Etrian Odyssey is one of my favorite niche franchises, but it can sometimes be a tough sell. A lot of care and time was spent on developing each game to feel like a new experience. With the demise of the 3DS, I couldn't help but worry that the franchise had finally been left behind. Thankfully, Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection, a collection of the first three games in the franchise, shows that there's still plenty of life in the cult classics.

The Etrian Odyssey franchise began on the Nintendo DS and, until recently, the titles have been exclusive to that console. The titles were known for being a modernized take on old-school dungeon crawling, with high difficulty, slow pacing, and a heavy focus on the need to map yourself. As the games progressed, they have gotten more complex, but even the original Etrian Odyssey still has a ton of depth and challenge.

Each game has its own set of distinct classes that interact with one another in different ways. Some are focused on offense, some on defense, some can lock down enemies with binding attacks, and others can poison and debuff. Building the perfect team takes a lot of time and effort, and you're encouraged to run multiple characters, as certain rare items or difficult enemies require you to have a specific set of skills.

Probably the most memorable addition to dungeon crawling are F.O.E.s. This acronym, which occasionally changes its meaning from game to game, is the name for incredibly powerful foes that wander the dungeons. Some are docile and let you walk past; others may chase you, get aggro'd by certain actions, or require you to sneak past. They add a level of tension to the game and reward players for being smart about exploration and mapping. Each one is also a miniboss that you can take on at any time; it's a wonderful feature that encourages players to test their strength and rewards them for exploring earlier areas of the dungeons.

Make no mistake that these titles are dungeon crawlers first and foremost. While each game has an overarching storyline, it's generally rather light. You'll have a handful of NPCs and a few major plot events, but the real fun is the experiences you create. This means that if you're expecting something as plot-heavy as Atlus' other titles, you might be in for a disappointment. Etrian Odyssey is almost always a case of mechanics before plot, and while I enjoy them for that, some people would prefer more of a plot.

There are quite a few minor quality of life changes under the hood of the games. Modern features like auto-map and auto-battle have been backported along with useful things like a mid-battle codex that can show enemy strengths and weaknesses. A lot of combat skills also saw minor tweaking, either with buffs, removing "dead" levels, or fixing bugs that made them not work correctly. As far as I can tell, the development team provided fixes that benefitted the player, so things like Etrian Odyssey 1's absurdly good Immunize ability remained intact.

Players also retain the ability to modify and customize their own map — or draw it themselves. This is the defining feature of the series, and Etrian Odyssey has always put a lot of stock in asking players to draw their own maps. The attempts to modify this for non-touch-screen machines is largely successful. With the tap of a button, you can bring up your map and view it at any time, and the auto-mapping feature prevents you from having to draw each line. Regardless of how you play, there's a lot less busy work in these versions compared to their original releases.

With a mouse and keyboard, you can simply point and click to draw the map, which is just as good as the stylus was. On the gamepad, there are various button combinations to select various options. The gamepad works well enough, but it's inevitably more awkward than the alternative options. It's not enough to sour the games, especially since the new features automate a lot of what was done manually before, but if you have the option to play Etrian Odyssey on something with a mouse or similar, I'd recommend that instead.

The HD visuals will be the most noticeable thing for newcomers and longtime players alike. The entire game now has full widescreen support, and all of the environments and sprites have been done in lush HD visuals. The graphics are still basic and have relatively few animations, but everything is bright, colorful and clear. This is the best-looking version of all three games to date. I even prefer it to the technically more "advanced" 3D graphics from some of the remakes. The franchise's music, which is almost universally one of its strong points, has been revamped (though not remixed), so it sounds better than a straight port of music designed for the Nintendo DS.

However, there is one elephant in the room that keeps Etrian Odyssey Origins from being the ideal version of the games, and that is the fact that they are based on the DS iterations. That means the updated features from the Untold remakes are almost entirely absent, barring the Picnic mode, which makes the game easier. A fair amount of content, including the story modes and new classes, were left out from these theoretical "definitive" versions of the games. On a personal level, I preferred Etrian Odyssey 1's overall design ethos to Untold's, which focused more on the story mode, but I'd rather have had a genuine choice between the two, especially since the relatively light story is something that could turn off people from the game.

This lack of extra content is noteworthy when coming alongside the absolutely ridiculous price tag. The collection costs $80, while each game on its own is $40. This is effectively how much the Untold versions of the game had cost when new! Another recent portable-game-turned-collection, Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection, effectively had twice the number of games for $20 less. Origins has a fair amount of work put into it, but it's not enough to justify that cost compared to almost any other collection on the market.

Overall Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection is a solid, if overpriced, collection of some excellent dungeon crawlers. The same core gameplay remains strong to this day, but series vets might be annoyed at the lack of Untold's features. Any of the games is an excellent game on its own and provides gameplay for quite a while. If not for the price tag, this is an incredibly easy game to recommend, with or without Untold features. Even the most hardcore of Etrian Odyssey fans may want to stick to one game or wait for a sale.

Score: 8.0/10