I’ve been having a lot of fun with playing games again the last month or so, and I found a new genre that I have really enjoy, DRPGs, old school first person dungeon crawlers, with more focus on mechanics than story, and they have really been scratching an itch I didn’t really know that I had.

Probably the most known of these are the Etrian Odyssey series, and they are wonderful, I really like the nature feeling envioronmental labyrinths, the graphics looks pretty amazing for being on the Nintendo DS, and they are difficult, but fair. It’s a lot of fun delving into the labyrinth again and again, getting a little bit deeper each time.

Now it’s not that weird that Etrian Odyssey is the biggest, it’s developed by a big known developer ATLUS, which is probably more known for the Persona series or lately Re:Fantasio, but there are a number of smaller companies that do DRPGs as well, Experience inc. being one of them that I’ve kind of really fallen into liking a lot. The games can look kind of samey, but there is something about the graphics and feel of these games that really appeals to me, and the steady slow progress just really appeals to me.

There are some things I’m not a fan of, and it’s like in most games, Gimmick bosses, they just never were fun to me, sure make them have some personality, and let them be gates for levels or items, but having only one kind of damage damage them so that I have to rebuild my whole team and grind them up, that kind of thing just isn’t fun.

It’s always really nice to get into a new genre, suddenly a lot of games that you didn’t think about gets open, and it’s really nice. I’ll be working on more of them, I’ve only finished Etrian Odyssey II and gotten very far in Demon Gaze, and got sidetracked playing “Promise mascot Agency” but I’m quite sure I will drop down in the dungeons again for some more slow progress.