After waiting patiently for almost two months, my most anticipated music purchase in a long time has finally arrived; Sekaiju no Meikyuu Piano To Gengakki No Namaensou Ni Yoru (Live Music by Piano and Strings: Sekaiju no MeiQ I & II Super Arrange Version), music from the game better known to English audiences as Etrian Odyssey, has finished ripping, and I am listening to its absolutely beautiful arrangements as I write, it (and Amarok) filling the room.

My love of Etrian Odyssey is well documented, so suffice it to say that if you are done hearing about my crush on this series, you can just stop reading now, but hopefully anyone with an appreciation for music can find something to love here.

Live Music by Piano and Strings is simply stunning. The album is thirteen lovely performances by a small ensemble (Chieko Amano, violin; Yuichiro Oonuki, piano; Minori Yamazaki, cello; Shuji Narikawa, guitar; Naoko Sato, percussion), which brings to life Norihiko Hibino’s arrangement of the Yuzo Koshiro compositions. Much more evenly than the recent Super Arrange Version of the second game, the album puts a very calming instrumental touch on the “retro” soundtrack, and the performances are noticeably emotive.

Nietzsche wrote that without music, life would be an error, and these are the class of albums that remind me, a gamer to the bone, of that fact — organic, live performances, nuanced in their composition, combining the theme of an original song with the love of an appreciative interpretation. For me, among video game albums, this is up there with Xenogears Light.

Someone was kind enough to upload one of the tracks, battle themes from the first and second games, made calming. I was sold on the album before I heard a note of it, but that preview made it a must-have, and now, as the album nears its end, I confidently say that it is one of my favorite albums. As I said when I was similarly (although more verbosely) gushing over Xenogears Light, these are the releases that prove video game music is, without a doubt, “real music,” and more ultimately, important as its own class of art.

Oh, and it comes with PDFs of the handwritten arrangements, sometimes appearing as little more than note scribbles and clues to the performers, which seems fitting in an ephemeral way. I find I can’t recommend any one track, but rather all of them. Every single one, in addition to standing on its own as a wonderful piece of music, serves another purpose — that being tickling my desire to play one of my favorite games all over again.

So, after having completed the Item Compendium as mentioned as the last accomplishment remaining in my last Etrian Odyssey lovefest, I fired up Etrian Odyssey II and began anew adventures into the unknown.

After spending roughly an hour weighing my party options, deciding on what kind of party I wanted and where to focus my guild members’ attention (and then changing my mind at least three times), I stepped foot into the labyrinth with a War Magus, Ronin, Gunner, Medic, and Alchemist. I was then reminded what pain felt like, needing to take the shortest path possible from the start to the stairs returning me to Lagaard’s safety.

It was comfortable.

In the past couple hours, I’ve mapped the first floor and have been soundly beaten by a FOE whose warnings from the game I gleefully ignored, not at all surprised by the resounding rhythm of my party dropping one by one. I’ve determined where to send my farmers on my next pass, and I’ve come across a couple of EO’s classic “your curiosity will hurt, but the payoff is good” events (including one designed to remind you of your early days in EO). And I’ve run to town with a shattered party and very little money more than once.

Thoughts on the game (in the scarce couple hours I’ve played it) include a couple expediencies in the interface and gameplay pacing (always welcome), a more consistent (by my memory, anyway) difficulty, a tuning of almost every class with more customization options and, in some cases, removal or revision of the überskills. Another welcome element is the game’s enjoyment in reminding you of the past — the event mentioned above, the presentation of the password import feature, and the reaction from the townspeople when it’s soon known that, yes, you are that guild from that place called Etria. It’s a nice little touch.

I’ve decided that I’ll make these little journal entries semi-frequent (so you may see one or two more before I forget and stop updating the site again), and in adding an Etrian Odyssey category to the hierarchy of my nonsense, I noticed that it has been roughly a year since I started EO. Hopefully it will not take me that long to complete the sequel, but even if it does, it’s looking to be just as enjoyable.

I finally beat the ultimate boss of Etrian Odyssey today, meaning I’ve finished the Monstrous Codex and just have the Item Compendium remaining… but, that’s not the point of this post.

I’ve been slowly working more people down and getting them to play the game, and in doing so I’m reminded of what makes it such a great game. I think that some time in the past, I’d said that “the game hates you", and time has led me to reconsider that statement.

The game respects you.

Sure, maybe an aspect of it (primarily the narration, for me) is a bit steeped in nostalgia, but the game knows what you want (or what it thinks you deserve) and presents it to you as clearly and easily as it can — it leaves you with a dungeon and a myriad of options for tackling it. But, practically every step of the way, you’re in control of the progression — how fast you advance, how gut-wrenching you make the FOE battles, how much focus you put on your favorite party members and how rounded your guild becomes. It sets the stage and lets you be the players, without latching itself onto your experience by burdening you with high fantasy plot and saving the world for love. Other RPGs can and do provide you that; Etrian Odyssey is around to relieve you of it. It is pure, as only RPG-fundamental water can be.

For its respect, it demands the same in kind. Having spent countless hours on the game, I’ve come to see my guild as a living thing — something I have grown and nurtured from its nascent stage to its present near-god state, the characters’ skills and names (my retired characters were replaced with those of the same class and name, with a “II” suffix) acting as personalizing scars and records, a sort of living history of thirty levels of dungeon exploration. It’s fun for me to watch other people start their journey.

And how it encourages exploration. The first task, even, is to map the first floor to an acceptable degree, and it sets you up for what the game expects of you — to make something with the blank slate it has presented you. Learn the way that is right for you to map, to equip your party, to set your expectations for the venture into the Labyrinth. There are completion benchmarks, of course, but Etrian Odyssey is wonderfully content to refuse to rope you along in plot or in archetype, to the point that the former is bare and the latter is entirely up to you. Create a traveling party of Medics (a challenge I would expect is only slightly less hardcore than the Final Fantasy four white mage challenge — but primarily so because Etrian Odyssey gives its Medics more options) if you so choose. Ignore the sidequests for a while? Fine. Arm yourself to the teeth by creating a party of farmers to compliment your adventurers? Great!

As my time in Etrian Odyssey comes to close with the last dozen or so items left to discover, I’m looking forward to the sequel. Not because there are unanswered plot points in the first, or a new earth-shattering game mechanic or killer class, but because, absent being able to bottle the experience of progressing through Etrian Odyssey for the first time unaided, I want to relive those first timid steps into a dungeon adventure that, if nothing else, became mine as I was given the freedom to write its story by my actions.

I really believe this is a singular experience, and that console or computer, eastern or western, this is one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played.

Two or so weeks ago, I finally finished the climax of Etrian Odyssey (commonly known as the “end boss"), in the sense that I saw the ending for the game, not conquered the game — there is still another stratum and a couple quests left to topple. All in all, it was a very enjoyable (and enjoyably frustrating, at times) experience, and the game has left me with a small sense of real accomplishment. I did not beat it, so much as I did pass its trials, and Etrian Odyssey II sounds like it will be just as enjoyable as the first.

In the end, EO is probably one of my favorite RPGs, which is saying a lot. There are of course the common favorites: Baldur’s Gate II, Final Fantasy VI, etc., but Etrian shines for what it isn’t. It is not a glossly conglomoration of drama, overpowered combat with spiky-haired, pencil-thin kids, and card games. It isn’t action intermingled between cutscenes. It doesn’t hold your hand through half of the game. It uses the DS’s stylus in a goddamn reasonable manner.

EO knows what it is and embraces it. There is a dungeon, and apparently you’ve assembled a gang of people who consider themselves adventurers and dungeon delvers, so what you have to do is obvious. Round peg, round hole.

That reminds me of a sentiment sprinkled here and there in the press for the game — the game keeps plot sparce and PC character development nil so that the player can imagine their own stories and motivations, however reasonable or not. In my game, the guild was named after the gaming group, and the characters were all friends from the group. In my mind, their motivation was simple, and as just described — much like how we get together to play D&D, the quest for the group was running head-first into danger together, sharing in accomplishment and defeat, the joy of a close battle and the fear of an even closer one. And I pictured myself as the guildmaster; not a participant, but the orchestrator, the one getting the party into the messes they so gleefully got themselves out of.

It sounds hokey, but it worked for me. I catch myself every now and then, seeing friends’ D&D characters in a slightly EO light: Mark’s cleric a stalwart center for the party, Aaron’s exemplar brute force in combat. Granted, the class selection for the characters were inspired to varying degrees by their then-current D&D characters, but nevertheless, EO had no small part in making the characters of both games feel a bit more real.

Off that, however, and back onto the actual game. The supplied plot is decent, but low on surprises; surprising, however, is the writing supplied for the town’s NPCs, a couple being presented well enough that you can become momentarily attached to their unanimated, never-leaving-the-shop lives. But, in the end, it’s all about exploration and combat, which it delivers superbly. The game is one that dials into its desired formula (backs-to-the-wall difficult dungeon diving), assembles it into an old-school feel what with the first-person view, the mapping, and the PC-88 original soundtrack, and supplies it throughout, without distraction or deviation.

Not incidentally, I think this may be the first RPG I’ve beaten since Neverwinter Nights, another favorite. Currently competing for the next slot is any of The World Ends With You, Rondo of Swords, and Final Fantasy III. Hopefully, those won’t take me five+ years…

Random thoughts today:

• Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard comes to us North Americans in June. Check out Atlus’ promotional site.
• I think I let my Rock Band guitar skills lapse for too long. I did far worse on the Metallica songs than I have in the past, I still can’t get through Joker & the Thief on Hard guitar, and Suffragette City is equally unscalable on Expert guitar.
• It seems more likely that my video card is dying. I’ve been pretending to be interested in an 8800GT, but I’m not really sure how much I care until it no longer pushes air.
• Seriously, Etrian Odyssey II. I don’t know if I’ve looked forward to a game more in recent history. The gunner class looks like it could be interesting, and I’m even a bit excited about some minor details: more map icons (hopefully the hard limit on the number of icons you can place per map is gone, too), and, thankfully, you can now browse your characters’ equipment while deep in the store menus.

I don’t think I ever spat out what I thought about the Nintendo DS games I own and have been playing, and there’s no time like the present, as I sit here pondering new purchases and preparing for another quasi-streak of gaming over the coming weeks (as much as can be fit into my work schedule).

• Advance Wars: Dual Strike — a quite engaging strategy game with more than sufficient depth, and some non-boiler plate (and occasionally also annoying) dialogue. Looking forward to getting deep into this one, it fell by the wayside when I had other things to do, as it is certainly a game for longer periods of play.
• Bomberman — Bomberman. Bought it for the multiplayer, which is Bomberman. Bomberman. You can have up to 8 players playing locally on one DS cart.
• Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin — enjoyable Castlevania action, without too much obsessive item collection. Not by any means easy, either. The dual protagonist arrangement is nice, but the magic user generally is only rarely used as the primary character.
• Children of Mana — fun little hack and slash, although I found the combat leaning to the repetitive, but the differing level designs for each quest or plot-related dungeon romp kept it from being a borefest. Damned pretty, too, and the music is nice.
• Feel the Magic XY/XX — quirky as all hell, and sometimes a bit unnerving in the interaction with the female object of desire. Highly enjoyable in short bursts, though, which is how a game of minigames should work.
• Final Fantasy III — a nice remake of an old NES game never given a chance here for far too long. PC dialogue is shoehorned into the remake and sometimes it shows. The job system is good enough but hard to embrace having already played FFV. Nevertheless, a solid Square RPG, one which can only be described as enhanced for the DS.
• The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass — pretty damned great. My favorite Zelda since Link to the Past. The touch controls are great were it not for some spotty detection (a direction point being interpreted incorrectly as a sword slash and the like). The game is bordering on the easy, but still enjoyable adventuring.
• New Super Mario Bros. — a welcome platformer, feeling like a mix of SMB and SMB3, with slight additions from and nods to SMW, SMB2, and Yoshi’s Island. Mario controls kind of funnily, however, the new power-ups are kind of gimmicky and useless. Thankfully, though, the levels are nothing like the original SMB (despite the title), and the game manages to be fairly challenging at times.
• Pokémon Pearl — it’s a Pokémon game. Bought mainly for nostalgia purposes and to whittle away a couple long car trips (which were instead spent letting others play Portrait of Ruin, mostly), I haven’t played this much. Sounds kind of obsessive, like Pokémon in general. Will have to revisit some time later.
• Tetris DS — pretty flipping awesome. Almost as addictive as the original, with enough additional gameplay modes to keep interest up. Spent a good amount of time playing this online, mostly getting my ass kicked. Push mode is, surprisingly, a pretty clever addition to the Tetris world.

New games to play coming up: Etrian Odyssey, which sounds like my cup of tea, assuming I can find the time to put into it (ah, “hardcore” western RPGs), and an import of Jump Ultimate Stars, which sounds like good Smash Bros. fighting welcome in a world where Guilty Gear Dust Strikers apparently isn’t any good.