Atlus announced a crossover between their Etrian Odyssey franchise and the Mystery Dungeon franchise in the same livestream that announced Etrian Odyssey V. Titled “Etrian Odyssey and Mystery Dungeon” and developed for the 3DS, the game is a collaboration between Atlus and Spike Chunsoft. The game already has a planned release date of March 5th and will retail for ¥6,980.
Gematsu writes that an announcement trailer for the game describes the crossover as for “those of you who’ve played 1,000 times” and for “those of you who want to play 10,000 times”, perhaps positioning the game as one meant for diehard fans. They have also produced a list of staff working on Etrian Odyssey and Mystery Dungeon, information found in the trailer and the newly launched website for the game. I’ll reproduce the table that Gematsu created here:
Atlus (Production)
- Producer – Sigeo Komori
- Director – Yukari Yokoro
Spike Chunsoft (Development)
- Planning and Director – Seiichiro Nagahata
- Character Design – Kaoru Hasegawa
Etrian Odyssey Series Staff
- Music – Yuzo Koshiro
- Class Design Drafter – Yuji Himukai
- Monster Design – Shin Nagasawa
- Art Supervisor – Nizou Yamamoto
For our readers who want a little more background on the Mystery Dungeon franchise, my fellow staffer Kuronoa offers some help:
Mystery Dungeon is Chunsoft’s pride and joy, their own interpretation of the “Roguelike” formula. Since 1993 they carefully crafted this style of dungeon crawling and made a name for themselves collaborating with the most respected RPG franchises. The series was originally conceived as a spinoff for Dragon Quest, starring DQIV’s lovable merchant oaf Torneko Taloon. Over time, official variants range from Final Fantasy (Chocobo as the star), to Namco’s The Tower of Druaga, Pokemon and an original story series titled Shiren the Wanderer. The series have also inspired clones such as Izuna on DS, Azure Dreams on Playstation and even variants of series we cover like Waku Waku Puyo Puyo Dungeon and Dramatic Dungeon: Sakura Taisen. To best explain the gameplay common with this series, players are sent to randomly generated dungeons full of hidden traps and enemy crowds. The game is turn-based, in which your every move, walking or attacking, counts as a turn and will cause all surrounding units to make a move accordingly. This thus creates a sense of strategy for the player requiring them to take the time to plan out how to get out of the situation. One wrong move could mean you will lose your items and money, or depending on the individual game the worst case scenario will mean resetting your experience level. This is not too much of a setback, you can always find decent item replacements and store everything valuable for later. I’m curious what Etrian Odyssey will bring to the table, especially if the iconic F.O.E. enemies show up because that can be terrifying in this type of gameplay.
Be sure to check out the trailer below! For those looking for a few additional screenshots, this Gematsu article is worth checking out.
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