I had a good feeling! Celebrating 40 Years and 108 JRPGs of Destiny

[Kazin]

Etrian Odyssey games are all fantastic (well, apparently not the Mystery Dungeon ones, I've not played those). IV is not my favorite but it is fantastic.

And to kick us off is the fan-favorite Odyssey, Etrian IV.

Is this the only Etrian Odyssey on our list, or is IV considered the best by wider fandom? Either way it'd be fascinating, I have no idea!

 

[Lokii]

EO1 ranked at 82. I don't know if 4 is considered the best by the fandom (there are several other worthy candidates) but its certainly considered to be in contention.

 

[aturtledoesbite]

I'll say it's the best.

 

[Kazin]

EO1 ranked at 82. I don't know if 4 is considered the best by the fandom (there are several other worthy candidates) but its certainly considered to be in contention.

I am sorry I have forgotten the list. You've been putting in a ton of work on this project and me forgetting an EO has already appeared on the list is dumb and disrespectul of your effort. Sorry, Lokii!

I'll say it's the best.

I think III is, but IV is, like all (regular) EOs, great.

 

[Lokii]

I am sorry I have forgotten the list. You've been putting in a ton of work on this project and me forgetting an EO has already appeared on the list is dumb and disrespectul of your effort.

Haha no its not. I have to look at the master list three times a day just to remember what's coming next. I had to look it up just now to remember if we actually had covered an EO before. There are far too many JRPGs here to keep track off. No worries.

 

[JBear]

IV is my fave EO as well, although it's not by a lot. A big part of the appeal for me is that it succeeded in on-boarding a couple of my IRL friends who hadn't played the series prior, so I had the rare pleasure of staying with two people for a week while we were all playing the same game. This is what it must be like for people who play popular new games when they come out!

 

[jpfriction]

IV is a good one. Likely the last one I managed to roll the credits on. I don’t think I finished V or the untolds.

 

[Purple]

"Etrian Odyssey IV's Battle Theme Goes With Everything" seems to have been fully removed from the internet and that makes me very sad.

 

[Yimothy]

I didn’t vote for EOIV (I did for I and III), but I did get a lot of enjoyment out of it. Mostly I remember the overworld and gradually figuring it out over the course of the game. I think I prefer the one big dungeon style of the first game but I like that the series mixes things up a bit from game to game.

 

[gorha]

I voted for EOV and EOIII, but IV is not far behind them. It's the game I got a 3DS for! And its second dungeon, where the map wraps around, is one of my favorites in the series. Oh yeah, and the music was great. I guess some people must have a strong preference for the FM synth versions of Yuzo Koshiro's music, since they sold them as DLC, but I really liked the default arrangements.

 

[Pombar]

EO4 benefitted not just from the slow word of mouth spread online that helped defang the previous games’ bad reviews from writers who Just Didn’t Get It, but also more importantly from releasing during the early 3DS drought - a time that also saw Fire Emblem hit it big, as players starved for any new exclusive greatness ventured beyond their usual comfort zones to find it.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of the shift to 3D enemy models from those gorgeous sprites, but it did look good. My bigger problems were much the same as with 3 - too busy, too unfocused, and too much going on that distracted from the series’ great core loop. Airship puzzling was only slightly better than sailing ship puzzling imo, and mini-dungeons did nothing for me. It was well made, and I did have fun with it, but the direction it continued down was one that took things further from what I liked about the series.

Thankfully, its followup brought things back to basics in a hell of a way.

 

[Lokii]

49 Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey
Atlus, 2009: DS Points: 315 Votes: 9 Previous Rank: 33​

I’m still not sure why Atlus didn’t call this SMT IV. I guess not being set in Tokyo disqualifies a game from mainline status. But, aside from its Antarctic setting, there’s nothing it doesn’t share with the core games that form the spine of Atlus’ illustrious series. Like other mainline titles, it depicts an apocalyptic scenario where the various gods, myths, and legends of humanity’s collective cultural unconscious (collectively called “demons”) have manifested in the real world. As always, the player takes the role of a key figure in the conflict, whose decision between two competing worldviews will shape the next iteration of reality. Do they side with the peaceful tyranny of Law or with the brutal freedom of Chaos? Or do they opt to trust humanity's capacity to lead itself and seek a centrism that embraces both, with all the messiness that entails?

Strange Journey is a particularly potent enactment of this formula. Its depiction of the demonic apocalypse is novel and the attention it gives to arguing the different moral perspectives is both fantastically rendered and carefully considered. The player sees themselves as a member of a special UN scientific and military unit tasked with investigating the Schwarzwelt, an extra-dimensional entity originating at the South Pole that will, unless understood and prevented, grow to annihilate the Earth. Upon entering the Schwarzwelt, the UN forces are confronted with what appears to be a psychospace of the planet’s unconscious. In classic SMT fashion, the player must navigate a series of first-person mazes, and through the first half of the game they present as cruel sardonic parodies of humanity at its worst. The player tours through the flaming ruins of a city torn apart by war, the sinister decadence of a giant brothel, an endless mall and shrine to capitalism, and a labyrinth composed of towering walls of trash and waste. Crawling through these dungeons lays a compelling case for wiping the slate clean and starting fresh.

The dungeons take a turn in the second half of the game, becoming more surreal and abstract, moving from elysian gardens, to conceptional mindscapes, before arriving at a memory of Earth’s first formation, a space all of molten lavas, jagged slate, and primal forces. It is in this part of the game too where the traditional companion characters who act as mouthpieces for the two moral alignments themselves transcend, becoming a literal angel and demon respectively, and present their visions of an ascended humanity. In Law’s case it is one of humanity rid of strife and want via compelled worship of the demiurge, while Chaos proposes a humanity reunified with nature, but with the red-toothed survival that would require. The elegance of both perspectives that they’re both compromises, neither optimal, yet both less noxious than the Neutral route, which sides with the vision of humanity skewered so thoroughly in the game’s first half. There really is no good outcome here, and so the player is forced to take a stance on which of these perspectives is least harmful, and therefore “best.”

Underlining the moral drama of the game’s plot is the Co-op System, a variation on the standard SMT Press-Turn mechanic where attacking enemy weaknesses grants bonus battle actions. Here, striking a weakness allows demons in the party to do extra damage if they share moral alignment with the protagonist. This doesn’t do much to argue for the various moral perspectives—that’s something more than adequately accomplished by the plot and environments—but it does dramatize the player’s alignment choice through the play experience, as demons themed along one of the perspectives will spend more time occupying party slots. It’s not an essential gear in the working out of the game’s themes, but it does elegantly ornament them. It also ties player choice to player expression. If a player sides with Law, they should really side with it and team up with Law aligned units. A Law player filling up their team spots with Chaos units (something viable in other SMTs) would be aesthetically incoherent as well as having a much more difficult time of it.

Strange Journey is a particularly compelling and well-realised take on the standard SMT scenario, as well as being a crackerjack dungeon crawler to boot. Among Megaten fans it is highly regarded and often cited among the series’ best. Its placement among this list testifies to that. So it's hard to bemoan too much about the fact it doesn’t have a “IV” after its title, though, from the moral perspective I chose to align with, it really should have.

 

[R.R. Bigman]

A tough as hell but great game with the most interesting setting and cast the franchise has probably ever had. It’s also the end of the Kazuma Kaneko era, and series has never looked or felt the same since.

 

[Torzelbaum]

Here we are at the halfway point! Almost unbelievably, this is where a regular-sized list would start. All the wonderful games we’ve looked at so far would be runners-up. A big part of why this is a double-sized list is so we wouldn’t have to discard such an excellent crop. And yet, the next set of titles does have a kind of legitimacy the previous group lacks, in that they can claim a rank in the top 50.

This does make me wonder how many of the games in the top half of this list were ranked at #26 or lower by any of the voters.

 

[spines]

the music and a couple aspects of the battle design are my biggest complaints and neither one is even close to a dealbreaker. from a technical and compositional standpoint (i really can't believe it sounds like that on a ds) meguro's soundtrack is really impressive, i just only love a few tracks. the smirk system and the EO engine's extreme level scaling are also kind of jank (albeit making eirikr's party of level 6 reflecting demons that can easily beat some of the final bosses very funn) but it's a fair enough attempt to experiment on press turn, and outside of that it's a great and surreal dungeon crawler. kaneko's designs on this game are pretty rad, and i think it's especially telling that they brought back the demonica again in 4...it's one of his best character designs overall. though the others are strong too, i'm also quite fond of mastema and jiminez.

the story has really grown in my memory, ahaha. it's less melodramatic and twisty than 1 or 2 but merging the smt style and themes with a good old-fashioned cursed pit to explore obviously totally works. it makes sense they mentioned inspirations from the thing in development, as the remote antarctic setting as a replacement for nocturne's barren and inside-out world really gives it a uniquely alien feel, which is heightened even more as multiple areas combine familiar real-world themes with the uncanny effects of repeated tiling and blobber gimmicks. this would be a great one to pick up again sometime, and the portable nature makes it a bit easier to imagine doing that with than some long console rpgs.

pro tip: if you give your character the last name "strange" then the game becomes named after him

 

[YangusKhan]

This made #23 on my list. I loved it so much when it came out, but I've never felt interested in replaying any SMT games I've completed (so far), so my admiration for it is now a fairly vague memory of excellence. Except I still listen to the soundtrack sometimes too.

 

[Sarge]

This does make me wonder how many of the games in the top half of this list were ranked at #26 or lower by any of the voters.

This one didn't make my list, but I also have only beaten one game in the SMT franchise, Soul Hackers, which also didn't make my list but enjoyed quite a bit.

 

[FelixSH]

43 on my list. The first Megaten I played (together with Devil Survivor and TWEWY, what a way to start using my hacked DS Fat, amazing games). It is absolutely rock-solid, and especially the first four floors, before it gets meta, are really cool, just with these concepts. For some reason, what mostly comes to mind is that weird sidequest, where the toilette doesn't work, or something. Because it's posessed by Belphegor.

Classy guy.

I don't have much more to add, it's just been too long. But I enjoyed my time with this game a lot. Just mapping out the floors, even if you don't do it manually as in EO, you still have to visit every square. It's a great game.

 

[Yimothy]

I didn’t vote for this but I had to check my list to be sure of that because I played and enjoyed it. I had a hard time with SMT3 I think because I didn’t know how to play it, but by this time I had a few more games in the series under my belt and understood that all those demon party members are temporary and did much better. Still died a lot though, as I recall.

 

[Pombar]

Big big fan of SJ. Wish they got so creative with the setting and premise more often!

 

[Lokii]

48 Dragon Quest IX
Level-5, 2009: DS Points: 326 Votes: 8 Previous Rank: 34​

Dragon Quest IX is perhaps the oddest Dragon Quest. Certainly it is the most maximalist game in a series that has made maximalism part of its core identity. We must thank Tim Rogers for his observation that every Dragon Quest contains its own sequel. This bears out in a variety of ways: DQ IV’s character focused early chapters followed by the hero’s actual quest, DQ VII’s tautological second loop, or DQ XI’s infamous second and third acts as some examples of how Dragon Quests double themselves. Dragon Quest IX is no stranger to this trend, but enacts it in the strangest way. After the main story is complete, the game transforms into a social-focused dungeon grinder of truly maximalist proportions.

After realizing the Dragon Quest experience as an inhabitable world in Dragon Quest VIII, Square Enix pivoted their ambitions and made the brave, and certainly lucrative, decision to release the next mainline game as a portable, social-focused game. Originally, it was so radical a departure that it wouldn’t even feature turn-based battles but rather multiplayer real-time action. However, Dragon Quest is also defined by its rigid conservatism, so that vision was inevitably walked back. But though it largely features standard single-player hallmarks, IX still incorporates many social aspects to take advantage of urban density to fuel its longevity and this can be felt most profoundly in its postgame.

Whereas there are MMO-type “content for the sake of content” elements in the single player experience in the forms of loot, quests, and crafting; the postgame becomes entirely focused on a narratively thin but content dense empowering churn where the player is invited to level and reset characters numerous times to bypass limits and challenge legacy bosses, in which in turn can be powered up to their highest levels and rewards. This is a massive task representing hundreds of hours of train commutes and grinding sessions, but can be expedited by social aspects. Not only can friends bring their characters into your game and help defeat legacy bosses faster and earlier, but tradable maps to randomly-generated dungeons create opportunity for high experience or rare powerful gear. Several maps became famous for their viability and the trading of them became a social phenomenon in Japan.

The game’s success in its native context justifies the oddities of its “contenty” design, but in the West it did give the game a feeling of being out of lockstep. Unless you were in a population center that just so happened to have many western Dragon Quest fans, you were unlikely to be able to experience any of the social aspects, and the game’s hybrid qualities stood out in even starker relief. Every mainline Dragon Quest is singular, but IX is the most singular of them all, isolated in design, but also by the contexts of its region and era, much more so than other classic JRPGs which are also heavily defined by region and era. It feels very much like a game designed to be of its moment and unconcerned with sustaining itself past that. Square Enix has shown a continued interest in remaking and refreshing the classic Dragon Quests, but is IX even viable for that kind of treatment? Or will an ineffable and core part of its enactment forever be locked and lost to its ascendant moment?

 

[Bongo]

I wanted to replay Dragon Quest IX (it's the only one I've only played once) but I could never find a comfortable way to emulate DS games. The screen layout, you see. I can probably figure something out.

This game features a landmark design innovation, in that it could use the DS' wireless features to passively tag other nearby players and exchange data while in sleep mode. Few games besides Dragon Quest in Japan would have achieved the density to make that work for just a single game, but it worked, and it proved such a hit that it inspired the system-level Streetpass feature in the Nintendo 3DS. That era of dedicated handhelds is over, and it would be a privacy nightmare to make that sort of thing work on phones, but for a time that was a major trend, and Dragon Quest IX is where it began (at least, I'm not aware of any antecedents to passive multiplayer).

Compared to Dragon Quest VIII, which shared a developer, IX has a lot more Level-5isms in its design. The quest list is filled with arbitrary chores and there's a lot of gathering and crafting, with a whole pyramid of intermediate resources required to get some later gear. And yet it's also got the fullest commitment to the gambling-like appeal of Dragon Quest, with quests based on teasing out some rare events that are down to chance, and a super-low-friction dopamine loop that I didn't burn out on until deep into the post-game.

I'm given to understand it can be read as a precursor to the Fantasy Life series in many ways. I've always been curious about that one but it's never risen to my purchase threshold.

 

[Sarge]

I like Dragon Quest IX, but I admit that it isn't my favorite, for the MMORPG-styled reasons laid out. It's just not my thing (gaming-wise, I'm an anti-social git), but I know others that were absolutely enamored by the game. Personally, I thought they dropped the ball by not following up on Dragon Quest VIII's relative success in the West with another traditionally-styled game, but what do I know? (It only took 'em 13 years to do it with DQXI...)

Anyway, I do wonder what I'd think of it on a replay.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

DQ9 was one of those games born in the late aughts, where everything about it was designed around local multiplayer. While it must have been rad AF if you lived in a situation where you could actually participate in local multiplayer like that, I didn't. So playing DQ9 was like playing an MMO by yourself. Which is to say, kinda defeats the entire purpose of an MMO to begin with. (Yes, I know a lot of MMOs are designed to be played that way now. I do not like that.) And if you're playing a story driven game with blank slate characters, and without the personalities of your friends filling that void, the story is going to suffer as well. It was a completely different design philosophy coming directly off of DQ8, which I adored. A remade version of this game, either making is a better single player experience, or with facilitating the multiplayer with online play (like MGS: Peace Walker eventually did) would be great.

 

[Kirin]

I had DQIX all the way up at #7 on my list.

Which is wild. As someone who’d been into JRPGs since FF1, but more for the stories than for systems and grinding, and who was never into MMOs or even much multiplayer gamin in general, it is deeply weird that 9 is the *only* Dragons Quest that I’ve seriously gotten into.

But I got *so* into it. I think it was just a case of right place at the right time. It was an era when I had my DS in my pocket just about literally at all times and was sinking pretty much all my gaming time into it. And 9 is extremely geared to its context, easy to get into, reasonable in short sessions, but endless content to dip into over and over again. And while I’m normally not super into blank slate characters, I spent hours crafting these and ended up just as attached to them as any story-based personalities.

And then the online stuff. No, I don’t live in a huge city, but it was a point where the DS was ubiquitous enough among nerds and DQ9 made a big enough impact that any time I went to a gathering place I’d get hits. The local anime Con was a bonanza, of course. At some point I picked up the notorious Masayuki map, one of the shareable random dungeons that just happened to have an entire floor populated only by Metal King Slimes. Armed with that, I got onto some relevant forums and set up a DQ9 meetup at DragonCon, which was amazing. I probably personally had a noticeable hand in spreading that map around the southeast US.

And that’s just the kind of experience you can’t predict which makes a game stand out forever. I was never really a Dragon Quest kid and probably never will be, but DQ9 will always hold a special place in my personal gaming history. Right place, right time, magic ensued.

 

[Sarge]

See, I think that was my primary issue, I didn't get to experience that magic like you did. Sad times for younger Sarge - I'd probably have it way further up the list if so! I'm a little jealous.

 

[R.R. Bigman]

I got a whole lot of fun out of DQ9 despite not even connecting to the internet to get the weekly DLC stuff, as that was just before my family got wi-fi. I did go to a Best Buy and traded data with a group of people during some kind event, which was neat. I got a poster, as well.

 

[Paul le Fou]

I'm not a Dragon Quester; my attempts to play both 7 and 8 failed almost immediately. Yet I still tried 9 and...ended up really liking it. And I don't think I even really ever touched on the whole multiplayer or postgame aspect, I mostly just played the story and stopped. But something about it just worked for me, even so. I haven't played another DQ since then, either, so it stands alone as my one good experience from the series.

 

[gorha]

Strange Journey was number 8 on my list. I love a good dungeon crawl, and this might be the best one I've ever played. Secret passages? Teleporter mazes? Trap floors? Gimme gimme gimme. Finding the apps that show virtual spaces and hidden monsters and items on the map felt as revelatory as any plot twist in a more story-focused game. Strange Journey's own story is no slouch, either. I really like how there is no "golden ending" where every problem is solved. You get the usual SMT three-way route split, but for once all three routes are presented as equals, with the upsides and, mainly, downsides that come with the alignments that lead to them.

I also voted for Dragon Quest IX, at number 35. It came out at a time when I had a very long commute by bus and thus spent several hours every day playing my DS. DQIX was nearly the only game I played for a year or so, putting something like 500 hours into its postgame content, grinding out random dungeons and fighting the bosses from previous games. The DQ battle system is at its best here, I think. I never got to try the multiplayer, (though I did unlock stuff by streetpassing people at conventions) but even as a single player game, it was a lot of fun.

 

[Lokii]

47 Etrian Odyssey III
Atlus, 2010: DS Points: 333 Votes: 8​

Here it is! The king of Etrians! I don’t have much to say on this game except to gush over surface level features (ironic for a game that’s all about going deep); but what features! Whereas Etrian Odyssey II felt more like a mechanical refinement than a truly transformative sequel, III took the EO formula and gave it one hell of a shake-up. Everything about this game is fire. The concept is rich, the setting wondrous, the mechanics fresh and bold. It is the weird outlier game, the one that goes for new ideas wherever possible, and by golly, they pulled it off.

Etrian Odyssey III sees the player’s adventure guild exploring the port city of Armoroad and its adjacent Yggdrasil labyrinth. But instead of the leafy paths and boscages of the previous world-tree dungeons, here it is a hole into fantastical ocean depths. The maze finds the player crawling through coral mazes, undersea volcanic vents, and even sunken cyclopean acropolises. It’s a standout, marvelous setting. And it doesn’t end there. In addition to the primary dungeon crawl, EO III introduced a wonderfully puzzly ocean to sail that required special equipment and planning to navigate. This optional sailing section offered a large secondary task that could be tackled at the player’s leisure and provided a different type of gameplay to break up the normal delving routine. This concept of secondary, puzzle-focused, overworld exploration proved so rich an idea that Atlus expanded it and made it the central conceit of the next game in the series.

The fresh approach to the EO formula didn’t end there. The character classes and party compositions of III are something special. Eschewing the typical set of knights, mages, and bards that typify the genre, this game introduces a creative gang of weirdos whose roles and mechanics don’t quite line up with expectations. Each one is a little odd, requires a little nuance, and is rich with growth potential and party synergy. And, because they don’t fall into cliched archetypes, they’re wonderfully fun to explore both mechanically and aesthetically. Here, the player’s guild will be full of roguish pirates, melee-focused anchorite healers, sheep-toting farm boys, and of course a saucy spoiled princess to lead the party.

Etrian Odyssey III is also the only game in the series to feature a split path. About halfway through the game you’re asked to side with one of two warring factions, and this radically transforms the rest of the story, the quests and bosses you’ll face, and unlocks one of two exotic new classes. Additionally, the halfway point introduces EO III’s other great innovation: sub-classing. The EO games already had complex character growth and build strategies but now a unit could specialize in a second job to gain access to its skill tree. The number of hybrid builds this makes available and the synergistic strategies this opens up is so empowering, and makes the gameplay sing as sweetly as a siren’s song.

​

I hear and respect those who classify IV as the better game, but Etrian Odyssey III for me hits with the force of aesthetics, innovation of mechanics, and boldness of vision which, like trident lobbed from the deep, skewers with an impact that I can’t help but see as the apotheosis of the series. This ends our time with Etrian Odyssey, but it was a series that saw much love. Here’s where everything fell out:

#47 Etrian Odyssey III (333 points, 8 votes)
#50 Etrian Odyssey IV (299 points, 7 votes)
#82 Etrian Odyssey (208 points, 6 votes)
#108 Etrian Odyssey V (146 points, 4 votes)
#156 Etrian Odyssey II (70 points, 3 votes)
#193 Etrian Odyssey Untold 2 (32 points, 1 vote)
#205 Etrian Odyssey Untold (20 points, 1 vote)

And zero points for Nexus.