Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City, The Southern Sea, by Zach.

Notes: I wish I had made notes on the in-game map that says what item you get from what little island, because then this would have been a little bit more interesting. Sadly, all I remember is that you get sheep cheese from the island north of the main port.

[Josh says: this is just super great.  And EO is a wonderful game as far as meta-level map stuff goes, what with the built-in drawing-a-map-on-graph-paper game mechanic.]

Radiant Historia, Cygnus, by joseph.

(spoiler)

All I have to say is: Giant Enemy Spider!!!

(/spoiler) 

Radiant Historia, Granorg, by joseph.

The moment I entered the city I knew I’ll love this place along with the music.

[Josh says: I just started playing it!  I’m not to Granorg yet!  Now I know there’s a sewer off to the left!  THANKS FOR THE SPOILER WARNING OMG]

Radiant Historia, world map, by joseph.

This game is EPIC: epic music (yoko shimomura), epic plot (a bit cliche in some parts), and epic music…

clocked about 70 hours and still can’t beat the secret final boss, if you know Altus you know they like making things impossible :(

[Josh says: oh man, epic RPG for the DS by freakin’ Atlus?  I think this is going on the todo list.]

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Red/Blue rescue team, town map, by joseph.

This is the town…

In the submission page it says I can do it with ketchup, sadly I ran out of ketchup this morning so I had to go with mustard… 

[Josh says: oh man.  I think you are on to something here, joseph.  Someone needs to draw a Donkey Kong Country map on a banana now.]

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, world map, Ario Barzan.

Lots of mistakes, here! Incorrect room sizes, unrealized links, and overlapping. I think we generally have a tendency to increase, rather than reduce, the scale of places in our memory, especially if the places are large to begin with. Aria of Sorrow has a few mysteriously connected rooms in its Floating Garden area, and they’re represented on the map by several “floating” rooms around the castle’s top. I couldn’t fit them in on the scanner. The room that was easiest to recall was the one near the center-bottom that sort of resembles a person, precisely because of that resemblance.

[Josh says: you’re killing me with these, Ario.  If I have a Castlevania relapse on my DS, I’m holding you directly responsible.]

Elite Beat Agents, world map, by LuigiHann.

This was more difficult than I expected, and I ended up getting a lot of it wrong… turns out I only had a vague idea of what was near what, and no real sense of the directions they were relative to each other. I blame the globe-like perspective of the map.

Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, world map, by Ario Barzan.

I forgot to draw the castle’s center where the final fights happen. If I had remembered, there would’ve been some significant overlapping. As is maybe evident to people who’re pretty familiar with the game, I had the most trouble remembering how parts in the castle’s middle connected. Harmony of Dissonance’s layout is kinda notorious for confusing a lot of players, in part because you have to switch in and out of two versions of the castle which are are often visually similar.

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, world map, by Ario Barzan.

This is my first attempt at reproducing the entirety of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow’s map from memory. It was drawn on a large sheet of paper using graphite and a colored pencil. My attempt to be as exact as possible highlights the errors moreso, but I think that the errors are the most interesting part. As one example: in the bottom-middle, a little line connects two rooms in the Subterranean Hell sector. The line represents an intended linking that I could not complete. Another example: on the top right, you can see an erased horizontal space that links two towers. This was the correct placement. The final, second-guessed version is incorrect. In any case, I was surprised by my relative accuracy. The last time that I played Dawn of Sorrow was a little less than a year ago. I should also note that, rather than mentally consulting the image of the game’s map, I drew this map according to the actual rooms in the game. Put another way, I imaginatively played the game at high speed, and used that to generate the map.