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.

Reviewed on Mar 08, 2023


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