Genuinely some of the tightest, most perfectly tuned combat you will find in any game. Every bossfight is so genuinely thrilling to tackle and when you eventually figure out what each fight wants of you and triumph over something that might seem like a total brick wall at first, it's more satisfying than basically anything else in the world.
It's the product of hundreds, if not thousands of hours of someone playing Etrian Odyssey back to front and front to back and so perfectly managing to turn what makes it so tense and fun and exciting into something far faster and more galaxy brained than even the most ingenious moments of any EO. There are 56 characters in this game, and each and every one of them is totally fascinating to play with, feeling totally distinct and exciting to use and figuring out how to make up to 12 of them at a time work in sync is just the best feeling thing in the world. I want to scream about how happy this games makes me. Playing it absolutely lights up the part of my brain that played Disgaea as a teen and upon realizing how deep its systems went, immediately declared it to be my favorite game of all time. On a mechanical level, maybe this is what I'd call the best game ever made. I honestly struggle to think of anything that makes me buzz as much as this does, and that's despite my wife Youmu being one of my least favorite characters here to use! It was an uphill battle from there and the game so firmly won me over that it didn't matter. The game told me I'd be an Iku fan going forward and I was powerless to say no to it. I wasn't before, I had no real opinion of her, but now seeing her gets me fired up and ready to spill out a dozen stories about fights she carried to a win when everything looked hopeless.
Then also when you finish the normal dungeon crawler story you get more dungeon crawling but everything is ratcheted up to insane degrees. It might've taken you 30 hours to get a party to an average level of 50, but suddenly you hit hour 100 and you're fighting bosses at level 12000 and how did it come to this? The game holds back nothing. I respect it so much. All the item descriptions are references to eroge that are filled with personal anecdotes like "the end scene in this game is one of the best things I've ever seen" because it is the purest expression of someone's deeply nerdy joy you can imagine.
Also I listened to the title screen music on repeat for like an hour when I was sad and came out the other end of it having written the best thing I've ever made, so when I say this game makes my brain light up, I truly mean it.
What a fucking achievement.
It's the product of hundreds, if not thousands of hours of someone playing Etrian Odyssey back to front and front to back and so perfectly managing to turn what makes it so tense and fun and exciting into something far faster and more galaxy brained than even the most ingenious moments of any EO. There are 56 characters in this game, and each and every one of them is totally fascinating to play with, feeling totally distinct and exciting to use and figuring out how to make up to 12 of them at a time work in sync is just the best feeling thing in the world. I want to scream about how happy this games makes me. Playing it absolutely lights up the part of my brain that played Disgaea as a teen and upon realizing how deep its systems went, immediately declared it to be my favorite game of all time. On a mechanical level, maybe this is what I'd call the best game ever made. I honestly struggle to think of anything that makes me buzz as much as this does, and that's despite my wife Youmu being one of my least favorite characters here to use! It was an uphill battle from there and the game so firmly won me over that it didn't matter. The game told me I'd be an Iku fan going forward and I was powerless to say no to it. I wasn't before, I had no real opinion of her, but now seeing her gets me fired up and ready to spill out a dozen stories about fights she carried to a win when everything looked hopeless.
Then also when you finish the normal dungeon crawler story you get more dungeon crawling but everything is ratcheted up to insane degrees. It might've taken you 30 hours to get a party to an average level of 50, but suddenly you hit hour 100 and you're fighting bosses at level 12000 and how did it come to this? The game holds back nothing. I respect it so much. All the item descriptions are references to eroge that are filled with personal anecdotes like "the end scene in this game is one of the best things I've ever seen" because it is the purest expression of someone's deeply nerdy joy you can imagine.
Also I listened to the title screen music on repeat for like an hour when I was sad and came out the other end of it having written the best thing I've ever made, so when I say this game makes my brain light up, I truly mean it.
What a fucking achievement.