A quick update on my progress through Etrian Odyssey II for the Nintendo DS.

As advertised, the game can be a challenge. I’ve had more than a few total party wipes, which means Game Over. Actually one aspect where I think they missed out on some fun is forcing a reload after your party dies. Since a Guild can house 30 members, wouldn’t it be cool if you had the option to form up another ‘rescue’ party to set out from town? Oh well, maybe in EO III.

But the game is compelling. Thanks to the fans at GameFaqs I’ve learned at least one reason to have extra characters: there are resource nodes in the dungeons, but it takes a particular Skill to gather resources from them. Rather than devoting skill points to these Skills with your “main” adventurers, the suggestion is to create a set of “gatherer” adventures, and send them in to collect resources (which can then be sold for coin). You can gather once per node per gather skill point, so ideally you’d have a party of 5 gatherers with maxed out gather skills. But such a party probably would never make it to the resource to be gathered. So there’s a nice balancing act in building a party with a good number of gatherers and sufficient ‘fighters’ to keep them alive.

Good fun still. Looking forward to the weekend and the chance to put some serious hours into the game.