A bunch of classic Nintendo DS JRPGs are headed for PC, but it'll cost ya

Permit me one moment to complain, readers. Over ten years ago, I buckled and bought a CD copy of Knights of the Old Republic 2, since it clearly wasn't coming to Steam. It came to Steam a few months later. At some point I did the same with Planescape: Torment, just before it released on GOG. Literally last month I bought the first few Etrian Odyssey games for my indomitable 3DS before Nintendo could close the eshop, and hey, guess what? Etrian Odyssey 1, 2, and 3 are headed to PC in a newly remastered form on June 1. I am the plaything of fickle gods.

But hey, chin up, because those games are cult classics, and having them freed from the shackles of slowly-submerging Nintendo hardware can only be a good thing. If you don't know, they're first-person dungeon crawlers that see you lead a party of adventurers around dangerous labyrinths chock-full of enemies that you deal with in turn-based encounters. It's incredibly similar to the Persona Q games, if you're familiar with those.

The games' most interesting—and potentially most exhausting—gimmick is that mapping the dungeons out is entirely on you. On the DS version, that meant the bottom screen was a canvas for your cartographical ambitions, and you'd use the stylus to plot out everywhere you'd been as you adventured. If, like me, your brain resolutely refuses to operate in terms of shape and space, you can look forward to completely hamstringing yourself with your own mapmaking ineptitude: That mechanic survives in the new HD versions.

Atlus has been fairly generous with pricing its old hits as they trickle over to PC, the recently-released Persona 3 Portable was a mere £17.99/$19.99 when it hit Steam last month, and the same was true of Persona 4 Golden when that came out in 2020. Well, no more. If you want to engage upon an Etrian Odyssey, it'll set you back £35.99/$39.99 per game when they release on June 1, or £72.33/$80.37 for a bundle of all three. I guess someone at Atlus finally realised PC players want to buy the studio's games.

If that price doesn't make you wince, you can find all three games waiting to release over on Steam.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.