Etrian Odyssey II HD

Etrian Odyssey II HD is a remaster of ATLUS's classic first-person dungeon crawler, set in the sky city of High Lagaard. You build a party of up to five adventurers from a roster of distinct classes, draw your own maps on a grid (yes, literally, using the in-game mapping tools), and grind your way through the floors of Yggdrasil, a colossal labyrinthine tree that connects the city to something much stranger above the clouds. If you bounced off the original DS release back in the day, the HD version smooths some rough edges without gutting what made it interesting. The class system is the real hook here. You pick from options like Survivalists, Hexers, War Magi, and the returning Gunner, and then you spend skill points across branching trees that genuinely shape how your party operates at a mechanical level. A Troubadour buffing your Ronin while a Medic keeps the back row alive sounds routine until a FOE wanders into the corridor and the whole plan collapses in two rounds. FOEs are those big, roaming overworld enemies visible on the dungeon floor, and learning their patrol patterns is closer to a puzzle than a fight. The moment you successfully outmaneuver one to grab a chest behind it feels earned in a way that most modern RPGs have forgotten how to do. Narrative depth is not this game's strongest suit, and if you come in expecting BG3-level character writing you will leave disappointed. The story of High Lagaard and the mystery behind the Heavenly Keep is genuinely interesting in its back half, and the worldbuilding does a quiet, atmospheric job of making the city feel lived-in. But your party members are blank-slate adventurers with no dialogue or arcs. The storytelling is environmental and systemic, told through the dungeon design and the occasional NPC quest at the Stickleback Bar. For players who want to project their own narrative onto silent protagonists, that works. For anyone who needs a Shadowheart to keep them going, this will feel sparse. The HD remaster adds widescreen support, updated visuals, and rearranged music options alongside the original soundtrack. The quality-of-life additions are sensible without being hand-holdy. The difficulty is still steep by modern standards. Random encounters hit hard early, the economy is tight, and the game will cheerfully kill your whole party on the second stratum if you stop paying attention. There is no filler in the sense of bloated open-world padding, but there is grinding, and the gap between meaningful dungeon exploration and repetitive encounter management can get narrow around the mid-game. Save often. Map everything. Do not fight the crab. If you have already played the Nexus or the first HD remaster and want more of the same careful, demanding cartography with a slightly richer story hook, EO2 HD delivers. If you are new to the series, this is a reasonable entry point, though the first game's HD version is arguably a gentler introduction. Either way, this is a game that respects your time by refusing to waste it on cutscenes and instead dares you to figure out what is actually killing you on floor six.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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