The first of my many deaths in Etrian Odyssey IV came at the hands of a kangaroo, of all things.

(Japanese version pictured)

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Now, you may laugh, but this was no ordinary kangaroo. A towering behemoth that dwarfed my guild's modest airship, the so-called Bounding Beast possessed a territorial drive matched only by its pugilistic chops. It made those boxing kangaroos in the old cartoons look like runners-up in a kindergarten slap fight.My guild members held their own for most of the fight. In fact, they took the monster's health to critical with ruthless efficiency. But then its desperation moves came out, including a maneuver that stunned my party of five warriors, leaving them vulnerable for it to follow up with punishing cross-hooks that knocked multiple targets out of the fight in a single blow. The tide of battle turned against us quickly. Game over.So it goes in Etrian Odyssey IV, the fourth entry in Atlus' ongoing attempt to answer the question: "How do you make the oldest of old-school role-playing game styles, the first-person dungeon crawler, appeal to a contemporary audience?" With each sequel, the Etrian games have drawn closer to finding a perfect balance between 8-bit grind and contemporary accessibility. Etrian IV marks the biggest leap forward to date, bringing both deep and superficial revisions that could very easily launch it from niche favorite to mainstream hit. It's not quite the revolution that allowed Persona 3 to catapult Shin Megami Tensei (Etrian's blood relative) to become America's Japanese RPG darling, but it certainly breaks down the previous games' barriers to entry.Make no mistake; Etrian IV still dwells very much within the realm of the classic dungeon crawler. The lean story happens almost independently of your nameless protagonists' actions. While you can choose to recruit a few unique, named characters along the way, for the most part the player's guild exists as a catalyst for world-shaking events rather than a group of meaningful participants in the story.Instead, you begin each game by building these characters from scratch, choosing a name, appearance, class, and a handful of skills. As you level up, you unlock additional classes, determine the specific growth path of your warriors, juggle your party makeup, and gain the ability to use subclasses for even greater customization. Yet while these protagonists lack personalities or even dialogue (the story plays out through a sort of passive third-person narrative), I still grew rather attached to them through the 50 to 80 hours of desperate combat and daring exploration we spent together.Etrian IV offers fewer options at the outset than its predecessors, but the classes and skills here prove to be thoughtfully balanced and work together in sophisticated and often surprising ways. The developers' stated aim with this series has always been to give players plenty of tools for combat and exploration yet leave them constantly feeling like they're missing one crucial component to their party in order to build a sense of urgency and tension. That seems less true for this adventure than in the past, but every time I reached a new floor of the dungeon or encountered a never-before-seen F.O.E. (free-roaming super-boss), I still felt a knot of anxiety in my stomach.While Etrian IV hasn’t abandoned the series’ notoriously difficulty, it excels in selling its themes of hard-fought progress and manual dungeon-mapping. It shakes off the occasionally archaic feel of its predecessors in favor of something more thrilling without forsaking its foundations. It's low on spectacle yet high on both complex play mechanics and meaningful player choices. The bulk of Etrian IV still plays out through dungeons, but this time around the experience no longer feels so monotonous. The quest spans six different regions, each of which contains one main dungeon as well as a number of smaller offshoot areas. Each dungeon features its own hook with the side labyrinths invariably constructed around their gimmick.To link these disparate caverns and forests together, Etrian IV features a large, sprawling overworld to map, the same as dungeons. These areas are mostly safe from random encounters, leaving you free to work through the puzzle-like environments and reach new destinations. This welcome change in routine takes a side feature from Etrian III – seafaring for side quests – and makes it integral to the quest. Your airship progressively gains features as the story unfolds, allowing you to reach new areas and find hidden secrets in conquered lands.On top of these features, Etrian IV makes the series' biggest concession in acknowledging that not everyone in the world thrives on having their virtual faces pummeled by giant kangaroos and other mythical beasts. Rather than dumb down or neuter the difficulty, Atlus has added an adjustable difficulty setting (which you can change any time you're in the central hub town). The standard mode is Fire Emblem tough, with total-party wipeouts that can cost you time and progress. Casual mode, on the other hand, is more generous with experience and retains party progress upon defeat.Even on Casual, Etrian IV is one of the more difficult RPGs in recent memory, and forces you to create a balanced party and use smarter strategies than your basic "fight and heal." But a loss never feels punishing, and grinding rarely becomes a necessity. Other smaller improvements hold true regardless of difficulty level: Resting a character to rebuild their skills costs two levels instead of 10, you no longer have to pay to store equipment at the inn, and forging weapon perks costs nothing. These are minor changes, but they show a willingness by the developers to throw out impediments to progress that served no purpose but to force us to spend time without a sense of real advancement. Etrian IV doesn't do anything "because that's the way it's done" – its design speaks of purpose and deliberation.