Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard - Thoughts

For anyone that bounced off of the first Etrian Odyssey, I have some bad news: the second is unabashedly more of the same. Etrian Odyssey II carries over the same classes, same mapping system, custom levelling, item grinding, dungeon dimensions, story beats... hell, even the UI is basically copied over! Sequels typically offer the developer a chance to make their franchise more accommodating and mainstream, but Etrian Odyssey II laughs at the suggestion, doubling down on its exotic blend of labyrinthine madness. If punishing mechanics or obtuse progression has deterred you from delving deeper into labyrinth of Etria, then take heed: the sequel is just as harsh and baffling, if not more so.

But for anyone charmed by Etrian Odyssey's brave debut, then prepare for an even bigger, smarter, and better adventure.

The best way to think about Etrian Odyssey II in relation to its predecessor is to picture the change from Mega Man 1 to Mega Man 2. To an outsider, it'll appear as if you've paid full price for a sizable expansion at best and a shallow reskin at worst. But veterans of the first expedition will find a massive new adventure in a familiar-but-fresh universe—with some absolutely essential quality of life tweaks! The foremost among these is found in the shop: your party's equipment is displayed on the bottom screen, letting you swap out and sell gear much more quickly. Not only that, but you can finally see how many materials a new piece of equipment requires, giving you a firm grasp on which enemies to keep an eye out for. Those may not sound like huge upgrades, but in a 50+ hour RPG where story accounts for 5% of your play time (if that), speeding up the inventory management is a delectable godsend.

Etrian Odyssey II also gives the shoulder buttons a much-needed reassignment, allowing you to strafe while walking around the labyrinth floor. But where they really shine is in battle: tapping the L button initiates a sped-up auto-battle, reducing much of the game's tedious grinding to a one-button affair. A slight kink however, is that it overwrites any of the previous commands you've entered as soon as you begin automating combat. For instance: want your samurai to a unleash devastating AoE guaranteed to kill the enemy forces, while not caring about what the rest of the party does? Well a single push of the L button will send everyone into a melee frenzy, erasing all previous commands so that the party focuses on the enemy with the lowest health (which is often the least troublesome foe). Even with that hitch, auto-battling is  great addition to the series—but it's clear there's still room for improvement here.

The changes made to map making however, are a splendid surprise through and through. The number of available icons has more than doubled: there's now closed doors, a FOE tile, a new event tile, two more gather location tiles, and multiple arrow tiles to keep track of the game's numerous secret passageways. Floor tiles also come in two more colors now, letting you differentiate between floor hazards and FOE walkways at a glance. Like the shop upgrades, these ostensibly minor additions have a huge impact in the grand scheme of things, making the game categorically better just for having them. Another small touch I like is how none of the icons come with pre-written tags (like "use this for treasure" or "use this for passageways"), encouraging the player come up with their cartography system. It's a simple touch that makes the bottom screen feel that much more like a digitized parchment scroll you must carefully maintain.

Not everything in Etrian Odyssey II is sunshine and rainbows, but there's barely any complaints here that can't also be leveraged at the first game. Strategy is sadly frontloaded; the bulk of your gameplay decisions apply to character building, as battles out in the labyrinth are simple, straight-forward affairs. While I applauded the first game for its risk management challenges, I found that aspect a bit routine this second time around—you'll almost always return to town when you're out of mana, use a warp wire when cornered by a new FOE, and check every wall in the game for invaluable shortcuts. By far the biggest improvement the series should make going forward is to display more conditional information on characters and enemies, like defense up, provoke, attack down, etc. It's also hard to tell if a boss is immune to a status effect or simply resistant to it, a frustration my hexer shared as she gambled every turn trying to figure out which ailment was the "correct" one. More information provided to the player is very rarely a bad thing.

An unexpected misstep Etrian Odyssey II makes that the first entry (arguably) avoided, is that your journey begins needlessly overbearing. The start of these games is always the most precarious: you have terrible gear, barely any abilities, and the abilities you do have are junk for the first few levels. But Etrian Odyssey 2 adds a ruthless economy atop this, providing a pittance for the items gathered in the labyrinth while bankrupting you whenever you're in need of a resurrection—let alone a night's stay at the inn! It took hours of grinding just to make it past the first boss, a task made stupendously more difficult due to FOEs providing no experience whatsoever. Should FOEs have awarded less experience in the first game? Sure—but this is an overcorrection you'll be reeling from the entire journey, given the sheer abundance of patrolling FOEs that bar your path.

Despite all of these gripes, I still found Etrian Odyssey II to be a good game—or at the very least, an inarguable improvement over the first. Geomagnetic poles wisely replace healing pools, cutting down on the backtracking required while simultaneously allowing bosses to hit harder (as you're always a stone's throw away from their front door). Dungeon events are also far more common, going from a rarity in the first game to an infrequent-but-exciting occurrence that can bestow anything from healing, to items, to lore, to robbery-by-rodent. Lastly, Etrian Odyssey II feels more balanced than its predecessor... though I confess I'm unsure how much of that is due to my new party composition. Going from LPD/AM to LPR/HM, I found this game much harder than the first; hell, I didn't even try the last stratum due to how brutal my battles with the Colossus and final boss were, especially with my rare item stock all but depleted.

(Plus I looked at a youtube video of how much damage the true last boss dealt and proceeded to laugh as I hurriedly ejected the cart from my 3DS).

Etrian Odyssey II is an admirable follow-up to the first, although it does little to address the most off-putting characteristics of the series. But hey, that's fine! Etrian Odyssey II is a half-step in the right direction, offering a better, smoother experience through a gorgeously lethal fantasy labyrinth. It's paradoxically more punishing and less cruel than its predecessor, being easier to get through while demanding more time, thought, and focus from the player. Admittedly, I still have a smidge more fondness for the original entry, only because it made a stronger impression as my first JRPG dungeon crawler (I shall never forget the hell that was B18-20). Nevertheless, Etrian Odyssey II is the superior onboarding point for newcomers...

... but I have the sneaking suspicion it won't stay that way for long.

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Images obtained from: steamgriddb.com, dungeoncrawlers.org

Wizard of Legend - Thoughts

In the world of Wizard of Legend, mage battles are a lot closer to samurai duels than they are to the cover-based shootouts of Harry Potter. The game ranks as one of the fastest action titles I've ever played, requiring blisteringly precise inputs and split-second reactions in order to survive. It is merciless to the point of ludicrousness, rarely doling out full heals all while gleefully locking you into rooms with enemies that can (and will!) combo you to death. There are no i-frames, no insta-win upgrades, and no meta-progression to make the game more fair; you will learn to play by Wizard of Legend's rules, or get decimated trying.

And during its first twenty hours, I sure as hell got decimated.

In a lot of ways, I am reminded of my time with ScourgeBringer, another excellent roguelite where one badly bungled room can destroy an entire run. Both games aren't shy about hammering the player over and over for petty mistakes, but at least ScourgeBringer offers permanent upgrades that will become essential to your victory. Wizard of Legend instead boasts wider customization options out of the gate: your choice of a starting relic, cloak type, and your four core attacks. But its in-run upgrades provide significantly less impact than the blessings found in the Ordeal. I don't think one approach is superior to another per se—especially since you'll have to learn both games to the point of mastery anyway—but at least ScourgeBringer provides a sense of momentum as you gather upgrades throughout a run. Wizard of Legend on the other hand, is a vicious, no-holds-barred brawl that can kill you at the start just as easily as it can at the end.

What makes Wizard of Legend one of the most cutthroat roguelites I've played is that everybody in it is susceptible to stunlocking. Enemies, the player, bosses—all will kneel before the great leveler of the infinite combo. Well, provided they don't have any hyper armor on—which your enemies will evolve by floor two, by the way. Even the lowliest of dregs are capable of interrupting your earth-shattering specials, a mere slap setting you up nicely for their brawny buddies to tag-team you into oblivion. Some players may enjoy this ruthless "first to strike is first to win" philosophy, as it forces everyone to play by the same rules. But I guarantee that no matter what your preferred playstyle is, Wizard of Legend will wrench more than one exasperated expletive from your mouth as you watch your tiny warlock hopelessly battered back and forth like a well-worn tetherball. (I believe my first utterance of "Jesus Christ" was when two cyclopses beamed a geyser of red 5s out of my forehead.)

Due to the aggressive combat, you'll likely lean heavily into the game's ranged arcana—especially since flashy melee attacks leave you exposed for a fraction of a second too long. This has a tendency to render runs somewhat samey, especially once you discover that each elemental arcana comes with the same staples (rushdown attack, big AoE, delayed AoE, weak summon, strong summon, buff, totem, etc). This may imply Wizard of Legend lacks variety, but that couldn't be further from the truth; there's an impressive amount of arcanas, relics, cloaks, merchants, room layouts, and enemy attacks to memorize, fully capable of surprising you with something new 20 hours in. The issue is that you'll be quick to play favorites and slow to experiment, treating some of the relics and arcanas as obstacles in your path rather than tools to play around with.

Personal preference is inevitable in every roguelite, but since you can decide your most of your equipment before a run begins in Wizard of Legend, you'll have little reason to veer from your intended course. Which is a shame because it's a lot of fun in experimenting with new arcana and seeing how they work, even if they may not be all that useful. Better yet is when a previously-thought "worthless" arcana reveals its value as you grow accustomed to it: summons provide an excellent distraction, dash arcana can punish bothersome pursuers, and buffs can turn basic arcanas into full-fledged wrecking balls. Ranged attacks remain king of course—especially when dueling the final boss—but at least you'll have plenty of attacks to cycle between if you get tired of your usual loadout.

Speaking of the final boss, Wizard of Legend's big bad master mage joins the nightmarish ranks FTL's Flagship and Slay the Spire's Heart, where you must build your repertoire around their abilities. Dominating the rest of the game with a solid loadout means nothing if you're unable to strike Master Sura while he's vulnerable, a task that'll only grow harder as the fight wears on. And even if you manage to stun him, he can recover in the blink of an eye and retaliate with a string of lightning-fast combos, erasing your health with the fury of a teacher cleaning a swear word off their chalkboard. Even if you enter into it at full health, the duel remains a horridly lethal race to the bottom; I reckon I've lost more times to Sura at the last 20% of his HP than I've actually beaten him.

I hope my endless griping about Wizard of Legend's difficulty doesn't belie the fact that I really enjoyed my time with it. While it doesn't hit the consistent highs of the genre's best, in no way did I find it lacking or failing to live up to its potential. Sure, maps have too many dead ends and the game struggles to encourage experimentation, but for the most part it ticks all the right boxes: a good amount of randomization, an enjoyable combat system, fantastic animations, no external wiki help required, and a hard-earned victory you can be proud of. I suppose I'm hammering on Wizard of Legend's difficulty so much because the game lives or dies based off of whether you think it's unfair or not. And make no mistake—you will definitely find it unfair at times (like when you're being juggled to high hell during the wind master's signature arcana god damn knock it offfff!)

Similar to Spelunky, death is an ever-looming presence in Wizard of Legend, a shadow you're unable to shake. It forces you to play at a distance at all times, turning certain arcanas into a must-have, certain relics into a must-buy, and certain curses into a must-take. Wizard of Legend does offer build variety, with melee and rushdown builds blinking on the horizon like a shy lighthouse, but to cross the water is to chance drowning in a game full of turbulent waves. One wrong move, one miscalculation, and you'll be spent spiraling into the nether, death's icy grip clamping around your throat. In high-intensity games like Devil May Cry and Doom Eternal, you are the one to be feared, a force of nature laying waste to those foolish enough to get in your way. But in Wizard of Legend, you are a glass cannon, capable of shattering into a thousand pieces due to one impulsive misfire.

Wizard of Legend is cool—and fun!—but it has zero qualms about pulling down your pants to turn your ass into a pair of bongos.

Loop Hero - Thoughts

Loop Hero is a novel concept that struggles to "wow" the player beyond its drawing board. You're not likely to notice it during your first dozen hours or so, where everything is new, exciting, and strange. Unfamiliarity will usher in intrigue, the sense of discovery propelling you onward as the next upgrade, tile, and unlock is just around the corner. In that sense, I think Loop Hero succeeds in being a worthwhile experience with plenty of highs to look forward to—but its foundation is shaky, its philosophy confused, and its mechanics drunkenly slapped together. It's a beautiful game full of conflicting bits and frustrating design choices, leaving a bitter aftertaste only because it shows so much potential.

It's important to emphasize how utterly ingenious Loop Hero is—especially in a genre overflowing with imitators. Roguelites often fit snugly into "X-like" categories (eg "Isaac-likes, Spire-likes), but Loop Hero skirts all comparisons and mimicry. It's a bizarre amalgam of ideas: base building, auto battling, tile laying, hand management, and crunchy RPG equipment juggling. You get a little bit of everything, from loadout tinkering to permanent progression, from reliable strategies to RNG-derived wins. There's likely something here to tickle your fancy, as well as a gameplay concept you haven't encountered before—or at least, not in the peculiar way Loop Hero handles it.

On top of all that, Loop Hero's aesthetics are downright unmatched. The pixelated art style captures the world's bleakness better than its stilted writing ever could, with easily readable tile design and phenomenal color composition. The character portraits in particular are wonderfully rendered, with each friend and foe being as wildly strange as they are hauntingly beautiful. Complementing the carefully crafted visuals is a chiptune soundtrack that slaps so hard that you'll have to check your ears for bruises afterwards. It's impossible to name a favorite tune—pick any track out of the expansive OST and you'll get toe-tapping beats, chill jams and moody meditations. But where Loop Hero goes its hardest is in its boss-appearance themes, tossing the player into some of the most exceptional, hype-inducing headbangs to rouse your anticipation of the upcoming boss fight perfectly. I can't commend Deceiver and blinch enough for their positively phenomenal work

So if everything about Loop Hero stands out, where does it fall apart? The answer to that will require some digging...

... or rather, some constructing.

The base building system in Loop Hero is terrible in just about every conceivable way. While promising at the onset, you'll soon realize it's an elaborate front for unlocking new tiles. The placement of your shantytown is largely nebulous; only farms and lumber mills benefit from adjacency bonuses, but both are straight-up sunk costs, requiring way more resources to construct than they'll ever produce (seriously, you're giving me stable branches?!) In fact, a lot of the upgrades come across as the developers tossing crumbs at the player: 1% potion heals, garbage starting equipment, +30 max HP, and needless supply cap increases. Building upgrades are arbitrarily assigned (no upgrades for the warehouse and alchemist, but five for the watchtower?) and you're not likely to even notice this feature without the "?" tooltip on. Perhaps worst of all is that the intel center—a useful catalogue of everything seen and unlocked in the game—can only be built halfway through the campaign, forcing the player to learn much of the game's inner-workings on their own.

Exacerbating this problem are the game's numerous currencies, making it hard to parse what you need and where to get it. The resources start off simple enough—wood, stone, food, and metal—but they soon spiral into a grocery list of metaphysical concepts—evolution orbs, unity orbs, expansion orbs, and more. Each of these also come with their own fragmented version, complete with a different name and icon from their parent, just so you'll have to deal with nonsense equations like how 10 time shards form an astral orb or 20 noticeable changes form a metamorphosis. Loop Hero's intention is to encourage variety and experimentation (eg fight slimes for resource X, skeletons for resource Y), but the player doesn't know where these goods come from until they unlock the intel center! And by then, the player is two upgrades away from discovering alchemy, allowing them to transmogrify one resource into another—completely bypassing the need to diversify your tiles!

And this is a real problem for Loop Hero because the game's tiles are an imbalanced, chaotic mess that push you to play favorites.

Every tile comes with its upside and downside, the upside usually being a buff or reliable enemy spawn, and the downside being a... well, an enemy. It's a smart way to ensure that the player has to be cautious and temperate with their tile placement, lest their road becomes one long monster crossing. But some tiles are categorically inferior to others: swamps are terrible, sands are terrible, chrono crystals and bookeries are better off being other tiles, and temporal beacons aren't worth the obnoxious watcher fights. Meanwhile the forest, blood grove, oblivion, and village tiles (with complementary vampire mansion) are so essential that you won't ever entertain a run without them. Sure, occasionally you'll flirt with an outpost or storm temple, but the benefits provided by the "good" tiles will have you crawling back to your original deck before day's end, no matter which class you start as. The impressively dubbed "gold tiles" also suffer the same fate, with the arsenal tile being the only reliable pick of the lot (the necromancer and crypt can synergize, but once the HP-gain kicks into high gear you're already unkillable anyway).

Battles are my last point of contention, though I admit a big part of it is that auto-battlers simply aren't for me. Loop Hero's bestiary has a shocking amount of depth and diversity woven into it—the sheer number of status effects puts most RPGs to shame—but that ultimately means very little in regards to gameplay. Whether an enemy can poison you, or buff its allies, or shields itself matters not, as you have no control over your character's actions during battle (besides donning and doffing equipment, which you'll very rarely do). You can influence the pace at which monsters spawn outside of battle, but the dominant tactic by far is to open the flood gates. Gear is only acquired from routing enemies, with better gear dropping from stronger opponents—so you'll want to toss as many aggressive foes at your tiny patrolman as possible. Not only that, but certain monsters (like blood golems and vampire lords) provide categorically better loot than their peers, further differentiating the good tiles from the bad. I think if the player was given limited abilities they could activate per run, or one-time-use items, or even the option to manually activate their own healing potions, I would've been at least engaged in most of the combat, rather than browsing the internet on my second monitor.

I didn't realize until writing this entry just how much Loop Hero and Vampire Survivors have in common. While the promise of progression serves as their main hook, most of my enjoyment was wrung out of discovering the optimal strategy for both games. These titles aren't like Dead Cells or Hades, where a successful run leaves you giddy to toy with a new weapon or perk path; once you figure out how to properly "play" these games, all that's left to do is sit back and let your kill count skyrocket. But whereas Vampire Survivors succeeds in being a clever little diversion, Loop Hero displays a lot more potential—and thus, falls from a greater height. It's worth a playing to experience just how unique of a game it is, but Loop Hero is less of a diamond in the rough and more of a... murky gemstone.

It's pretty, but sadly undercooked.