With Etrian Odyssey III coming out relatively soon, I thought I'd talk about mapmaking in relation to games. This has two forms, broadly speaking, which manifest as either Real Life or In-Game Maps.

It is the real life maps that are the nostalgic factor. These are the maps we would make, on graph paper with a pencil, to represent the dungeons that filled out games. Painstakingly drawn, detailed, and annotated we swapped these with friends to simply created them for our own use. No two map, I'm sure, was the same, for the nature and character of the map reflects that of its creator. This seems to me an admirable and endearing facet of our electronic world: that someone would map a Final Fantasy dungeon for future, mutual, or one-time personal use. They are committing to paper their devotion and love of the game, their willingness to put their personal stamp on the world they escape to.

The sad part of this is that, well, this doesn't happen so much for new games. The only new release on a console that I can think of that would use this is 3D Dot Game Heroes. Todays Bioshocks and Uncharteds either have maps built in or have no use for them. Final Fantasy, a series which I have even made maps for, now is in its most linear iteration, something which has so little use for a map that is is laughable.

The way I see it, there are several causes: One, videogames are shying away from dungeon crawlers and the perceived difficulty of the occasionally treacherous danger of mazes. To appeal to a larger audience it is a cut that was made and as a consequence the graph paper vanished. Also, they are no longer necessary in many senses. The proliferation of shooters and fighting games mean that there are no maps required for those, and to be honest, would you even make a map for Uncharted? The thing isn't supposed to be Charted.

However despite this the maps have evolved. Enter the in-game mapmaking of Etrian Odyssey. This is the reason I love the Etrian Odyssey games: the exploration. Even though the Etrian Odyssey games have a fixed area, unlike the ever-changing random roguelikes, the sense of discovery is the same. As a child I had a brief stint of wanting to be a cartographer (abandoned because I can’t draw a straight line) and that love of making maps has stayed with me, the same love of filling in the blanks, giving order, making a tangible representation of the world. 

The biggest draw to the Etrian Odyssey series for me has been that sense of exploration and the ability to create your own map. Once out of curiosity I looked up someone else's map and I was stunned. We were totally different. The symbols, the way we drew, the character of them was completely different. I couldn't make heads or tails of there and I quickly returned to the comfort of my own map.