Very far from being a 100% polished game, but holy hell is it fun. Sitting down and playing with my sister has been a complete blast, and even though some cars are objectively better than others (Cleaning Bot...,) you can still make up for it with skill. The serotonin from getting a skip through some large chunks of the map.... God it feels good. Balance-wise though there are a few issues, especially with Reisen, and we're missing best girl Patchy as a fumo but I'm sure they'll work on it more in the future :)

I won't mention much from this game due to not wanting to spoil this amazing experience, but it's incredibly charming, the combat is simple yet fun, and the story is amazing. This is one of the few games out there that has managed to make me genuinely cry, more than once, too, it's just so good. I felt connected to all the main characters in this game. Even if this kind of combat isn't everyone's cup of tea, at the very least it's not difficult, so it's not that hard to just cruise through and witness this beautifully hand-wrought story, from start to finish. Every second of it is worth it. I have yet to finish playing all the routes, but I'll get to it one day.

I enjoyed myself a lot playing this game. The music in it is very well made, and the art is incredibly good. Thing is, though, that while it passes as a metroidvania, the game is incredibly easy. And a lot of the orbs are just objectively worse than the others even if you get them later on in the game, so you'll more than likely just stick to what you get earlier which makes getting new options feel irrelevant. The story isn't anything TOO incredible, but it does it's job well, and I think that a time-controlling tribe is a pretty unique concept that fit well into the world of the game. You also start out-scaling most enemies pretty quickly, so not only do you kill them way easier, but you can stop time for a pretty long amount of time, ontop of the game being easy in the first place. After you figure out the movement and controls, and then get used to them, the game's difficulty basically vanishes. Despite that, it's a pretty fun short & sweet game, and I enjoyed playing through it once more via local co-op, even if I was forced to play as a weak minion.

Peak. Etrian Odyssey is my favorite video game series of all time, for better or worse. I can't always put my finger onto why, it just is. It's incredibly fun. It has pretty art. It has amazing music. It's difficult. Those are the most basic reasons, but there's so much more to it. The dungeons in each entry look beautiful, even if some are more frustrating to play than others. The story is there, albeit subtle, and it just helps to immerse yourself even further. The insane levels of customisation the series offers, the charm of drawing the maps yourself, the dangers that lurk within each dungeon. It has all been made perfectly, in each entry to the series (EXCEPT EO2U,) and from all of them, Etrian Odyssey 3 is my favorite. Peak.

Amazing metroidvania, and also one of my favorite games of all time. I did basically everything you can in this game, beat it in under an hour, beat steel soul with 112% completion, did all pantheons hitless + all bindings (EXCLUDING P5,) beat all the radiant bosses charmless + nail 0, did all the coloseums hitless and so on. And despite that, whenever I play it again from time to time, I still find myself enjoying the game as if I played it for the first time. Amazing art, beautiful music, and incredibly well-made combat.