Sorry about going dead for the last while - I had an onset of vertigo that had been getting worse over the last week and for the first time in my life, didn't feel like using the computer more than was absolutely necessary. Now the dizziness and apathy is lifting and it seems to have morphed into a bad cold - as my 28th birthday is tomorrow, perhaps this is just what flu does to you as you get older. When I was awake over the weekend, though, I dipped back into the first Etrian Odyssey game to see where I was, and I'm going to see if I can talk about that for a minute instead of about five days like I usually do.

The DS hasn't really been getting the attention it deserves since I stopped commuting by bus and train and I had stopped playing this game just after reaching the second stratum (the seventh floor), but I was surprised by how little time it took to remember who my adventuring party was and what I was doing with them. Before long, I had refamiliarized myself with my party's general dynamic, the current mission, and the girl in t'item shop who talks like t'is which I think is meant to make her sound Jamaican but unfortunately just gives her a thick Yorkshire dialect.

I've hacked my way down through a few more floors now, and on balance, I'm actually very glad that I started my experience of this series with Etrian Odyssey 3. When going backwards through a series of games, useful features seem to drop away to be replaced with slightly more awkward ones, and you can tell that they made some adjustments to the balance in the later games. Everything in Etrian Odyssey 1 now feels like an expert-mode version - having five floors per stratum instead of four, the introduction of damaging floor tiles much earlier on, and even being encouraged to defeat current-floor FOEs as early as the fourth floor rather than heeding your taught instinct to stay a million miles away from them.

And all of this on top of an exponentially more vicious economy where you really have to struggle to keep yourself in supplies for a long time at the start of the game. There are a lot of little things that add up - using the inn to heal yourself completely costs 9en per level of your highest-level character, and that's a huge increase over the 5en that I was used to, and healing and magic items are extremely expensive compared to the returns on the loot you'll be taking out of the dungeon. A couple of money-saving measures are necessary to make progress - finding a skill for the Alchemist class that warps you to the last used submagnetic pole (and therefore gives you a free route out of the dungeon) saves 100en each time on Warp Wires, and when your medic gets the Revive ability instead of having to drag people up out of the dungeon and put them on a slab in front of Dr. Hoffman every time, it really does feel like you're becoming a lot more self-sufficient. The level designs are also characterized by long, boring corridors with pointless dead ends and sky-high encounter rates - I actually wonder whether I would have had the patience to get as far in this as I currently have if it had been my introduction to the series.

But I'm really glad that I did. For all they had yet to get completely right at this stage, the feeling of satisfaction at venturing further, of completing a map or doing the next little mini-quest is incredible - as is the frustration when you over-reach yourself and die due to being trapped by monsters beyond your ability. The labyrinth is vicious, but it makes conquering each part of it just feel like a real achievement. And it's nice enough to warn you of approaching major encounters, like confronting me with the text "This spring seems peaceful, but you sense an evil presence - returning would be unwise." If there's something I'm most glad that starting with the third game taught me, it's that when Etrian Odyssey warns you about something you bloody well listen to it.