When starting on a title, the QA department usually has only a vague idea of what is in store for them. Deadlines almost always change, and unforeseen factors pop up when you least expect them to. But despite these known “laws of testing,” we were going into this project thinking it would be a simple matter. Honestly, how could a linear dungeon-crawler with minimal amounts of text be that difficult to bug?

Well, to our surprise, this game actually has a lot of depth! Now, this scenario is good for the people who play this game of course, but it makes things tough for the testing team. It’s difficult to put this aforementioned depth into words, but let me just say this: the game forces players to really utilize all of the character slots in their party, because if you don’t plan well, you will get rocked, to say the least. Thankfully, the dev team provided us with an invaluable set of debugging tools that let us cheat through the game in a timely matter, so that we could see all of the gameplay and text that there is to see. But even with these tools, scouring over each level of the labyrinth took a loooong time, as there are tons of secret passages and interesting map elements spread throughout the game. Remember how I mentioned that Etrian was linear? Well, I was just messing with you. Many of the levels require you to explore previous sections of the labyrinth, which essentially turns all of the floors into one giant, complex, and seamless dungeon. Once again, this feature is great for the fans, but it made our testers cry sometimes.

I was also worried about the feature of drawing maps with the touch screen, and what bugs we’d find relating to that function. But contrary to my suspicions, this section of the game was very well-designed. The mapping function in Etrian was probably the one of the best uses of the touch screen that I’ve seen in my time testing at Atlus (which includes working on titles like Trauma Center, which makes undeniably good use of the bottom screen).

Another welcome surprise during the testing process was how quickly the developers fixed our bugs for us. We were getting new versions of the game quite often, which is great from a testing standpoint. Many times, fixing bugs may cause new issues to rear their ugly heads, and having high turn-around makes it a lot easier for us to find (and fix) more of these occurrences. But since we were able to play through so many revisions of the game, the testing team feels really confident about the stability of this title. All of the testers here hope you enjoy Etrian Odyssey, and wish you good luck on your adventures therein.