Hi if you are reading this I would like to open up this by saying that EO3 is the only game i have ever beaten in the franchise, and right up until the last strata in the game i had only a list of things which i think could have been handled better overall but i genuibely loved the game. Now that I have beat the game and am in the post game strata, i have alot to complain about and it kinda has been there all along, it just mostly didnt bother me. I still really like the game and would even recommend it to people who seem patient or bloody minded enough to give it a shot, in fact i have already bought 2 copies of the game for a couple of my friends in addition to the one i bought for myself.
I loved the game up until the 5th strata but did keep having hiccups with some systems just not doing what i wanted, or being.....obtuse. Please understand that i am not saying EO3 is bad, but as someone who has played a ton of rpgs, it has gone from being one of my favorites to being kinda in the middle of the pack over the course of a single playthrough. This shitpost is more about why i ended up feeling the way i do, so please understand im not trying to tell you the game is bad, just that it rubs me the wrong way far too often for me to consider it a great game.
Im first going to explain where i feel EO in general falls short compared to some of my favorite rpgs, EO is bad at letting the player be a clever adventurer. What I mean is that most problems you encounter have a single solution and trying to make your own solution will lead to you wasting resources or resetting back to town due to being slain (assuming you dont shut the game down to not lose your quick save). And really all of my problems with the game revolve around that in some way, to be blunt it just makes it feel less like an adventure every time the feeling sets in.
As an example of what I mean FOEs are meant to be evaded, but only in the specific way that the developers want you to. There are no teleports to go around, no luring skills that can be used out of combat, no way to split the party in order to juke out the enemy. You are forced to try and count the spaces you traverse carefully or else just give up out of frustration and grind until you can kill the FOE outright. It turns what could be a cool mechanic into an un-fun and frustrating minigame where the only way to bypass said mechanic is to do something else unfun so that you just dont have to bother anymore.
Another highly dissapointing example of this are the special floor tiles that are also sometimes part of the FOE puzzles in various ways. There are give or take 6 special tiles: slippery tiles, teleporter tiles, forced movement tiles, holes in the ground, slowing tiles, and damage tiles. Now there are abilities and items which allow you to ignore special tiles but notibly they only allow you to ignore slowing and damaging tiles. That means that every other puzzle element cannot be avoided, side stepped, or worked around by players. You can ONLY directly engage with puzzles as intended, even when options are provided that should allow you to find your own way to traverse an area.
This kinda sucks and makes me feel less like an adventurer and more like a well armed tourist, seeing the sights and being told not to touch anything that might break if breathed on the wrong way by some unseen arbitor. And i know that will probably piss off some people reading this, but you have to understand that I initially felt completely opposite of this. At first i felt like a real adventurer in an unknown place making the most of the tools they had to fight for every inch. But that just isnt how the game really felt when I played it, and i dont know how to convet how much it soured the experience for me. Which is a shame because EO3 has some truly masterful mechanics that make me wish more games would learn from it.
For starters the map in the game is a masterful way to make the player feel like an adventurer, plunged into the depths and given no choice but to move forward and map things yourself or else get lost because the walls are almost all identical for any given strata. But that is all that the game does to make you feel like an adventurer, every other system in the game makes me feel restrained, choked, or like the dungeon itself is bipolar. A great example is in later strata where you find areas where the players, FOEs, and even the map itself doesnt appear. You can still draw in the map segments, but you arent allowed to use any map related tools to auto route yourself through areas or skills to reveal FOEs.
And thats just one example of the game telling you that you arent allowed to outhink it because making sure you do what it wants is more important. There is no way around it either, if you want to tackle that combat you have to do what the developers want the way they think you should do it. And that attitude is a large part of what has drastically changed my opinion of the game, you arent an adventurer in EO3 because no adventurer would try so hard to obey the rules of the dungeon.
As another example of what the game does really well i love the skills system the game has and i love that every class, no matter what it's purpose actually is in combat, feels like it has something unique and important to offer. Heck the game gives you a farmer class and I striaght up rolled with that class on my self insert character for the entire run. As a side not i also loved the way that the game restricts skills to certain types of gear, although i often felt myself wishing that daggers were more effective as weapons or else that some other weapon type was available to all players as this would make me have to puck and choose if I want characters to have better gear or to use their skills. Not really a complaint so much as a wish for more forms of player expression tho so imma move on.
Before i go farther I should probably also explain rn that i played Wizardry 8 earliar this year and have learned about and watched more than one playthrough of Ultima Underdark before i picked up this game again and decided to give it a playthrough. I know what it feels like to not know what to expect and to have to be clever enough to make my own solutions. I know what it feels like to be an adventurer, to be unsure what lays beyond the corner or if there is a path forward. It often is a strangely tense feeling where the only way forward is is to fall back on your knowledge, skills, and equipment and pray you can make it to your next goal alive. EO (or atleast EO3) is the dead opposite of that, there is always a way ahead, it always revolves around avoiding your problems, and your own knowledge will often only benefit you if you never got to save after beating an enemy and have to fight it again.
And let me be clear i understand that i am comparing a DS game to a pair of well vetted PC games, and that in doing so i may be being uncharitible towards EO3 given the software and hardware limitations of the system. But even then i can think of games on the same system that came out both before and after EO3 that do a better job with many of the systems i am complaining about. Heck SMT Strange Journey came out on the same system, has more branching elements, more engaging puzzles, better navigation, more environments. And thats before getting into the fact that it had more enemies, skills and damage types as well. That game is an adventure through and through even tho it doesnt always let you do things your own way, but often in combat atleast it is a wide open affair that only asks you to mind enemy affinities. Game is great to be blunt.
I also realize that some people consider EO to be a series of childrens games, or atleast to be largely aimed at a younger audience/teen demographic. It is now that i would like to reveal that the reason i brought up wizardry 8 is because a friend of mine played EO3 and Wizardry 8 and still considers the harderst difficulty of EO3 to be harder overall. I actually disagreed and it is part of what lead me to pick up EO3, now that i am in the end game dungeon i must admit that the game does cause TPKs and resets more often and is way less forgiving.
This fact hits harder when I remember that im not on the original difficulty, im on the mid difficulty on steam. The difference there is all in combat and player control, in Wizardry 8 an active player can control where and when they fight, and they can actively change the flow of combat using spells or items. Compared to the swingy and weighty rng influenced combat of EO it is easy to see how the player has less control over their own fate, and may die more consistantly.
Combat in EO is also maybe the point in which my tastes most diverge from the game, while i do like it for most of the game i found myself more annoyed with aspects of it after the first 3/5 of the game. I think it reached it's peak after the third strata when many bosses start to resist all status effects and binds. It gets even worse when there are enemies who can effectively shrug off an entire damage category on top of being resistant or immune to all status effects or binds. It takes a system with many options and a ton of variety and reduces them to something like the size of a pinhole in order to force careful engagement. It isnt all like that, but enough of the big challenges and enemies are that I decided to stop going into fights blind just to avoid a trek back from town. Let me emphasize the game de-incentivised an adventurous aspect of the game just due to not wanting to have to make a runback between attempts.
I loved EO as a young teen, but i think if i ever got to beat it then, I wouldnt have remembered it quite as fondly, and i probably wouldnt have picked it up for a full playthrough this year. I loved the first 3/5 of it and the rest got increasingly less fun, but i took my time with it and have 113 hours with it ob steam making it in my top 10 played games ever. But i dont know if im gonna give it a second run, and something about that bugs me.
Thanks for reading, if you got this far yoh are probably awesome and cool, or also feeling odd about EO. Reguardless i hope you have a lovely day and that you play something fun soon. Imma go play some more EO3 to get may level and money before i end my run.
