Etrian Odyssey IV Localization Screens

The eastern (Japan) hardcore turn based RPG fans already have a good licking on Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan, the first of the series on the 3DS. The 30-40 hour game is set to be another game ported by Atlus and isn’t too far along a release in north america. No set date confirmed for the next Etrian Odyssey, but as it looks it’ll become part the mess of that will be the first quarter of 2013. As of now they’ve finally came to lengthy conclusion of how they want the text to look like and this is just a snippet of their font selection process.

“A lot of things matter to the player’s enjoyment of a long RPG: game balance, plot and characters, visuals and sound. But although a great deal of attention is given to all these things in the original game, a seemingly small thing is often overlooked during the localization process: the font.

Thyssen certainly met the last criteria with flying colors, but was maybe a little too thin and might have induced eyestrain. Juste was more readable, but left a little too much space between words and lines and didn’t feel substantial enough. Imperator was better in that regard yet too cramped; we doubted three lines could fit without crashing ascenders/descenders.“

An interesting note that we dummy gamers take for granite, font. Something people at Atlus spend multiple meetings debating and arguing over how to make their text stand out with helvetica, Chicago, and hell, even IMPACT. Ultimately, they chose Neutron for us English speakers for Etrian Odyssey.

A while back we made note of our Etrian Odyssey curiousity and still attentive on how it will pan out when localized. Heck if a game like X-COM could thrive off being rebooted and not lose its personality, I’m all for more throwbacks to early genres. However, as a staunch avoider of the Final Fantasies for the past number of years, doesn’t mean I can’t head to another series retaining the same genre!

Check out the Etrian Odyssey IV site if this information didn’t suffice.