Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City
2010
- role-playing (rpg)
- adventure
- fantasy
- single player
The story
The embodiment of adventure and discovery in the purest sense, Etrian Odyssey III transports gamers to a sparkling oceanic paradise filled with atmospheric dungeons to chart and survey, vast watery expanses to sail across, and rumors of a sunken city to investigate. Aspiring explorers are responsible for charting their travels utilizing the intuitive touchscreen map editor, meaning that careless cartography could easily spell doom for a fatigued party trying to escape danger. Powerful challenges demand cunning and strategy: players will assemble and fully customize their party of adventurers from a variety of highly specialized classes and sub-classes. For the patient and prepared, fame and fortune await.
What it’s like
Bright, sun-struck seas and dim, stone-walled dungeons, rendered in crisp low-poly 3D from a first-person view, with the touchscreen's hand-inked map gradually filling the lower screen like a traveller's notebook. The palette swings between glittering turquoise harbours and the cool blue-grey of flooded ruins, and the day and night cycle shifts the mood of the same corridors. The soundtrack leans toward swelling nautical themes that drop into quiet, echoing passages between fights. The pace is deliberate and methodical: long stretches of careful mapping, planning, and step-by-step exploration, broken by tense, turn-based battles against strange creatures, where a single careless step can lead to a wiped party. Violence is stylised and fantasy-scaled, with monsters falling and characters occasionally dying, but there is little gore and no sexual content. The mood is focused, quietly satisfying concentration, with a steady undercurrent of unease in the deeper floors. It suits a slow weekend afternoon, a handheld session on a train, or an evening with a notebook nearby. It's for players who love mapping, tinkering with party builds, and the slow thrill of discovery.
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