the deepest part of the labyrinth, uncovered its secrets, and saved the day. Guild Kagami are heroes, and that includes Tsubasa and Robin.

All of that? I made it up. I don't mean that I didn't really level up a Ronin and a Hexer in the final area of Etrian Odyssey. What I mean is that the game didn't create that narrative: I did, using only what I did in the game and my imagination. On paper, the characters you make in Etrian Odyssey are nameless blorbos, silent protagonists whose only mechanical purpose is to fight monsters in a dungeon. You, as the player, are the one who imbues meaning and backstory to these characters, and that can go as shallow or as deep as you want. This is nothing new to Etrian Odyssey, of course: even its source game, Wizardry, is just drawing from the ur-text that is Dungeons and Dragons. D&D, of course, is a game where you and a group of friends take stat blocks and turn them into fleshed-out characters with hopes and dreams, and collaboratively create a story together using your interactions and the luck of a dice roll to do so. There's a post I sadly can't find about Etrian Odyssey which does the same, using the example of an imminent party wipe. Most of your team's dead, and the only ones left standing are the defensive tanky characters. The post invites you not just to think of this in the mechanical sense, but in a roleplay and headcanon sense. These are your characters that you created. How do they react to the no-win scenario? (FUCK I'M COMPARING IT TO STAR TREK AGAIN, I know, but the line was too good to resist) Do they stand tall in the face of certain death, protecting their wounded comrades to the last? Do they turn tail and run? Do they cry, beg, curse? Atlus doesn't decide that. You decide that. Another pal and colleague of mine, Lena, has been dabbling with such magic for ages at this point: from fanfiction to collaborative roleplay, she has created entire universes and worlds with her and her best pals, and I admire her for that. This is a magic that I only somewhat felt while playing the first Etrian Odyssey. Now I'm feeling it with the second, and it's unlocked whole new avenues for me.

The new main squad of Guild Kagami.

It happened from the moment I fired up Etrian Odyssey II: which actually was not a few weeks ago in Grand Bank, but immediately after finishing the first game. I only played for about an hour before realizing I needed a break from dungeon crawling, and set it aside until I felt the itch return. That was on vacation, but I mention this because upon starting a new game I was given the option to transfer my guild name from the first game to the second. I did that, and I furthermore discovered that the Ronin and Hexer are available from the start this time. With those two options, I knew what I had to do. I remade Tsubasa and Robin in Etrian II, and this time they would be 2/5ths of the main party. Immediately, without realizing it, I was creating my own headcanon. Two junior members of Guild Kagami, the legendary group of explorers who uncovered the deepest secrets of the Yggdrasil Labyrinth, setting out to prove themselves with the blessings of the five senior members who saved the day. The pair heading off to new lands to start a new branch of Guild Kagami, to follow that mission: explore strange new labyrinth's, help the people of the world out, and grow strong enough to protect them and others from any terrible threat lurking in the unexplored corners of the maze. The journey takes them to the kingdom of Lagaard, where they establish the new Guild Kagami and soon recruit three new brave and bold adventurers: Sonia the Dark Hunter, adept with a whip: Juniper the War Magus, skilled with a sword but also able to use healing magic, and Yuri the Gunner, a backline fighter with a fucking pistol. Together the five will explore a new labyrinth, ascending upwards this time to discover the truth of the legends about a floating castle in the skies.

Again, I made all of that up from just transferring over some data, two girls I made to finish a sidequest in the first game, and wanting to play around with a new party. This is just scratching the surface, of course. I could have gone deeper. I could headcanon all sorts of things about how these characters interact during downtime, how they act around each other, and all manner of things. I haven't played around with this sub-aspect of Etrian Odyssey much before now, but I find myself doing it more and more. Given the character portraits I chose, I imagine the group being more stoic and resolute, all business. If anyone's the life of my party, it's probably Sonia. The exploration and combat and all of that are my main focus, but it's a lot of fun to come up with these little stories based on what the game gives you. Once again, it all comes back to sidequests. I want to jump ahead to one a little later in the game before I get to the one that sparked all this in Etrian II. It's a simple enough quest: find a birthday gift for the innkeeper's daughter. This leads to the party not really knowing what the hell to get a little girl for her birthday, so you ask around town. The clinic's assistant suggest flowers, the girl who runs the general store suggests a rare stone from a bird's nest, and you can ask most NPCs in the town their advice on what to get her. It led to the lovely image of these experienced adventurers being such stoic introverts that, while they could face down something like a deadly chimera with bravery and grit, the thought of what to get a small child for her birthday was a vexing mystery. They're kind of like Captain Picard in that regard (The Trek comparisons are just coming to me naturally at this point, let's go with the flow), who's a seasoned explorer and captain but who finds himself unsure how to act around children. Again, you get to select what to get the little girl: both what feels easiest for you to get in the moment, and what your party would do. Mine went with the flowers, and the girl seemed pleased with them. Good job, Guild Kagami.

Talking of gathering flowers gets us back to what inspired these thoughts in the first place: sidequests and such off the beaten path from my main labyrinth exploring. I don't recall when such sidequests were available in the first game, but they come pretty early in Etrian II. Due to my unconventional party selection, though, I didn't have anyone to fit the bill. So I just made a new character of that class: Cassandra the Landsknecht. Then I didn't want to muck around with XP gains and leave one of my main squad out while I leveled up Cassandra, so I made a whole bunch of other characters for her to venture into the first level of the labyrinth with. My goal here was twofold: First, level up some girls and guys to level 2 in order to finish the sidequest. Second was gathering. To explain briefly: In EO a level 1 character starts with 3 skill points, and gains 1 more with every additional level up. You use the points to gain new abilities: a special sword slash attack, a fire spell, a healing spell, and so on. It's different for every character, but most have at least one special gathering skill. At certain points in the maze you'll find gathering points where you can forage, cut, or mine for materials that you then sell back to the store for both money and unlocking new items. Every point in a gathering skill lets you gather from that spot once a day, and my main squad was very combat-focused since this is a difficult dungeon crawling game, so I was only ever able to gather one time per dungeon dive. With the backup squad, though, I focused more on their gathering skills in order to gain some extra stuff and make some money while doing this sidequest.

It's a good mindset to have. In practice it was only moderately successful, this poor ragtag group of level 1 adventures barely able to survive a gathering session and a single fight without keeling over and dying. Still, they did it, and as more of these sidequests came out I began to fill in Guild Kagami with more inexperienced folks who were there for foraging and leveling up the classes I wasn't using. Daisy the Troubador, Maria the Protector, Kiana the Survivalist, Aizen the Medic, and many others joined the roster. Now that you know I have a whole slew of low level adventurers in addition to my five main ones, here's the quest that ignited my imagination and is the reason for me writing this: my quest for the Tri-Fruits. Tri-Fruits are a rare gathering spawn from the first floor of the second stratum, an autumnal forest. With my one point in gathering fruit, it would take an eternity to do this. So I grabbed a couple of fresh survivalists, Sue and Sirius (hi Thom!), put all their skill points into gathering, and started doing gathering runs. A simple routine. Tsubasa, Sonia, and Juniper as my experienced frontliners, with the newbies Sue and Sirius in the back. My veteran's one goal was to shepherd these two to the gathering point, pick it clean and hope a Tri-Fruit dropped, then rush back to the warp point and exit. I had to do all of this without those two being killed by the monsters: not because I wouldn't be able to gather, but because it would cost extra to revive them and also I would feel bad getting these poor newbies eviscerated by a giant killer ostrich. Which sadly happened many times.

Many times, by sheer happenstance, is also how much I had to run this loop before I got all of those godforsaken Tri-Fruits. It was grinding, in a sense, but I was gaining no XP because I didn't want to throw the level curve out of whack between my main frontliners and my two main backliners who were sitting at home drinking tea while these level 1 archers were probably shitting themselves at being ambushed by a group of fucking mushrooms again. I eventually killed like, two groups of mushrooms just to get Sue and Sirius up some levels to give them more gathering points so I had more chances to get this fucking fruit. So here I am, in the middle of this grind, and my mind starts to wander. I start to imagine this scenario playing out in the game. Tsubasa, the veteran Ronin who started her career being shepherded through a nightmare dungeon by the legendary five of Guild Kagami, now has the opportunity to do the same for Sue and Sirius as they search for these fruits. What is the experience like for not just Sue and Sirius, but all the other low-level folks of Guild Kagami? Since we're leaning into the Star Trek comparisons, I imagine it's like a science officer who just really likes botany going on an away mission to study some cool alien flowers before all hell breaks loose. Two folks who are just experts on foraging, being consulted by help by the veteran warriors of Guild Kagami, because for all their combat skills sometimes you need a guy and a girlie who know their plants.

The brave foragers of Guild Kagami.

And my imagination went on like this, during every random battle that popped up, every ambush, every unfortunate first strike which ended with Sue or Sirius KOed. I can see Tsubasa, the noble warrior, katana at the ready as she stands between the wide-eyed Sue and the hell beast out for her blood. "You shall not harm her.". I can see Juniper patching up any minor wounds they might get, looking out for them, their face never betraying any outward emotion but clearly showing a protective streak. I can see Sonia being hotheaded, wondering why we keep running away, and just impulsively smacking the shit out of one of these pesky monsters with her whip, maybe cracking it in the air to try and get them to go away or distract them long enough for Sue and Sirius to get away. Why, I can even see them back at the local hospital, still kind of shaken up from the experience, apologizing for being a burden before the veterans deny that. No, you two did exactly what the mission required. You found them. You found the elusive Tri-Fruits, we delivered them to the client, and got our reward. Another mission complete for Guild Kagami, and it's one that we couldn't have done without you two.

That's the magic of roleplay and headcanon, gang. Etrian Odyssey may have nameless protagonists who have nothing to say, but you tell their stories. You tell them through not just the way you play the game, but in how your imagination reacts to your playing of the game. Someone else probably played this part with a veteran Survivalist on their squad, one who had invested in gathering as well as combat, and got the fruits easy peasy. That's fine, that's their personal story to tell. This is mine, and there's a power in that. The RPG as a genre, as it grew more and more complex, eventually became a vehicle for telling amazing stories. Look at Final Fantasy X which I just beat a little while ago. Wonderful story. I even felt like I was choosing to defy fate along with the characters. There's something to be said for a game series like Etrian Odyssey, though, where you're given a scenario and a squad, and how you play and what you think of while playing determines the personal story in that game. This is nothing exclusive to Etrian Odyssey, as I've said: you can see it everywhere from tabletop RPGs, to MMOs, to just people RPing online. Why, just last night I caught up with someone I haven't spoken to in a while, and he regaled me about tabletop adventures that sounded amazing, gripping, and heartbreaking. All of that from half a dozen people making blorbos and throwing dice.

There's a magic that comes at play with such creations, and the other day I learned a little more about how to use it. I can even use it to fight against the uncomfortable nonsense from the first game with the forest folk. I can claim that my explorers acted bravely, they did things as diplomatically as possible, and instead of killing their way through obstacles they proved their worth to the people of the forest and were granted entry to the deepest part of the labyrinth. I'm stretching a little, sure, but it's my game file and I make my own story so that's the story I'm making. Speaking of stories I'm making... I'm about a little under halfway through Etrian Odyssey II, I think. Guild Kagami is currently enduring a frigid frozen labyrinth of ice whilst being accosted by tanky giant hermit crabs. They're resilient and it's frustrating me a little bit, and I think because of that it's frustrating them as well. Tsubasa and Yuri are cutting through their elemental defenses, Sonia and Juniper are hitting them for what little damage they can, and Robin is using her dark magic to cast debuffing hexes. It's draining their stamina and resources, making them have to retreat to the safety of home more often. I bet Sonia is particularly hotheaded about all of that. Tsubasa and Robin, the veterans who were part of the original Guild Kagami, will help to calm her. Patience. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Every step we take in there, every new pen stroke on the map, every enemy felled... it's all a part of the mission. To explore strange new labyrinths, to help the people of the world out, and grow strong enough to protect them and others from any terrible threat lurking in the unexplored corners of the maze. 

These are the voyages of Guild Kagami. May they live long and prosper.