Etrian Odyssey 3

Etrian Odyssey 3 is out today in North America. Is anyone playing it? My copy should be arriving from Amazon at any moment (of course, I am at work, so I will have to wait to get home anyway).

For people who aren't familiar with this series, it is basically a throwback to old PC RPGs like Wizardry and The Bard's Tale. In the old days, when you played those games, you would have to map the dungeons on graph paper or become hopelessly lost. In Etrian Odyssey, you do the mapping on the DS's lower screen.

There are a surprising number of games of this style on DS (minus the stylus mapping) -- Orcs & Elves, The Dark Spire, and SMT Strange Journey, for example. I wrote an article about this genre, which I am calling grid-based dungeon crawler RPGs. Read it if you are an RPG nerd like me and interested in this sort of thing!

If you're playing the game, how do you like it so far?

This is the first I have heard of the series and I am immediately interested. It looks like only the first Etrian Odyssey made it's way to the UK sadly, but I will hopefully pick it up before long. Thank-you for the heads-up! Great article by the way! Good website all round :)MuppetusG

Thank you for the compliment, MuppetusG. I'm glad you liked the article!

it looks great and the other 2 got great reviews but i just can't get into first person view rpg games, only old might and magic 3,6 i liked, but wizardary games and others i jsut never got into

I recently became atlus B*** so I pre order next all of their games, even if they only localized a game
tho since it is a import I wont get it until 3 days - several weeks

Is it possible that there is no key to explain the map icons in this game?!!

I created my ownEtrian Odyssey 3 Map Icon Keyto try to find and share this information. Please stop by and let me know if I have the symbols right. Thanks!

I picked mine up yesterday and am loving it!

I'm buying the game later this year.

I don't really feel like playing a grind-hog right now. love the franchise but I hate that it takes forever to do anything in these games thanks to the slooooow grinding you have to do.

Part 2 of my unofficial guide to the map icons is up! This one covers the Etrian Odyssey 3 Ocean Icons. Some of these symbols are just crazy -- what do they mean?

I too had it pre-ordered on Amazon. However, I chose free shipping. So it should be here at around the 30th or so. I'm busy beating the 2nd one anyway. :P

I just got Etrian Odyssey III in the mail a day or two ago, I haven't had a chance to play it yet since I've been pretty busy with school/work but I'm really looking forward to it, it looks like a really cool game and I've always been a pretty big RPG-game fan. The Etrian Odyssey series always seemed interesting to me but I missed out on the chance to play the first two games, so this time around when I heard Etrian Odyssey III was coming out and I saw some videos of the gameplay I was convinced I needed to get it to see what I'd been missing out on, the pre-order artbook didn't hurt either. :P Thanks for creating a thread about it, I feel like this is a really underrated series on the DS that doesn't get the attention it deserves since it doesn't have the name recognition/popularity of some of the other DS games/series.

I'm glad to see people are playing this. I really like this style of game and wish more of them would be released.

What I would really love would be remakes of some of the early CRPGs like Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder. These would work great on DS (or even iPhone), in my opinion!