Cognition Dissemination: What Does Persona Q Mean for Etrian Odyssey?

Etrian Odyssey has never been the highest seller for Atlus, but its performance between each installment on the market has been consistently modest. It’s the company’s reliable low-tier hit, each title selling around 110,000-150,000 in Japan. It found its appeal after providing a modernized and streamlined approach to the first-person dungeon crawling genre, doing away with elements most players find “archaic” these days. They also don’t cost much to produce, and their focus on gameplay rather than story requires minimal text.

Not to say there aren’t parts of it that people still feel are “archaic.” If you read their statements carefully, you’ll realize “archaic” is a code word for “remnants of elements from old games that I don’t like.” They’ll feel this way about the first-person exploration and the requirement of mapping dungeons, though the former isn’t a big deal and the latter is a useful tool more games should adopt.  Deciphering the meaning behind people’s usage of “archaic” is a rabbit hole that I’ll explore no further in this post.

Last year’s Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl took the franchise in a different direction, providing a reimagining of the first game with a bigger focus on story — complete with anime cutscenes and a little voice acting sprinkled in. It didn’t make the franchise catch on in a big way, but nonetheless sold well enough. Skeptics figured it was both an experiment and a hint that the franchise would shift its focus to a more story-driven one with future installments, and perhaps provide options to play it the “old school” way. That skepticism shifted in another direction with the announcement of another title: Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth.

Persona Q takes some of the best elements of the EO games, and throws in Persona 3 and Persona 4 characters for a mysterious, fanservice-driven adventure. Given its popular name, Atlus intended for it to sell higher than any EO title, something more evident upon seeing its fully-animated portraits and cutscenes with CG character models — complete with plenty of voice acting. It’s mostly a Persona experience with a conversation system reminiscent of Fire Emblem: Awakening’s, and a battle system that’s similar to the afore mentioned Persona games, albeit with EO features (like “Boost,” though it works differently) thrown in. The character models are super-deformed to match the EO franchise’s designs, and it retains the same dungeon mapping abilities.

They knew it would sell, but few expected it to chart as well as it did. It took only one week for it to outsell any EO game in the franchise, and it sold about on par with Shin Megami Tensei IV in its first week. The mainline franchise hasn’t lost any steam compared to Nocturne, meaning this shows how far the Persona franchise has soared in terms of popularity. This begs a few questions: Will Atlus continue with Persona Q as a franchise, or will they continue with Etrian Odyssey?

The former would be the ostensibly logical approach in terms of marketing and sales, given its overwhelming (well, in the grand scheme of things) popularity. But it could end with catastrophic results. Doubling down on one franchise isn’t a good idea, unless they want to run it straight into the ground. Persona Q (and Persona 4: Dancing All Night) were put into development to help save Index Corporation from their bankruptcy woes. They came too late (thankfully), but they weren’t going to cancel any money-making ventures. The question involved what they would do after this.

To the boon of EO fans, they’re actually continuing with that franchise, assuming the teaser site Atlus Japan uploaded last Monday is accurate. After scrolling up, you’ll eventually stumble upon orbs spelling out “2DX,” implying that it’s for a deluxe version of Etrian Odyssey 2. It looks to follow after Untold in being an enhanced, reimagined version of the DS title, but Atlus has yet to reveal details about it. I was surprised to see it missing from last week’s Famitsu, but very surprised to also see the same this week. How long they plan on keeping us in suspense remains to be seen.

Not that Atlus is immune to teasing an enhanced version of a previous release, as they previously did this with Devil Survivor 2: Break Record. Given how this port proves that the company’s teams are capable of handling an enhanced port along with a new game simultaneously, things don’t look rosy for the possibility of its existence.

Though not every EO fan will be happy due to an Untold 2 not being the new installment they wanted (that’s, of course, Etrian Odyssey V), you should take this as an encouraging sign that Atlus definitely isn’t scrapping the franchise in favor of Persona spinoffs. This doesn’t mean they necessarily won’t continue making Persona spinoffs, though. If that’s the case, it could take them a little while to pump out another brand new installment.