Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl Review

Welcome to the wonderful world of Etria (OR IS IT?)… and set sail for adventure!

About the Game

Genre: Single-player RPG

ESRB Rating: T for Teen.

Developer: Atlus

Publishers: Atlus; EU: NIS America

Composer: Yuzo Koshiro

Platform: Nintendo 2/3DS

Release Dates:

– Japan: June 26, 2013

– North America: October 1, 2013

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Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl (EOU) is, quite literally, a dungeon crawler. You’ll spend the majority of your time traversing very intricate dungeons in first person with one eye on the bottom screen, where the map functions lie. At least the dungeons are beautifully designed, artistically and from a gameplay perspective, and the map function distinguishes EOU from most other JRPGs. It’s actually a port/remake of the first Etrian Odyssey game with the addition of a brand new story mode.

I haven’t played any other Etrian Odyssey game, so I can only compare this to one other first-person dungeon crawler: Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers (or Soul Hackers). In Soul Hackers, the bottom half of your 3DS will have the map and will auto-fill parts of the map as you traverse them, showing doors, key items, walls, etc. However, in EOU, only “squares” of the map you step over will be painted. You’ll have to draw enclosures, place doors, secret paths, etc. on your own. It does get tedious by the end of the game, especially when the dungeons (which are puzzles themselves) get more and more intricate.

Like most RPGs, the game is very difficult at the early stages when your characters have no skills and really terrible gear, but it gets much better when you start leveling up and gaining new skills. On normal and expert difficulty, forget about auto-battling even the most basic monsters, unless you vastly out-level them. You’ll fight battles turn by turn by selecting your team’s moves and watching everyone duke it out. It certainly requires strategy to memorize turn orders and whatnot if you’re playing on a harder difficulty. If you don’t want to do all that, you can always change the difficulty to “Picnic” in the options and auto-battle your way to victory. You’ll still need to pay attention for bosses, though.

By the end of the game, the temptation to switch to Picnic grows ever greater because mobs require more effort to kill and the experience curve, while not very steep, still requires some grinding if you hope to have a chance against tougher enemies/bosses.

Not only that, I was getting hooked on the story mode and its characters. Every stratum of the Yggdrasil Labyrinth brought me closer to finding out more about the lovable cast. There’s the titular Millennium Girl, Frederica AKA “Ricky”; Raquna, the tomboyish rich girl who is actually your tank; Simon, the super serious doctor guy; Arthur, everyone’s favorite gung-ho alchemist; and of course, the silent protagonist, the Highlander. It was the characters and story that kept me diving deeper into the labyrinth. I really wanted to know more about Ricky and see how the other characters would react to my choices to uphold the Highlander’s code: True justice for all.

It has your typical anime clichés and all, and it’s not exactly Shakespeare, but like all Atlus games, it just executes everything so damn well. The characters and the story mode are the big selling points for me. And the music is so, so good. It honestly brings each dungeon to life, and by the end, the music of the final stratum left me a little sad that my journey was coming to an end.

I mentioned the basic features of the game, but there are too many things to go very in-depth about without turning this into another SMTIV review. You can hybridize or provide utility to your characters with Grimoire Stones (think materia from FFVII), you can change your classes, you can do side quests, you can talk to the minor characters as the story progresses, and so much more.  I haven’t even touched upon the classic mode, which is pure dungeon diving with a custom party of any class combination you could want. I didn’t get too far into it because once I started the story mode, I just couldn’t stop.

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TL;DR? I give Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl a very good 8 out of 10. Thank you, based Atlus.

If you’re looking for a satisfying JRPG with tons of depth, EOU is definitely for you. I know I’ve become a fan, and I’m totally looking forward to trying out the other/future games in the series.

What I liked:

– Strategic combat and exploration

– Flexible difficulties and options

– Lots of New Game+ and end-game options

– Awesome characters

– Engaging story

– Oh, the Atlus twists that were actually foreshadowed the whole time

– Atmospheric music

– Well-designed dungeons relevant to the plot

– Solid art direction and design

– Ricky best girl

What I didn’t like:

– Grindy at certain points (however, Picnic mode basically eliminates grinding)

– Combat not nearly as fluid as Persona or SMTIV

– Absurd fee for reassigning skill points and changing classes

– More Miyazaki than Hayao Miyazaki himself at times

– Mapping gets old by the end

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