Many early-era RPG fans still have those booklets buried in boxes at home. And so early dungeon crawlers gave players a fix of tabletop gaming for when their friends weren’t around. It was appealing because mapping was also a big part of the early Dungeons & Dragons experience. What was a flaw in game design became a defining quality of the genre. You needed a map, so players would buy grid paper books and carefully draw out maps as they journeyed. The labyrinth designs were quite complex, and the first-person perspective could be disorienting. Yes, the genre was genuinely loved for lacking a feature. What did people like about the dungeon crawler? Well, in the early days, a major part of it was that there was no in-game mapping tool. Our review.Įtrian Odyssey turned that around almost singlehandedly, and it did so by using the DS’ unique dual-screen hardware to take the genre back to its roots. Related reading: Atlus later used the Etrian Odyssey engine to produce the spectacular Persona Q dungeon crawler. After the NES and SNES enjoyed robust support from the genre, things dropped away significantly, and while there were still PC titles produced, it seemed that the once mighty approach to RPGs, frontlined by the likes of Wizardry and Might & Magic, was on the wane. At least as far as consoles were concerned. The original Etrian Odyssey, released in 2007, was something of a lifeline for the dungeon crawler genre.

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