The first thing you’ll notice about Epic Odyssey is that it’s a lot more welcoming than most gacha RPGs, with an accessible single-player campaign that seems to come from a more innocent age of exploration, fighting, fetch quests, and light puzzling.
But the nuts and bolts of a fully fledged strategy-RPG experience are all right there under the hood, and this guide will give you a grounding in how it all works.
In a nutshell, the single-player campaign sees you running around an isometric fantasy landscape made up of diverse terrains. You’ll open chests, meet NPCs, engage in battles, and so on.
With alarming frequency you’ll come up against enemies that you just can’t beat, even when you tweak your formation. In true RPG fashion, you need to keep levelling up and equipping the best stuff to stay on top.
As you’d expect, there are numerous items and currencies in Epic Odyssey. These include Gold, Gems, EXP, Daily Points, Summoning Pieces, Summoning Scrolls, Runes, Arena Tickets, and a variety of other trinkets and gewgaws.
These come to you through chests and rewards for completing NPC missions or winning battles within the campaign, but not in a big enough volume. To get the goods you’ll need to duck out to the menu screens and visit the following areas.
Great Hall: this gloriously uncomplicated source of bounty keeps self-replenishing, so you just need to keep visiting periodically to claim your goods.
Tower: Fight a boss, earn rewards, climb to the next floor, repeat.
Demon Queen’s Palace: fight in 5v5 battles, win, claim rewards, repeat.
Worlds Portal: head out with a team consisting of heroes from another player’s collection to kill demons throughout the Lynea Continent.
Dwarven Trader Lacose: a merchant who replenishes his stock of purchasable items every few hours.
Mission Board: send parties of heroes to idly complete missions for rewards.
Sky Hunters: go here to hunt enemies and earn Badges.
Lynean Tree: go here to swap Badges for upgrades.
Clan: after joining a clan you can take part in stuff like Clan War and Clan Daily Boss to earn extra rewards.
Daily Quests, Weekly Quests, Achievements, Events, etc: as with every free-to-play RPG ever, there’s a constant stream of rewards available in the menus just for making progress. Whenever you see a red notification, tap on it.
Heroes
Epic Odyssey is a strategy RPG, and so the emphasis isn’t on battle tactics (you can’t even control your heroes during battle) but strategic planning. That means keeping your heroes shipshape and deploying them in the best possible formations, with tanks at the front, ranged attackers at the back, and so on.
There are three different factions in Epic Odyssey: Humans, Nature Spirits, and Demons. All three of these factions come in three classes: Warrior, Assassin, and Mage. Altogether that makes nine possible combinations.
It’s worth noting that deploying three heroes of the same faction and class in a single party will give you a special buff.
There are two ways to add heroes to your collection: either through story moments in the single-player campaign, or by summoning at the Summoning Gate. There are three different types of summon.
The most common method is to summon either one or ten random heroes at a time using Summoning Scrolls, or gems when your scrolls are used up. Then there’s the Special Summon, which lets you summon heroes belonging to a specific faction using Special Summoning Scrolls. The faction in question changes daily. And finally, you can summon heroes using High Fives.
Heroes can have four different ranks. From worst to best, they are Common, Rare, Epic, and Legendary. New summons can come in any rank, though Common are the most, well, common.
You can level-up a Common hero all the way to 40, or you can just grind them into paste at the Temple and cash-in the gems. You monster.
Upgrading heroes costs Gold and Spirit Points, plus Runestones at certain levels. As they level-up they’ll acquire new skills. However, you can only level-up a hero to the level permitted by their rank. To increase their rank you need to Ascend your heroes, by sacrificing two other heroes at the Temple.
To take a hero from Rare to Epic costs two Rare heroes of the same kind, while going from Epic to Legend costs one of the same Epic hero and another Epic hero from the same faction. Ascending increases a hero’s star rating and improves their base stats.
Finally, let’s take a look at the Pentagram. This awesome feature automatically assembles your best heroes into a party of five and then allows you to nominate followers from the rest of your collection. Each of these followers is automatically bumped up to level 40.
They can’t progress beyond level 40 as followers, but the Pentagram is a good way of identifying which heroes you might want to cultivate into Legendary warriors.
Equipment
Your heroes aren’t much good without their equipment, which falls into four categories: Weapons, Armor, Helmets, and Accessories. All of these items can be Common, Rare, Epic, and Legendary, just like your heroes.
You obtain equipment in a number of ways – through campaign gameplay, in rewards, and at Lacose’s store. Fortunately, ensuring your heroes have the best equipment is very straightforward. You just go to your hero page and tap ‘Auto Equip’ if there’s a notification.
Each item of equipment has its own Special Stat, which imparts a percentage increase in a hero’s combat or total basic stats. You can tell that the function of a Special Stat is by looking at the last word in their name. For instance, the Bone Necklace of Steady increases your total defence, because that’s what Steady means.
Here’s a full list of the Special Stat types for reference.
Resistance: – skill damage.
Endurance: – normal attack damage.
Sylph: + evasion.
Vampyric: Regenerates health per normal attack.
Miracle: Resists bad status.
Unbreakable: – enemy critical chance.
Deathblow: + critical chance.
Disaster:+ critical attack damage.
Eagle Eye: + hit rate (accuracy).
Empowered: + total attack
Steady: + total defence.
Wealthy: + total HP.
You can pick up equipment in all the usual ways – quests, rewards, NPC tasks, etc – as well as from Lacose. At the store, equipment can cost Gold, Gems, PvP Points, and Clan Points.
Just as you can both level-up and Ascend your heroes, you can level-up or Refine your gear. Levelling-up costs Gold, while Refining costs other weapons and Gold.
You can download Epic Odyssey right now on the App Store and Google Play.