#ETRIAN ODYSSEY 4 CLASSES PORTRAITS SERIES#

If you want your party members to have personalities, backstories, and interpersonal dynamics, you have to come up with them yourself. YouвЂ™re given a vague ultimate goal and maybe a villain in the final stratum, but thereвЂ™s a lot of blank space in between. These games are purposefully big on the mechanics and light on story. You explore dungeons, fight monsters, and do a lot of strategizing for dozens of hours, with the ultimate goal of reached the top (or the bottom, in some of the games) of the labyrinth. You take control of a party of adventures and traverse a giant labyrinth comprised of several smaller dungeons, drawing your own map of the many floors as you go.

#ETRIAN ODYSSEY 4 CLASSES PORTRAITS SERIES#

If youвЂ™ve never played them, the Etrian Odyssey games are a series of dungeon-crawling RPGs on the Nintendo DS and 3DS. From left to right: Finn, Aoife, Christine, Silas. I never end up finishing that file, but IвЂ™ve played every Etrian Odyssey game I can get my hands on since, and I have Mallory to thank for at least one fifth of that. The party does pretty well until they stall on an optional boss and I get really busy with school work. While our attackers go on the offense and our defensive members keep us alive, Mallory helps both parts do their job better. Mallory becomes the team support, capable of buffing our attack, defense, and elemental resistances. Eventually, it doesnвЂ™t feel weird at all. It feels weird at first, like IвЂ™ve discovered some kind of exploit or cheat, but as I tab over to MalloryвЂ™s skill tree and break out my pen, I start feeling more comfortable with it.

I pick the leftmost Troubadour portrait, the one i like the most, and I name her Mallory. I realize thereвЂ™s nothing actually stopping me from just picking the portrait I like and saying this character is a girl, so thatвЂ™s what I do. Sure, the portraits are pretty obviously coded, with two masculine and two feminine for each class, but gender is only implied, never made explicit. I have made four out of five characters, and looking back, not once have I been made to choose a gender for any of them. ItвЂ™s just an impulse at first, and initially I dismiss it, but I come back to the thought, and itвЂ™s not as ridiculous as it first seemed.

The Troubadour portraits in Etrian Odyysey Untold. Why couldnвЂ™t I just make my character a girl, no matter what portrait I chose? IвЂ™m sitting on the couch, DS in my hand, thinking about whether I want to suck it up or try to find a different class, when I have a thought. Unfortunately, the only Troubadour portrait I really like is one of the male portraits. TheyвЂ™re not bad, exactly, but if IвЂ™m going to be looking at this portrait for the entire game, I want it to be one I like. I want my last character to be a girl, but donвЂ™t really like any of the female Troubadour portraits. IвЂ™m kind of eyeing the Troubadour, EOUвЂ™s take on the bard archetype, but the character portraits are giving me pause. Those choices were easy, but IвЂ™m stalling on the last. My first four characters have covered all the classic RPG archetypes: frontline fighter, tank, healer, and spellcaster. On the last party member I hit a roadblock. IвЂ™m spending a lot of time creating my adventuring party, because if you give me nine classes with their own skill trees and a wealth of synergy between them, IвЂ™m gonna bust out my notebook. ItвЂ™s not technically my first Etrian Odyssey game, but I only spent about three hours with my short-lived copy of Etrian Odyssey 4 before it broke, so itвЂ™s kind of my first experience with the series, if you squint a bit. ItвЂ™s the fall of September, 2013, and I am playing Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl.

Etrian odyssey 4 classes portraits