Shin Megami Tensei Archive

Wizardry -- Hope you brought your imagination!

With Etrian Odyssey 3 hitting North American retail shelves today, it seems like a good opportunity for a post on a subject near and dear to my heart – the surprising resurgence of what, for lack of a better term, I will call grid-based dungeon crawler RPGs on Nintendo’s handheld system. 

What is a Grid-Based Dungeon Crawler RPG? 

Before Ultima Underworld introduced the ability to move freely through a 3D space, first-person role playing games were strictly grid-based.  Each time you pressed the arrow key left or right, you would turn a full 90 degrees in that direction.  Each time you pressed the up arrow key, you advanced one square forward on an invisible grid.  While this made mapping easy (graph paper was ideal) it also imposed artificial restraints on the dungeon designs.  (These evil mages must have hired only the best dungeon contractors to get all of those 90 degree angles and perfectly level floors just right!)