I’m in the middle of Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard on the DS right now, and I’ve got to say that it’s one hell of a game. I’m in the process of playing it for an official review at GameCritics and I thought I’d be able to get it up in a pretty reasonable amount of time, but I’ve already sunk over 20 hours into it and I don’t think I’m even quite halfway. I may have to do one of my extremely rare ‘unfinished game reviews’ but in this particular case, I feel pretty comfortable with that if my deadlines start closing in.
The first few hours were heartlessly brutal, bringing a difficulty that I haven’t seen since the 16-bit days, but once my characters hit level 10 things sort of evened out and the constant smackdowns from random encounters started to ease up. I’m not going to talk a lot about it except to say that it’s an extremely fine piece of software and that although I can see how the appeal might be stronger with people who grew up in the old school, the designers of the game have got a pretty damned good handle on what they’re doing. It’s a total thumbs up at this point, and a very strong recommendation for anyone who can get into dungeon-crawl RPGs.
Easily one of my favorite games this year.
Read more at Drinking Coffeecola blog.
Brad Gallaway
Brad still loves Transformers, he's on Marvel Puzzle Quest when nobody's looking, and his favorite game of all time is a toss-up between the first Mass Effect and The Witcher 3. You can catch his written work here at GameCritics and you can hear him weekly on the @SoVideogames Podcast. Follow Brad on Twitter and Instagram at @BradGallaway, or contact him via email:
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