Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection works well enough as a single-screen experience

destructoid.com:

Making the jump from a two-screen device to a single-screen experience can be a tricky proposition. Some games, like The World Ends with You, lose something in the conversion. Others, like Layton’s Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaire’s Conspiracy Deluxe Edition, discover life can effortlessly go on with just one screen. Most games have a logical path forward moving from the Nintendo DS/3DS to modern hardware.

But Etrian Odyssey is not like most games. This franchise is categorically connected to the dual-screen era of gaming that it’s almost hard to imagine how it could possibly work on Switch. I mean, what’s Atlus going to do, cram everything onto one screen and hope for the best?

Yes, that’s exactly what it did. And surprisingly, it works.

One reason why there’s always been a question mark around porting the Etrian series to Switch or any single-screen device is that its identity is in its map-making. Dungeon-crawling RPGs are pretty prevalent today, but few of them ask players to make their maps the way Etrian Odyssey does. That was the appeal of the original game; how it tied into the pen-and-paper tabletop RPGs of the ’70s and ’80s. It was a gimmick that worked exceptionally well with the Nintendo DS and 3DS touch screens. Hundreds of thousands of people saw the appeal, which is how we managed to get six mainline entries, two remakes, and two Mystery Dungeon spin-offs.

To remove the cartography features, or to dial them down, would remove the very soul of the series. Etrian Odyssey just isn’t “Etrian Odyssey” if you’re not drawing walls and dropping icons for treasure chests you need to revisit. So, for Atlus to find a way to port the first three titles of the series to modern hardware that retains its