Etrian Odyssey II is a very solid blobber. Exploration is fun; uncovering shortcuts and delving deeper into this mysterious dungeon is engaging. There’s a lot of customization although I went with a highly recommended party and the game is hard so maybe if I winged character creation I would have had a (more) frustrating time. The challenge is good, too.

A lot of fun, but there are some weird flaws to it. Sidequests often give you scraps for rewards, and a handful of them are wretched to complete. There’s a lot of annoyance to certain mechanics like having to carry a Warp Wire with you. And, ultimately, this is a turn-based RPG and the depth is on the build side, not the battle tactics themselves. The battles are standard Fight/Magic/Item fare.

The aesthetics are good. I like the anime style especially the cool character portraits you get to choose from. All the player characters in this game look badass! And the music and sound is strong. The soundtrack sounds like the musician wanted to combine the Genesis and SNES soundfonts. Story… didn’t really care for it, although I like the townspeople.

Solid, but I wish it was more. These games have potential to be excellent blobbers but this one didn’t hit that mark.

This game is in such direct conversation with EO1 that they really are best played as a pair. There are a ton of changes in EO2 from EO1, many of which are about breaking everything that was strong in EO1 and making you take a different, often more challenging, approach here. I don't love every change they make (as fun as it is to use an alternate class in a role, a war magus just feels less secure to have around than a medic did), but the changes that are good are Really important to my enjoyment.

Every town NPC has dialogue every time you reach a new floor, which may be the most important change to the feel of the game from EO1. Every town character gets so much more personality, and the game plays with them (introducing character quirks and quest chains) and the time-of-day system (something that was barely relevant in EO1), all the time. Derek the hospital's doctor works all day and doesn’t want to be overheard, so isn't free to meet with you about a sidequest he's posted until 11PM. And in a later stratum there are tiles that save you a lot of time but can only be crossed at night. You will even speak to miscellaneous NPCs in the labyrinth far more now, a minor but still noticeable change.

The strata theming in EO1 was pretty good, and in the moment feels totally appropriate and strong but I like the theming and design of EO2’s strata (basic as the idea is) a lot more. While the series never quite recaptures the feeling of leading up to and then progressing through EO1’s 5th stratum, the 1st through 4th here are really good, and I like most of the 5th in a gameplay sense (though what a letdown compared to 1’s both visually and thematically, oof.)

And lastly the music is absolutely fantastic here, one of the best soundtracks of the series (though they are nearly all excellent).

Overall a great game, the quibbles I have with it don’t compare with the things I love about it, and I am really happy I revisited Lagaard.

What's unique about working artists among creative professionals is the way their education often leads to some acquaintance with the history of art. I don't know much about Shin Nagasawa's own background (a cursory search turns up some Pokemon cards, a dead website and a Pixiv account with some dubious illustrations of young girls), but I'm convinced the monster designs in this game were consciously influenced by the creatures in the work of Matthais Grunewald. There's a similar sense of texture and exaggerated motion, supported by a free sense of perspective and anatomy, that's so much like his work and so unlike the spritework in the prior game. It's distinct without being overstated, and I'd like to think Nagasawa chose it to support the northern-European feel of the game's setting, much as I'd like to think that somehow wasn't actually his Pixiv.

Where Etrian Odyssey was an effort to reduce the Wizardry-like to its essence and build a modern game around it, Heroes of Lagaard's got no such singularity of purpose. It's trying to balance familiarity and novelty well enough to make its place as a franchise on the Yoko Taro JRPG chart: to the former end there's frequent save points and limit breaks, and to the latter the cartography's more developed and the overworld enemies are turned from moderately challenging standard encounters to navigation puzzles. This is the version of Etrian which postdates the FOE flash animation.

At the same time, the game's substantially harder than the first. It's considerably more likely that a random encounter will kill a party member in the first round of combat, the two defense skills which trivialized Etrian Odyssey's middle strata are absent, and fewer classes are worth using. In conjunction with the two extra checkpoints each stratum, the game has an approach to difficulty comparable to a modern indie platformer: it sends the player back five minutes, time after time, until she gets it.

There's something lost in the move from an externally-referential piece to a self-referential one, a game trying to perfect an Etrian formula, but it's enormously fun. The world art in Heroes of Lagaard is more varied and interesting, the music's better, the town NPC's are well-developed and endearing. There's no rubbing yourself against a wall until you find the hidden path to progress, and the auto-battle Earthbounds you through old areas. I was fully prepared to admit that the franchised version of Etrian was the superior one until the fifth stratum, which is impossibly lame in terms of visual and level design as well as narrative content. Overlord fucking sucks and I'm glad I cheesed him with Dominate.

The faster pace of the game and the volume of dialogue does, I think, dislodge the sense of fondness for one's party that Etrian Odyssey built up. More content-per-hour means less time to get bored and consider how the landsknecht feels about medieval social class.