Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl

Not particularly fond of the cartography gimmick as it basically just means you end up always hugging the walls of the maze and then draw a line around your path (the Hollow Knight school of thought on cartography is far better to me) but the game definitely needed some sort of hook because, outside of that, it's a pretty bog standard dungeon crawler (other than the turn order being a complete fucking mystery).

Beyond the random encounters larger enemies show up as avoidance hazards on the map but everything else along the way is just described through visual-novel style text - gruesome encounters, items, and even characters you talk to inside the dungeon are invisible until you hit the examine prompt to read about, rather than see, them. I at least would've wanted models for the few people you meet in dungeons rather than invisible-bar-a-prompt characters.

One thing I do appreciate is the combat. Each character seems to have unique ways of slightly healing party health during their turns, beyond just spells and potions, and the stronger offensive skills cost health as well as MP so you have to try and hit as many of the heal conditions as possible to stack them into a big enough heal to cancel out both your actions and the enemy's attacks. Makes everything take a bit more thought than the standard RPG formula of just throwing out your strongest attacks while your mage spams Cure. Unfortunately the UX design makes all these systems a bit of a slog: there's no reason to limit the amount of collection side-quests you can accept at once (let alone to like 5), the inventory system isn't great, and good luck figuring out how Grimoires work without opening up GameFAQs.

Would be really good as a podcast game if it didn't demand constant attention to notice the tiny difference in wall texture that denotes a shortcut through the level. You can kind of work out the rough location of the atypical flowers using the cartography feature but if you walk by one without seeing it to activate that's a whole lot of time-wasting one way or another - either going a longer way 'round every time you go through the floor, or backtracking (wall-hugging the whole way) when you realise you've come suspiciously far without finding one.

I picked this game up on recommendation that it's got a similar setting to Made In Abyss - which has one of the most well established and interesting settings I've seen, with each dungeon layer having its own distinctive physics/biology quirks that've spawned an entire ecosystem of wildlife unique to it - In Etrian Odyssey the first three layers are forests. It's also a ridiculously long game; those three forests are something like the first 30 hours of the game, and I've put in too much time to just drop it now, I have to see where the story goes and, to be fair, it's not doing anything bad. It's just so boringly paint-by-numbers.

My favourite character so far is Raquna who - somehow, in this generic medieval fantasy setting - is a normal Canadian girl from regular old Ontario who likes maple syrup.