YMMV / Etrian Odyssey

Individual game YMMV pages:

• Etrian Odyssey
• Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard
• Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City
• Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan
• Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth
• Etrian Odyssey Nexus

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• Accidental Innuendo:
  • One of the Landsknecht's skills in Legends of the Titan is called "Mind Break"^note "mind break" in hentai-speak refers to someone being subjected to, ahem, excitement until they're in a broken-down state of mind..
  • Landsknechts don't have it much better in Nexus; even though they lose Mind Break (it's been merged into Power Break), they now have the skill "Smash Link".
  • Rob from Nexus makes one during the ending credits. While it seems to be intended as a joke about Charis' appetite, you could very well assume he's referring to something else entirely. Charis for her part acts appropriately flustered.
    Rob: It's because you've started eating right. You've grown in a lot of ways. And in a lot of places...
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Olympia: a Well-Intentioned Extremist doing what she must to protect the Deep City's secrets, or a sadist who enjoyed leading hapless, trusting explorers to their deaths?
• Angst? What Angst?: Present in The Millennium Girl quite a bit.
  • Frederica is from the distant past and left behind her family, everyone she knew, and all of the customs she was familiar with. This is mostly glossed over in favor of her being upset over having amnesia, a sub-plot which is resolved fairly quickly...only to replace it with the far more serious issue of Gungnir and the consequences of its use...
  • Arthur and Simon hail from a mining town called Gotham and were almost killed by Gungnir's activation when younger. Despite that fact, they remains cheerful most of the time (save, obviously, when the issue of firing Etria's Gungnir pops up, when M.I.K.E. and Frederica know full well it will kill everyone in Etria), and the only kind of problem Arthur seems to have developed from it is a fear of darkness... which is only brought up in an optional and missable scene.
  • As the party enters the Sandy Barrens to fight and kill the infected members of the Forest Folk, Raquna feels exceptionally down about the idea of having to carry out these executions. No talk is made of it in the aftermath of the ensuing battles.
  • It's the end of the game. Several Forest Folk have been killed, the leader of Etria is dead, M.I.K.E. went rogue and had to be terminated, Kupala gave up her life, and Etria may become a ghost town now that the Labyrinth has been (near) fully explored. Well, see you next time! We're going to report to the Midgard Library!
• Annoying Video Game Helper:
  • Downplayed since it's the player's choice to deploy them, but in Beyond The Myth, Necromancers' Wraiths and Rovers' Hawk and Hound can attack enemies, which does little damage but is still usually an acceptable supplement to your own party's attacks. Unfortunately, these attacks also wake up sleeping enemies, which means the sleep ailment is much more unreliable for any party containing these classes. Oh, and the Eternal Tyrant, the final boss is weak to sleep, so these "allies" will most likely deny you some precious opportunities to heal and reapply buffs during this difficult battle.
  • In a similar vein, the Highlander's Bloodlust passive gives them a chance to counterattack a random enemy upon taking damage, even if the damage from a source other than being attacked, such as one of their own HP-depleting skills or poison. While this is often helpful, it can be problematic when it hits an enemy that is asleep, wasting that free turn, or if the enemy has a counterattack skill; Stun Ananas and their last-ditch paralysis can be dangerous in this regard if they are not the only enemy remaining.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • The Yggdrasil Core in Untold. It's markedly tougher in the first phase, but thanks to the virus, it actually doesn't have much more HP than your standard endgame F.O.E. and its attacks are easily handled with regular healing. Thanks to Kupala's Heroic Sacrifice, you'll deal boatloads of damage in the second phase, and while Necrosis is something to watch out for, the first time it's used is liable to fail across the board. Keep up the pressure and it won't have the chance to use it again.
  • The final boss of Mystery Dungeon, Dread Muspell. Her main body doesn't even do anything until you deal a lot of damage to her, and even then, her damage output and that of her minions is weak. She does have a mass confusion attack and the ability to summon a D.O.E., but for the former, several classes have abilities that can easily remedy this, and the latter move takes a long time to charge.
  • Sky Kaiser, the boss of the 10th Branch dungeon, also qualifies considering you have to beat the three elemental dragons to get to it (and the Blizzard King is That One Boss). Even though it can deal massive untyped Area of Effect damage with Deafening Roar, it will likely only uses this attack once, if at all, since it can only use two of that move and its more common random status spreader (which may even grant status buffs) before its depleted of amber and must generate more (easily destroyed) pieces to restore its condition. Its only other damaging move is its physical attack, so if your party can survive Deafening Roar, it essentially becomes a giant punching bag.
  • The Dryad in the postgame of Beyond the Myth would make for a threatening boss, if it weren't for the fact that she is quite vulnerable to a lot of disabling ailments and binds. The battle against her effectively becomes "disable or die", because her attacks are very powerful if not prevented.
• Best Known for the Fanservice:
  • The series in general is known in the dungeon crawler community for the moe female portraits, due to the character artist Himukai's style.
  • Untold 2 has some infamy due to the Hot Springs DLC content.
  • Of the many things Beyond the Myth is known for, the younger female Necromancer who doesn't zip up her hoodie is one of the more prominent. It's also known for the "Sultry" personality option, which makes your character sound like someone from an adult game.
  • Nexus carries on with the racy DLC content with the female Heroine getting a Bikini Armor DLC costume, and the return of the "Sultry" voicepack, now in its original Japanese dubs and even more erogame-like in quality.
• Breather Boss:
  • Shin in The Drowned City is programmed to, for at least the first half of the fight, only attack while your party is afflicted with ailments. So with a few ailment-prevention methods in place (and curing whatever slips by) you basically have half the battle handed to you. At the same time, a head bind renders all her skills unusable.
  • Gimle in The Millennium Girl. It's insanely bulky, but it isn't a threat at all when you consider that you just got past the Iwaoropenelep. Doubly so if you have Peace Ballad, as it removes any need for even TP restoring items.
  • Demi-Fafnir in The Fafnir Knight, particularly in Classic mode. After the one-two punch of Guild Esbat and Scylla, he's a step down, lacking any of the major heavy-hitting moves that the above threw at you. In Story Mode, this is slightly counterbalanced by the fact that you're missing one of your party for the fight (specifically, Bertrand, due to him kinda becoming the Demi-Fafnir). Classic Mode, however, places no such restrictions on you.
• Broken Base:
  • Etrian Odyssey IV caused a rift between fans at one point, especially with Casual Mode, and the shift from a synthesizer-based soundtrack to "actual" instrumentation.
  • The Millennium Girl brought in all sorts of disagreements within the fanbase, ranging from the new Story Mode and the main characters, to Grimoire Stones (until the second Untold game, anyway) and the floor jump feature. In particular, the retcons to major plot elements in the original game are either seen as making the story worse by diluting the tragedy to the point of going against the original intended message, or the retcons were at least better than the original game guilt-tripping the player for things they had no control over.
  • Downloadable Content in The Fafnir Knight. There are there who are more than willing to purchase the additional features, and others who are accusing Atlus of implementing microtransactions when QR codes (as done in the fourth game) would've accomplished the same thing. To add insult to injury, they are releasing QR codes for it... if you pre-order the game in North America. And even then, it's just grimoires that serve to make the game easier.
  • There was particular ire with one item of DLC unlocking semi-nude portraits for Story Mode's two female characters, especially considering that one of the characters is twelve.
  • Etrian Mystery Dungeon. Is it an interesting take on the franchise and a solid roguelike? Or is it a mistake of a game that got the series' core concepts wrong and traded in the series' legitimate difficulty for a lot of Fake Difficulty and cheap shots? The game's announcement alone was aggravating for some—not so much because of the game itself, but because of the timing. The game was announced about a week after the Japanese release of The Fafnir Knight, while there was still no word on localization for the latter. To add insult to injury, Mystery Dungeon got a localization announcement within a week of the Japanese announcement, while a localization announcement didn't come for The Fafnir Knight for another two months. And this is to say nothing of Europe's problems with Atlus localizations.
  • The HD remasters of the original trilogy are either liked for being Truer to the Text but with some quality-of-life touches from later games and retaining many of the amusingly broken qualities of the DS games' classes (like the beloved unusually-high-damage Medic from the first game), or disliked for missing things like Story Mode and not having all of the convenience features of those later games.
• Common Knowledge: The music video by IOSYS was so influential that those who haven't played Etrian Odyssey automatically assume the orange spheres that represent F.O.E.s in the DS games have faces. They are conflated with the kedama from Touhou Project which are fuzzy orbs with the faces.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Even with the fairly wide variety of classes as well as skills that players can invest in for each party member, and no matter which installment in the series, each with it's different class, a common strategy in every Etrian Odyssey game is to include a tank (Protector/Hoplite/Fortress/Dragoon) in their party. Other roles that are often added into the party (though it slightly differs depending on the goal for the party composition or the game) include a healer, a damage dealer, a buffer, and debuffer.
  • Also in general, the Game-Breaker classes depending on the game are often used in that game (such as Medics in the original, Hexers in II: Heroes of Lagaard, and so on). Due to how challenging these games are intended to be, the more powerful classes in each game tend to hold together even the most questionable party compositions with their sheer power, especially during boss fights that tend to stop the weaker classes in their tracks.
  • Gathering Farming parties are parties with the purpose of gathering resources from that are usually composed of party members who only have skills for farming resources from gathering spots, and made separately from main progression parties. The most notable examples of this are a party with all Survivalists in the original, a mix of Survivalists and/or Beasts in II: Heroes of Lagaard, and Farmers in III: The Drowned City.
  • In the original Etrian Odyssey itself, a common party composition that is considered widely as one of the best possible party compositions include a Medic, a Protector, a Landsknecht, a Survivalist and a Troubadour. It helps that Medic has actually a strong array of skills here, such as significantly large ATK up passive, Immunize that serves as damage reduction to all damage types, and is the team's overall best healer. The Protector is used to invest on the anti-element skills up to 5 points, to nullify elemental damage taken, and Smite to take down threats faster (as the Medic's Immunize covers for most of the damage taken by the party).
• Contested Sequel: Whether you consider Beyond the Myth's immediate predecessor to be Legends of the Titan or The Fafnir Knight, it falls into this either way. Series fans either appreciate the expanded degree of cosmetic customization, the usual quality-of-life improvements, the four races, and the new classes, or find it disappointing that the game scrapped the Story Mode of the Untold games and the world exploration of the last two non-remake non-spinoff games and nerfed floor jumping thus resulting in what is considered a comparatively bare-bones product. The substitution of subclassing with Mastery is also a point of contention, with some enjoying how it effectively doubles the number of classes while others would much prefer the mix-and-match system of subclassing.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Hexers can learn to command frightened enemies to kill themselves. In this day and age where telling someone to commit suicide is taken much more seriously than on the early days of the internet where it was far more common, there's something so wrong yet so hilarious about this.
  • The tavern owners of II" and III are much more sardonic than others in the series, and are prone to making quips about your other other guilds/guards performances in this manner. Missy from III'' can be downright acerbic if you really mess up a quest, when she's making fun of how badly other guilds are doing compared to the player's.
  • Giving an adventurer in Beyond the Myth the "Sassy" voice option makes them into a good source of Black Comedy. Ally faints? "Aww, my toy broke!" Gets revived from death? "I didn't ask for this."
  • Fire Squirrels in Beyond the Myth. As if squirrels stealing your Ariadne Threads weren't notorious enough, here's a squirrel that just straight up destroys them.
• Demonic Spiders: With its own page.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Edie Napier from The Drowned City is the most popular shopkeeper in the series, thanks to her funny dialogue and Money Fetish with some shades of Jerk with a Heart of Gold revealed later on. She was popular enough to return as the shopkeeper in Nexus, being the only town NPC in the series to reprise their role in a later game (all other townsfolk in Nexus are new), possibly as an apology for there never being an Untold version of the third game for her to reappear in.
  • Hypatia/Kanae from The Drowned City has a lot of fans due to her unique design and her cuteness. The later reveal in supplementary material that she dyed her hair since Agatia liked blondes made her even more popular.
  • Lili and Solor from Beyond the Myth have their fair share of fans. Lili's cuteness and friendliness, plus her backstory, help her win over players, while Solor's chill but gradually defrosting mood, plus her towering figure and protectiveness of Lili, make her well-liked as well. It helps that they have a supporting role in the player's quest as guest party members, and are actually pretty strong in their own right.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • A one-sided one spent a long time simmering with Persona 5, with the popular belief that the localization of Etrian Odyssey V was being put off in order to focus on promotion and localization for Persona 5, which was delayed several times.
  • This came in the opposite direction with Etrian Odyssey Nexus and Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth. Persona fans were exceptionally vocal on every single social media post involving Nexus, all but outright demanding Atlus put them first due to it being the Cash-Cow Franchise and being certain it wouldn't get released otherwise due to the 3DS's age. Meanwhile Etrian fans had been hopeful for either to get a release and, having been put first this time around, simply wanted Persona fans to at least wait until near Nexus' release before panicking, a stance proven justified by the announcement for a western release of Persona Q2 made a week before Nexus' release.
• Fan Nickname:
  • F.O.E. stands for "Field-On Enemy" in the Japanese versions, and for whatever reason, Formido Oppugnatura Exsequens (which is Latin for "the pursuing dread that will attack") in America, and Foedus Obrepit Errabundus ("the vile, wandering one sneaks up") in Europe and the first game's BGM player. Given their ridiculous power, fans have come up with their own interpretations, including "Freakishly Overpowered Encounter" and "Ferocious Orange Enemy."
  • Ragelopes, the very first F.O.E.s in Etrian Odyssey and players' introduction to the concept, are better known as Rapelopes.
  • Landsknechts tend to get the nickname of "Landshark" due to how hard it is to spell their name. This results in the secondary female Landsknecht of Legends of the Titan being called the Bandana-shark due to her headdress.
  • The blonde female Protector also tends to be nicknamed 'Teacher' (ししょー or Shishou) due to the Explorer's Log comic. The nickname carries to one of the representatives of the last class in Legends of the Titan due to how similar they look like, some even joking that it's the same Protector in disguise.
  • The female blonde Zodiac gets the nickname 'Fluffy Zodi' (ふわゾディ or Fuwazodi).
  • The female Medic with short brown hair is often called Medigirl or Mediko (which is the Japanese equivalent).
  • While not as popular, the purple-haired Medic with glasses from Legend of the Titan is sometimes called as Megane Mediko (Glasses Medigirl) in Japanese community.
  • The Mascot Fortress from Legend of the Titan is sometimes called "Flatress", usually in a complimentary way by people who love their girls petite (and because, hey, her build actually makes sense for an armored tank). The Japanese fandom calls her "For-chan" instead.
  • The smaller, blonde female War Magus in Heroes of Lagaard and Knight of Fafnir is known as Fang-chan on the /vg/ general threads.
  • "PLASM" is a nickname for a popular team setup in the first game. (Protector, Landsknecht, Alchemist, Survivalist, Medic) This team covers a lot of your bases between great defenses, good healing, and both physical and elemental damage.
  • The Awesome, but Impractical Nine Smashes skill from The Drowned City sometimes gets called "Two Misses". The Gladiators' low Agility impairing their accuracy doesn't help.
  • Beyond the Myth:
    • The mascot female Fencer has been commonly called Nene due to her resemblence to the anime character. The other female Fencer is known as "Braids", and as a lesser note, several of the other female portraits bear some resemblances to other New Game! girls.
    • Much of the fandom generally accepts the oldest female Rover being addressed as Granny, especially given how there's a voice set that's blatantly angled toward being for her.
    • Blade Dancer Masurao are also known as "4kats" due to their ability to wield 4 katana, whereas Blade Masters are often called "1kats".
    • Thanks to their low INT growth, Therians often get nicknamed "dumb bunnies" by the EO General thread on /vg/.
    • Brounis are sometimes called "potatos" by the same /vg/ dwellers, due to their similarities to Lalafells from Final Fantasy XIV and Harvins from Granblue Fantasy.
  • The Forest Folk and Arken are both called Salads by /vg/ dwellers.
  • The female Highlander is sometimes affectionately called "Shiitake" after her mushroom-shaped hair decorations.
  • All the adventurers in general are sometimes collectively referred to as "Etriams" by some of the /vg/ general thread regulars.
  • The Heavenly Keep of Heroes of Lagaard gets the unflattering nickname "piss castle" because of the eye-searing shade of yellow of its walls and floor. The Fafnir Knight recolored the walls to a metallic gray to make it easier on the eyes.
• Fanon: Outside of bits of story and the Untold games' story modes, this is literally encouraged by the developers! As explained on the first game's website (Director's Diary, entry 5), one of the major elements the games take from "old-school" dungeon crawlers is that the party is meant to be defined largely in the imagination of the player. How they react in detail to what's going on, what they adventure like, how they interact with one another, is meant to be up to the player to define. This is why the games only ever describe your actions in the broadest of terms—they want to encourage you to invent your own interpretation and "canon" for what your characters do and say. This is also why the Story Mode of the Untold games proved divisive: having five pre-defined characters, as opposed to the party that lives in the mind of the player, seems to many to go against the wider spirit of the franchise.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Whenever "F.O.E." as an acronym is expanded, there are very few people in the English-speaking community who say "Formido Oppugnatura Exsequens" or "Foedus Obrepit Errabundus", the official meanings in the localized versions. Many players instead prefer the Japanese versions' meaning "Field-On Enemy" which at least makes some sense to the average English-speaker (even if the more gramatically correct way to say it would be "On-Field Enemy"). Or "Freakishly Overpowered Enemy" or more obscene variants thereof.
• Friendly Fandoms: There's plenty of overlap between fans of Etrian Odyssey and fans of 7th Dragon; both series were created by the same director and share the same composer, and are portable dungeon-crawling RPGs with many similar elements (customizable blank-slate characters, classes developed via skill point investment, and on-field minibosses) implemented in different ways. This applies mostly in Japan since the only 7th Dragon game to be localized was the final one, but fan translations have alleviated this.
• Game-Breaker: Has a page here.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The Fafnir Knight is generally considered one of the weaker games in the series in Japan, due to the many balancing issues, an average plot that contradicts itself at times, enemy HP being through the roof, and paid DLC. In the US, it's considered one of—if not the—best games in the series in spite of its flaws, largely thanks to its stylishness, the breadth of options in its Classic Mode, the availability of both soundtrack modes, and an absolutely on-point localization including some killer dub work courtesy of some of the best actors in the business.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Insectortoises in the Bonus Dungeon of The Drowned City, when killed, immediately cast "Lay Egg" which replaces them with a Pandora Egg, which is far less threatening unless you let that egg hatch. The irritating part is that this prevents you from getting the Insectortoise's Codex entry and its item drops! You either have to disable it with an ailment like panic or sleep, insta-kill it, or petrify it; these may not be readily available to a team.
  • In Etrian Mystery Dungeon, one of the labyrinths features an owl monster which loves to spam mind-control spells at you. When controlled the first thing any character tends to do is unequip all of their gear and start chucking it in every direction. Oh yeah, and this particular dungeon doesn't have walls; the playable area is on raised platforms above a deep pit, and if your tossed gear happens to land "out of bounds" it is instantaneously and permanently destroyed and gone forever, even if it was rare or unique. Fortunately the owls are also fairly weak and easy to kill, and the control effect can be undone by a medic, but still one unlucky incident could mean the permanent loss of a piece of gear that you can literally only get one of in the game.
  • Myconoids in the 2nd floor of Beyond the Myth like to toss out petrification to entire lines at a time. What keeps them from being outright Demonic Spiders is the Nerf applied to stone status: it now wears off over time or when you finish the battle (and thus, a full party petrification is no longer an immediate Game Over). Still, having multiple party members unable to act for several turns can be a pain in the ass.
  • Eerie Chokers in the third stratum of Beyond the Myth are surprisingly fast and can throw head binds across the entire party, rendering your Warlocks and Necromancers helpless before they can even move. They also like to come in numbers, so having your entire party head bound becomes an inevitability.
  • Hypno Bats, goddamned literal bats in the 4th Stratum of Beyond the Myth who love to put your entire party to sleep.
  • Bloodhound Bats in the Nexus version of the Ancient Forest turn aggressive at the slightest provocation and can chase the player all across the floor. They are incredibly fragile and easily defeated, but it only temporarily staves off the problem as these bats will just respawn immediately. On the plus side, a patient-enough player can farm these bats for their conditional drops, which sell for a pretty penny.
  • The Giant Sloths in the Giant's Ruins in Nexus are not terribly powerful, but they are obnoxiously tanky despite being officially resistant to only one element. This seems to be intentional, as they can cause the resident FOEs, who only move when you're in battle, to move around and catch up to you. Outside of FOE rooms, they're primarily a waste of time.
• Good Bad Bugs: The series has its fair share of bugs across all games. Some of them create some unintended interactions and give way to a few exploits...
  • You can skip Fenrir in the first game by exploiting the fact that FOEs maintain aggro even with a wall between you to lure him into a corridor so you can run past him. While you can't go far on the 6th floor without going back and killing him (as you need to report Fenrir's death to do so), it does allow you to warp to town, save, and fight stronger monsters for better gear and get a free turn on Fenrir by attacking him from behind, as well as open some new quests. This is all very helpful, as Fenrir is an Early-Bird Boss.
  • 1st Turn and Slowstep in the first two games are supposed to have chances of failure which decrease with investment up until Level 8, but a bug skips the check for failure, so these skills are always effective (and far more efficient due to their low TP cost) at Level 1. The HD remake of Heroes of Lagaard condenses these skills into a single-level guaranteed success skill.
  • On the bad end, the floor 30 dragon doors in the first game checks for the quest that has you kill each of the elemental dragons, rather than whether they're in your bestiary or present on the map. While this makes sense (each of the dragons spawns by starting their quest), they're still spawned even if you cancel. As such, the door can remain locked even if you've already killed the required dragon.
  • Koteuchi in the Japanese version of Heroes of Lagaard is a skill that's supposed to be able to land an arm bind on top of doing damage, but the arm bind effect instead went to Getsuei. On top of that, Getsuei's arm bind effect was far stronger than Koteuchi's intended strength, on top of having a speed bonus.
  • In The Drowned City, while the Monk's Fist skills require you to fight unarmed, for some odd reason, the second slot counts as a Weapon. If your first Armor Slot is blank, a Monk can use their fist skills with a Mace, even though they don't have the Shogun's Second Sword class skill.^note If you're concerned about fragility, your body armor can still be put into the second or third armor slots. Whoops.
  • The three-headed Ruin Caller in The Drowned City's Sea Quests can have its AI script to regenerate severed heads disrupted, rendering it incapable of regrowing any heads that destroyed each other due to Confusion-caused self-inflicted damage.
  • Tagen Battou in The Drowned City deals damage before merging the Ninja's clones to the user. If the user is killed from curse recoil damage, the clones are not used up, allowing for an immediate use of Tagen Battou next turn.
  • In Legends of the Titan, "Auto" skills activate at the beginning of a battle, giving you a buff immediately without costing a turn. However, since the non-"Auto" variants of the buff do cost a turn, they actually last one turn less than their "Auto" variants (because it activated on the middle of your turn, and once the turn ends the buff's duration ticks down one turn). Especially useful with "Auto-Throw", which usually just lasts for one Throw skill, but when activated via Auto-Throw can be used twice. This quirk was preserved in The Fafnir Knight, and is most noticeable with the Ronin's Stances, Troubadour's Songs, and Hexer's debuffs, as their Force Boosts prevent turn count depletion.
  • There are two notable and extremely useful glitches in The Millennium Girl; one allows infinite replication of any item that can be used in battle, while the other lets you pass down a large number of skill slots from a grimoire in synthesis without actually consuming it.
  • Alchemists in The Fafnir Knight get a new skill called Compression, which massively boosts the elemental ATK of their target-all Formulas but reduces them to single-target attacks. If you use the Grimoire system to combine them with target-all composite attacks—those that have both a physical and an elemental attribute, like the Ronin's Frigid Slash—you'll find that they do benefit from the damage bonus but still hit all enemies, allowing you to sweep through random encounters easily.
  • In Mystery Dungeon, the Sovereign's "Arms" skills makes an ally's attack become a certain element, adds resistance to that element, and raises STR by 3 when applied. All well and good...except you can apply the STR bonus multiple times, and when it wears off, only 3 STR is lost, meaning that you can get at least 3 net STR.
  • Accuracy-boosting equipment in Nexus is incredibly effective due to a programming error. When equipped to a dual-wielding character, they give double the stated boost; on a single-wielding character, it's triple. This eliminates the downside of anything intended to be Powerful, but Inaccurate.
• High-Tier Scrappy:
  • The titular Fafnir Knight of Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold can dole out incredible amounts of elemental damage — often, endgame Story strategies are carried by the Fafnir while the rest of the party is playing support.
  • In Nexus, many players make it a point to not use Heroes in their guilds, due to being seen as effectively being the Fafnir Knight of this game. They're Masters of All with strong passive healing, defensive skills in the Shield Skills, and fantatsic elemental skills that does massive damage on top of the class primary gimmick to generate Afterimages to serve as decoys and to double down on damage. The Hero's Force Boost is also commonly derided for having significantly higher numnbers than normal to compensate for Afterimages' lack of buff upon spawning. Unlike the Fafnir Knight, you can have multiple Heroes in your party, and they’re perpetually powerful.
  • For players who are familiar with the earlier games in the series, Medic is one of the most infamous examples for the Immunize skill and its damage reduction capability. On top of that, a Combat Medic build is incredibly viable due to their personal ATK Up giving a 300% boost instead of the usual 130%, letting them keep up with some of the better damage dealers even in the endgame. Immunize's Common Knowledge reputation about it being bugged (when in reality it's simply overtuned) is one of the most repeated statements about the game, to the point that one of the most common conversation about the Origins Collection was whether or not Immunize would get changed (it ultimately remained the same). It doesn't help that in Origins Collection, Medics are one of the few class who gets sizable changes to its advantage, with the buff to Healing Touch turning it from terrible into being borderline overpowered. The class ended up getting nerfed in Heroes of Lagaard, and never quite recovered to its prime since, with The Fafnir Knight and Beyond the Myth (with Graced Poisoner Botanist) being the only games that made any sorts of serious attempt to give them appreciable damage output.
  • Gladiators from The Drowned City are often considered one of the most glaring balance problem in the series, to the point that it practically exposes every single game balance related problem during its infancy. On its own, the class is already extremely overpowered relative to the rest of the game. On top of relatively competent damage dealing skills, Endless Battle, their unique class passive gave them significant damage boost for free, Berserker Vow is a high risk, high reward damage buff that scales up to 90%, and Charge, which let them charge up for the next action to do 210% to 260% damage output. All of these stacks multiplicatively. In a game with a sub-classing mechanism, Gladiator's presence in the game effectively forced every class who attempted to do any form of Physical damage to take a Gladiator sub-class to make use of Berserker Vow and Charge to keep up with it, turning every serious damage dealing build into a different flavors of Gladiator, and due to Endless Battle, the only class who could outdo Gladiator at damage dealing with a Gladiator sub-class in any way at all are the Arbalists, who have an even more powerful damage-boosting unique class passive in Giant Kill. While the same can technically be said for Zodiacs, who have an even more powerful charging skill in Etheric Charge (which charges elemental damage by 300%), and damage boosting passive in Singularity (which boosts weakness hitting damage by 50%), the applications of both skills are significantly more limited. In later games, sub-class skills are restricted to half skill levels, damage modifier stacking started to have an increasingly higher diminishing return until Beyond the Myth retooled the entire mechanic into additive calculations, and charge skills are for the most part restricted to be lower than 200% and generally turn-inefficient outside of Beyond the Myth where they have similar multipliers to the charge skills of The Drowned City with some potentially surpassing it.
  • Tank-based classes have a mixed reception in the earlier games due to being simultaneously really useful (being capable of reducing damage easily and using elemental "Wall" skills to nullify a dangerous attack if predicted) and kinda dull (an optimized Protector and especially Hoptile do very little in boss fights outside of spamming their front-line guard and casting a wall when necessary). This especially permeates the Untold games; both of them feature Protectors in the Story Mode parties, and a not-uncommon opinion is that this influenced the boss design around them (with stricter boss scripting often leading to "get a free turn if you deploy a wall on this point, take horrible damage if you don't" situations). Elemental damage would gradually become more counterable by other means to reduce this, and later tanks like Fortress, Dragoon, and the Nexus version of Protector were given more flexibility to contribute beyond basic reduction.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Atlus's other first person Dungeon Crawler series would borrow the first game's big twist in Shin Megami Tensei IV.
  • The second random battle theme of the first game is called "Kill or be Killed", in a game where killer flowers make up some of the enemies you face. The track is otherwise known as "Destruction Begets Decay".
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: These games can be offputting for many gamers for not only in how difficult their many boss fights are, but because this game also expects the player to carefully plan their party and skill point allocations, and it's all too easy to build up a bad party that can barely withstand damage or inflict it at a reasonable rate. It's rather telling that these games are intimidatingly hard even to fans of Shin Megami Tensei, another infamously hard Atlus franchise.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • The Ronin and Hexer classes in the original game. They already suffer hard from Late Character Syndrome because you can only recruit them at the start of the 3rd and 4th strata respectively, yet they still start at Level 1 in a game that requires a lot of grinding. However, if you put in all that effort to grind them up, they're still the two worst classes in the game. Ronin has the strongest attacking potential in the game, but because it requires a turn to set up a stance to use it, it becomes too slow for use in random battles and bosses can still dispel their stance to nullify their abilities. Hexer is a class dedicated to Status Effects, which, unlike in later entries, are as much of a Useless Useful Spell as the genre standard here (and Dark Hunter, which statuses and does damage, is already available at the start of the game, leaving the Hexer in a support role at best (for a whip DH) or for binds (for a sword DH), rather than the obscenely powerful mezzer it is in later games.
  • Beast, the unlockable class in Heroes of Lagaard, is greatly marred by its Loyalty skill, which has the Beast take attacks for other party members at random and needs investment to unlock other key skills. The issue is that it has a high chance to activate (up to 75% at max level), can't be disabled, and uses the target's defense and buffs instead of its own, meaning that more often than not it'll gib itself on attacks that aren't an immediate threat and need to be revived constantly. Its other skills are iffy as well: Autoheal only recovers ailments at the end of the turn, En Garde doesn't reduce any damage from Loyalty activations, it lacks a way to draw aggro so En Garde can activate, and its autorevive skill only has a 30% chance to activate at its highest level. The end result tends to be a mediocre soak tank with alright attack skills, but nothing else worthwhile in the most Rocket-Tag Gameplay-oriented game in the series. They can’t be pure damage dealers in spite of the incredibly powerful Rampage (the highest damaging skill in the game alongside Ricochet, even taking the lowered accuracy into account) either, since it requires a maxed-out Loyalty to unlock, by which point your Beast is a Glass Cannon who can only use it once or twice before keeling over. While it got retooled into a manual tank in The Fafnir Knight and was very useful there, the Origins Collection version of II didn't adjust it at all despite fixing some bugs for other classes (though changes to aggro-drawing moves at least make it possible to alleviate the issue in specific party setups).
  • The one thing saving Beast from being the weakest class in Heroes of Lagaard is the nerfs to Survivalist. After being an absurd damage dealer in the first game, their strength was dropped into the dirt, and Multihit lost the third hit it gained when maxed out (whereas other classes were allowed attacks that hit as many or even more times than it used to). Its damage output is poor enough to force it into being a pure support... but it didn't gain many good in-battle support skills either, just some status effects. Outside of 1st Turn and gathering, anything a Survivalist can do can be done better by a Gunner or Hexer. They kept most of these nerfs in The Millenium Girl and were only saved by how strong Efficiency is, but The Fafnir Knight finally retooled the class into a mixed attack/support that regained most of the glory they had lost.
  • Almost no one who plays The Drowned City likes Farmers. While they're excellent for making money and gathering item ingredients, they're virtually dead weight in battle, which can make it hard to level them up since you have to work with a one-person handicap. Thankfully they got retooled into a more useful combat class in Nexus.
  • Yggdroids in The Drowned City are less fondly looked upon compared to the Shogun, the other unlockable class. Yggdroids are built like a Mighty Glacier and have immunity to binds (that aren't self-inflicted)... but their skills are hard to work around. For instance, their innate tankiness is offset by a Cast from Hit Points passive that drains their health whenever they act (and is required for their strongest attack), and their elemental Bots require multiple turns and vacant party slots to set up and use to the fullest, leaving less room for support or elemental damage sources to trigger their chases. Also, they're restricted to the weakest weapons unless supported by their subclass.
  • In Etrian Odyssey IV, Medic as main class is not well-liked because most of their skills don't scale well past half their max level (in particular, they tend to heal more than your party's average max health), and coupled with their fairly lackluster stats you're better off having them as a subclass for another magic-focused class. That being said, they're the only class with actually effective healing skills early-game ^note Dancer has Regen Waltz, but it's regen effect heals less than a Medic's Line Heal, especially with how hard the enemies can hit a party member in one turn. Additionally, Landsknecht's Bandage can only be used outside of battle, so they tend to be at least treated as a Crutch Character.
  • The titular Fafnir Knight of the second Untold is either this or a High-Tier Scrappy, depending on who you ask. He's either hated for being so overpowered that he demands the increased HP of bosses of the game, or he's the single worst character in the game that ruined the experience of having to play story mode with a deadweight, with little in between. The reasoning behind this is due to his Force Boost, which turns him into an unworldly monster that eviscerates nearly everything and is built around being in the mode as much as possible... but outside of it is a monumental pushover to the point where if the mechanic didn’t exist, he’d be a bottom tier class across the entire series. This is also not helped by the class being an extreme case of Magikarp Power that can't be solved by simply grinding, with key skills such as Extend and the ungodly broken Accelerate being locked to story progression. Opinion about Fafnir is largely colored by your opinion about the Force mechanic, as almost every single class in the game can be ridiculously powerful with proper usage of it, but it's also either disliked for being so overpowered with its fully unlocked skillset and tons of skill points, or hated for being deadweight that become okay at best with their Force Boost before unlocking Accelerate, when other damage-dealing classes can take off long before that point.
  • Pugilists in Nexus are much less surefire than their former selves, with fists being much weaker than in 5, Overexertion being completely absent from the toolkit, and binding skills being much weaker on them than say, gunners.
  • Hexers in Etrian Mystery Dungeon tend to not be effective, despite their infamous legacy. This is for a few reasons: enemies tend to be fewer in number when encountered due to the nature of Mystery Dungeons, the Protector already does crowd control better due to Provoke completely breaking the AI on top of making them practically immortal, dealing damage tends to be superior over disabling your foes, and most damningly, killing something through poison (the Hexer’s damage dealer) doesn’t give experience.
• Memetic Badass: The FOEs as a whole, not only known for making players' pants turn brown but also being immortalized in an extremely catchy IOSYS song.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Even in _____, F.O.E.! ^Explanation Originates from a catchy IOSYS song about the frustrations in dealing with the F.O.E. They have become infamous for turning up in the most unexpected places at the worst possible times.
  • "NeVer eVer" ^Explanation Used to taunt fans still waiting for Etrian Odyssey V's localization after going months without news from Atlus. This got discredited promptly after the localization was finally announced.
  • Wynne's lady boner^Explanation In EOIV, Wynne, who's the clerk of the local shop, explains that she's "gotta lady boner harder dan steel" for equipment. Some players wonder how the heck that managed to slip past the ESRB, which rated the game only a T (Teen). Other players read the full ESRB notice and find the ESRB's direct quote of this exact line amusing.
  • Never trust squirrels! ^Explanation This comes from Etrian 2 and Fafnir Knight where you can encounter squirrels in three different Stratums of the Labyrinth that will all steal Ariadne Threads from you, potentially screwing you out of a safe escape. As a reference to this, Beyond the Myth has a fire-elemental Squirrel in one of the back areas behind sealed doors that can destroy Ariadne Threads with one of its Fire-elemental attacks.
• Memetic Psychopath:
  • The FOEs in general and the Ragelope/Furyhorn in particular are often made out by the fandom to be more bloodthirsty and unstoppable than they usually are in actual gameplay. Not helping matters is when one reads their Japanese names and realizes they are quite grandiose — compare, for instance, "Cutter" with "Destroyer of the Forest".
  • Squirrels throughout the series, due to field events in which they steal the player's Warp Wires / Ariadne Threads. In Etrian Odyssey V, one type of enemy squirrel can destroy the player's Threads with a battle skill. They may as well be doing it less out of some sort of necessity and more out of straight-up sadism.
• Memetic Troll:
  • Etrian 2/Fafnir Knight and Beyond the Myth have the memetically annoying/dangerous Ariadne Thread-stealing/destroying Squirrels, that actively seek to deprive adventuring parties of their emergency escape tools.
  • Beyond the Myth has Conrad of the Freeblade guild, who demonstrates Guild Card perks including field events where a character from one of the player's Guild Cards (which can be exchanged via QR codes or StreetPass) can show up. Sometimes, Conrad shows up in said events which has led to Guild Card collectors believing he's just showing up to piss the player off. And since many of these particular events are one-time, each appearance of Conrad means a wasted chance to see a fellow player's character as the Hero of Another Story. Meanwhile, players who don't have any Guild Cards will constantly see Conrad get involved in many misadventures throughout the labyrinth.
• Moe:
  • Present throughout the series, but the female Yggdroids from The Drowned City take the cake. The males look like you'd expect humanoid robots to look, but the females really had moe shoehorned onto them. They're tiny, have human faces and look like they would break if you looked at them too hard. Any why would robots need to wear glasses?
  • Abigail from Heroes of Lagaard, Lili from Beyond the Myth, and Missy from The Drowned City also count.
  • Hypatia gets extra moe points for having a tragic backstory and being potentially doomed by your choices.
  • Beyond the Myth has an entire race of these, the Brouni: short, cheerful humanoids who specialize in party support and look extremely cuddly. Lampshaded in one bar conversation, in which a "pouting Brouni" complains about being used as a cuddle companion by a Celestrian.
  • Nexus has Vivian, the perpetually sleepy innkeeper with a smug, chubby cat on her head.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The chime that plays when you get bonus EXP from a rare breed.
  • The extended death rattle that plays when you kill an FOE or boss.
  • The extended variation of the current area's random battle theme (not the one that begins with a guitar riff) if you get a preemptive strike.
  • The "da-ding!" of a Zodiac's or Runemaster's Singularity / Runic Flare damage multiplier triggering from hitting an enemy's weapon-type or elemental weakness. The same sound is used for Swashbuckling's bonus attacks activating.
  • The unique chime that plays when a Nightseeker activates Spread Throw. Moreso if it plays at the start of a battle due to Auto-Spread.
• My Real Daddy: Kazuya Niinou, the director of the first game, did not work on any of the sequels due to leaving Atlus to create the 7th Dragon series (which borrows a lot from Etrian Odyssey). As a result, most of the series' evolution gets attributed to Shigeo Komori, a scenario writer for the first game and the director of every future game except Legends of the Titan.
• Narm:
  • In Story Mode of The Fafnir Knight, suffering a Total Party Kill will elicit some sort of last words from one of your group, most of which are fairly tearjerking—except for Fafnir himself, who lets out a yell that sounds more annoyed than anything. This also happens with the Highlander in The Millennium Girl.
  • The Final Boss's Battle Theme Music in Beyond The Myth opens with powerful Ominous Latin Chanting to set the mood. The FM Synth version, however, instead has what some YouTube users compare to a constipated cat. Fortunately, the rest of the song is still Awesome Music.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • Gathering runs can be disrupted and lead to fatal results because there is a chance after each attempt that an enemy ambush will take place. If your team is optimized for farming with little to nothing in the way of defense or even offense, say hello to the "save your map data" prompt. While some classes can learn passive skills to block an ambush, they don't have a 100% success rate.
  • Fetch Quests that require you to retrieve a specific item from the labyrinth will almost always have you encounter some resistance while en route or once you're at the site of the item. If neither happens, expect a rush of Elite Mooks or even FOEs once you pick it up. You'll probably never trust a fetch quest giver again.
• Salvaged Gameplay Mechanic:
  • Unlockable classes are subject to Late Character Syndrome, mainly because you're forced to grind up a new recruit from the ground up when you've already got a decently-built party. Each subsequent title that features them either unlocks them early on or features ways to jump-start a new recruit towards the level they're unlocked at. Beyond the Myth and Nexus drop the concept of unlockable classes entirely.
  • In the DS games, it costs 1,000 en just to rename a character, despite there being absolutely no practical advantage to doing so. The 3DS games drop this fee, mercifully. Unfortunately, the Origins Collection remasters of the DS games bring the fee back.
• Salvaged Story:
  • Millennium Girl addressed the shortcomings of the original game's plot. After the original version's plot was heavily criticized for portraying your Guild as little more than loot-obsessed sociopaths who literally commit genocide and doom the world purely for the sake of finding treasure, Millennium Girl retooled the plot heavily to make things less grim, such as the entire Forest People subplot being rewritten so the heroes are fighting plague-crazed members of the tribe instead of slaughtering them to the last man, and while Visil is still a Well-Intentioned Extremist, the party is given actually genuine motivations to oppose him beyond "he's in the way of our treasure", the consequences of his defeat are far less dire.
  • Fafnir Knight improved 2's less than savory plot elements. In the original, the Overlord was a genuinely noble man with a genuinely noble goal, and his experiments only ended up becoming threats as a direct result of the party's meddling in his affairs, and his senseless death and the destruction of his world-changing work are treated as afterthoughts to the treasures he was "in the way of". In Fafnir Knight, the Overlord is considerably more villainous, his hunt for immortality combined with elongated solitude corrupts his noble goal into one of selfishness (also allowing him to contrast with Bertrand), and he possesses a shortsighted disregard for containing his experiments and the damage they cause. This all serves to let the party's opposition to him feel much more natural.
• The Scrappy:
  • Kujura from The Drowned City is not well-liked due to his condescending attitude towards your guild, along with his annoying tendency to block off parts of the strata until you accept a mission from the Senatus. As such, those who side with the Deep City find great satisfaction in killing him within the fifth stratum.
  • Kvasir from Nexus has his fair share of detractors as well. While he seems intended to be a quirky and slightly perverted old man who is acknowledged as such in-game, a lot of players find his behavior rather off-putting or just plain annoying.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In the DS games, you can rename your characters, but it costs 1,000 en per rename; early on, that's a steep cost that could go towards things of actual functionality such as equipment and Warp Wires / Ariadne Threads. There's no practical effects that come with renaming a character, so it seems rather greedy of the game to charge for a rename. The 3DS games thankfully removed this cost, allowing you to rename your characters as much as you want while in town. Unfortunately, the HD remasters bring back the renaming fee, which is egregious considering that they keep some of the quality-of-life changes from later games like changing character portraits and the skill upgrade list being reworked into a flowchart.
  • It costs a fee to store your items at the inn in the second and third games and the Origins Collection remaster of the first (the original version didn't have storage at all, an issue in its own right), meaning that offloading unnecessary items from your 60-slot inventory can eat through your ental, especially if you do it repeatedly; The Drowned City decreases the cost after completing sidequests, but the others don't. In the case of equipment, this can at least be circumvented by creating new characters (provided you haven't hit the 30-character cap) and just having them hold onto those items. Legends of the Titan removes the cost but imposes a very strict storage cap that increases upon finishing innkeeper quests, and starting with Untold storage remains free and has 99 slots from the start.
  • The 3DS games allow you to scan QR codes for a variety of purposes, such as items and exchanging Guild Cards (which can also be exchanged via StreetPass). However, Beyond the Myth and Nexus have a few problems regarding this:
    • In the Western releases, the game has difficulty reading the QR codes that the game itself generates, even ones from QR code image files generated by the game itself (as opposed to QR codes in photos). They generally work best if you align the QR code with the 3DS's right camera (which the game uses for scanning), but the game does not tell you that.^note As it turns out, this is because, for some reason, the game squishes the QR codes by rendering 6 lines on each axis as 1-pixel lines rather than 2-pixel lines like every other line. It doesn't completely break the codes, and the problem can be fixed either manually or with a program, but the fact that it takes player-side effort that involves removing the (micro)SD card from the system, which by the way means no code-fixing on the go unless you have an SD card reader for your phone and a lot of time and patience with smartphone image editors to make the codes scannable shows that the development team did not test this feature thoroughly for non-Japan versions, not even learning their lesson for Nexus.
    • The QR codes are not cross-region compatible, not even between NA and EU/AUS copies.^note Usually, 3DS games' Player Data Sharing (including StreetPass and multiplayer) are compatible between NA and EU, but NA and EU cannot exchange or connect with Japan- or Korea-region copies. This is likely because NA and EU 3DSes have the same script available for textual player input, but 3DSes released for Japanese and Korean markets also have the appropriate scripts available for their target countries, and issues would likely arise if an NA- or EU-region game had to process text written in kana, kanji, or hangeul. As such, it comes off as a shock that NA and EU players of EOV can't share data with each other.
  • While Grimoire Stones in The Millennium Girl offer a lot of flexibility, one big problem with them is that the skills you can obtain in one is random. Creating the ideal Stone will likely take a lot of skill point manipulation and praying to the random number gods that the right skills drop quickly. They're still random in The Fafnir Knight, but a reworking of the relevant systems, including the means of influencing the skill you get, made them less annoying.
  • Etrian Mystery Dungeon has two especially annoying instances of this:
    • Issuing commands to your party members requires Blast Points. These include orders like scattering or following you, which feel like they should be issuable at no cost. Given that you also use Blast Points for things like your class-specific Limit Breaks, it makes the commands costing something even more annoying.
    • Some of its Rare Random Drops require an obnoxious amount of time just to roll the dice once, and this is the only game in the series without Formaldehyde. A particularly extreme example is the Green Shard: it's only dropped by the boss of Phantom Depths, and it has a 5% drop rate (according to a datamine). Phantom Depths is a 60-floor dungeon that resets your party to level 1, resets their equipment to whatever new characters of their classes start with, has all items unidentified (not just sigils and scrolls), and is known to take at least two hours to complete per run. Thankfully, only one is needed to complete the game's Item Almanac.
  • Beyond the Myth has its own pile of these:
    • The Double Attack Union Skill, for whatever reason, does not allow targeting of back-row enemies if the one initiating the attack is in your party's back row, even if they're using a ranged weapon and the other participant also has enemy back row access.
    • You can show your maps to the council and get rewarded if they're accurate enough. But for some reason, using blue squares to mark water counts as a mistake, and you are expected to represent it as normal walls. And some FOEs can swim through water, so you do have a reason to want to distinguish water from walls (only made even more egregious in the Fifth Stratum, where blue is used for the ponds you pass over). A game about cartography penalizing you for making a more accurate map is just infuriating. This seems to have been fixed in Nexus, where you only need to map most of the floor instead of all of it and the game explicitly notifies you when you are able to turn in a map.
    • It has portrait DLC... that can only be used on new characters and apprentice characters that replace retired ones. So you buy the base game or get the demo, break in a fresh party, and then find out that your level 10 units can't use that cool school uniform portrait. While there are items to get a new character to level 20 immediately, it's a waste to use one of those rare items just to have an apprentice character that's the same as a retired one with a new portrait. Nexus fixes this by letting you change an existing character's portrait to another one, including the DLC ones, any time you want.
  • A small issue exists on the world map of Nexus: the game only responds to cardinal direction input, and sometimes it's unclear which direction(s) you need to push to get to a specific spot you want. Since said map is on the top screen, you can't just use the touchscreen to directly pick your destination.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • The Solo-Character Run is a common sight in the fandom, usually using the defensive class's massive endurance to outlast waves of enemies.
  • It's also not unusual to see someone attempt bosses — usually the ultimate superboss — with unusual party setups. Such strategies are usually specifically designed to kill the boss as fast as possible and are not expected to be used in regular play.
  • The final superboss of The Drowned City is located in the center of the final floor and can be challenged right away, but it's putting out incredible amounts of damage and takes Scratch Damage from your attacks. You're expected to travel around the floor and slaughter the Tentacles to weaken it, but it hasn't stopped players from killing the superboss at its strongest.
  • Legends of the Titan expects the player to traverse all across the final floor to weaken the ultimate superboss before challenging it. There are no additional rewards for beating the boss at its full strength, but that hasn't stopped players from trying.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Beyond the Myth removes Picnic difficulty from the Untold games (and doesn't bring back the equivalent Casual difficulty from Legends of the Titan, either), leaving only the Basic and Advanced difficulties, the latter being the de facto default difficulty and the former being similar to Standard in the Untold games (items are still used up, and you can only continue once after a defeat per labyrinth trip). It also strips out subclassing in favor of Prestige Classes and class-changing, which the player can still work into some synergies but which doesn't allow for as many game-breaking combinations compared to subclassing. Finally, floor-jumping has been nerfed; you can only choose the floor to go to when you enter the labyrinth, not while you're already in it.
• Solo-Character Run: A popular challenge, especially against the Optional Bosses. Usually this relies on the Protector's ability to just tank anything thrown at them. It's also a rather viable way of playing Etrian Mystery Dungeon. Not only do you get quests that require you to do so, but because of the occasionally derpy character AI and the splitting of resources, going solo might actually make the game easier for you.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • The series is outright designed to be a modernized take on Wizardry.
  • The original game's Twist Ending in which the setting turns out to be a post-apocalyptic Earth makes the series this to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
• Surprise Difficulty: Do not be fooled by the cute art style (especially compared to fellow Atlus series Shin Megami Tensei) of promotional material, the games' box art, or the characters, or the relaxing designs of the game interfaces; these games will destroy unprepared players young and old alike, and maybe destroy them if they are prepared.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The Super Arrange of the boss theme Their Own Brand of Justice has moments that seem like Far Beyond The Sun and a few other Yngwie Malmsteen songs. A less distinct, but similar part occurs here as well.
• Tainted by the Preview: The announcement of the Etrian Origins Collection revived a dormant fandom after years radio silence regarding the franchise. However, while the remasters themselves have been received well, much annoyance arose when it was discovered that the PC port has intrusive Denuvo DRM, the remasters are based off of the original DS versions instead of the updated Untold remakes for 3DS, and are sold individually at $40 each rather than a single collection and the optional bundle costs $80 ($10 more than Tears of the Kingdom's already controversial price), leading some long-time fans to pass on them despite interest.
• That One Attack: Many a cause of a Total Party Kill.
  • Alraune in The Millennium Girl has Ancient Pollen which inflicts random status ailments across the party, leaving them severely disabled if not completely petrified. The superboss also has this skill.
  • The Yggdrasil Core's Cell Membrane in The Millennium Girl. It prevents any and all damage for a turn and releases a painful party-wide counter in return for getting hit. If you just so happen to have a character that has the Highlander skill that may cause an attack upon being dealt damage, you may go down from a single attack triggering a chain. The only saving grace is that it can be predicted with the assistance of a guide. This boss also has Armageddon, which deals massive amounts of damage and is very difficult to survive. The problem is that this happens outside of its designated pattern, triggered only if you happen to have one too many buffs, so your loss can be randomly guaranteed the moment you see it use King's Resolve.
  • In the original Etrian Odyssey, Primevil had a very accurate version of Necrosis that retained the instant-death status effect. Any party that avoided the TPK would lose its momentum, which could be fatal anyway.
  • The Fallen One in Legends of the Titan has Darkness Curse, which can almost completely bind the party while also applying some binds on itself. This conveniently doesn't bind the limbs this boss needs to execute its next attacks, while your party is mostly rendered helpless until they unbind themselves. The skill is very likely to go before anyone else does, and cannot be stopped with any bind. While it is guaranteed to open the battle with this skill, its subsequent uses become less predictable.
  • The Warped Savior in Legends of the Titan has two. The first is Ragnarok, a very accurate instant kill attack. There are only two ways to avoid it: stun it, or traverse the floor to weaken it. The second is Chaotic Embrace which inflicts random ailments across the party. This one is still used while the boss is weakened, with the only reliable way of stopping it is by landing a bind.
  • The DLC Ur-Devil in The Fafnir Knight has several means of instantly killing the party, but the attack that takes the cake is Realm of Death, which is an environmental effect that cannot be dispelled. Not only does it reduce the party's ailment and bind resistance, it also prevents them from recovering from or removing these ailments, while also blocking revival of fallen party members. The only saving grace is that preventative measures like Barrier or Prevent Order still work, if they haven't already been mandated by the rest of the fight.
  • The Crystal Dragon of Beyond the Myth uses Clear Breath, an almighty attack that does more damage if it hits a buffed party member, on top of erasing their buffs if it hits them. For players trying to make the most out of the Shaman's buffs, getting subject to Clear Breath can result in a Total Party Kill before they realize why it's so strong. Parties without Shamans aren't safe, either, as most classes carry an indispensable skill that also counts as a buff, meaning they'd have to deliberately fight with a handicap to avoid taking near-lethal amounts of damage.
  • Of the many skills possessed by the limbs of the ultimate Superboss in Beyond the Myth, two stand out: Parry blocks all physical attacks to it and its parts for the turn, and Elemental Decoy does the same for elemental attacks. If an attack has both a physical and elemental component, like a Fencer's Chain skill, it's susceptible to both moves. Getting your attacks blocked by these moves at inopportune times practically buys the boss a free turn while its other parts can wreak havoc with impunity.
  • Blót in Nexus has Clear Mind EX, which is used to heal off all binds, ailments, and debuffs. On top of him already resisting a majority of disabling status effects, he uses this move often enough that those ailments will never stick for very long, putting a great damper on any team setup built around shutdown.
  • The Abyssal Princess of Nexus has Unholy Light, which cures all her ailments, binds, debuffs and purges all the party's buffs on top of that, putting a halt to a team built around shutdown. She randomly that at the end of the turn in addition to her regular attack pattern if she has any debuffs/ailments/binds on her, and is practically guaranteed to use it if she's fully bound, fully debuffed, or knows your party's fully buffed.
• That One Boss: See here for more details.
• That One Component: Conditional Drops require you to kill the monster in a certain manner, sometimes with types of damage, sometimes while it's under the effect of certain ailments. That One Component is that conditional drop that has such an asinine condition that you'd rather expend a Formaldehyde to acquire.
  • Conditionals that require killing with Curse backlash damage are some of the worst, because Health/Damage Asymmetry means that curse damage incurred by bosses and FOEs will only constitute a small amount of their HP, and if their attack kills anyone, they don't take any backlash damage.
  • Death by poison damage is not as difficult to achieve on random encounters, but on bosses or FOEs that possess mountains of health, trying to whittle their health low enough for the poison tick to kill without actually killing the boss yourself can become difficult (again, courtesy of Health/Damage Asymmetry), even if you're using the strongest source of poison available to you. And while you're carefully managing the target's health there's still the chance the target can simply wean off the poison by itself.
  • Killing a target while it sleeps gets tricky because the status condition is automatically lifted when damage is dealt to it. You do get a significant damage bonus when attacking a sleeping enemy, so the plan on a boss is to whittle its health down, put it to sleep, then set up several buffs and debuffs before bursting it down. It's easier said than done, especially if the boss can wake up before you're done preparing your attack.
  • Some "conditional" drops don't have a true condition — they're just a very Rare Random Drop. There's no strategy to getting it, you either get really lucky or burn a Formaldehyde.
• That One Level: There's always one particular floor that is really tedious to map and navigate, or is crawling with deadly encounters. See here for details.
• That One Sidequest:
  • "Explorers Guild Trial" in the first game has your party spend a total of five in-game days on the 8th floor. It's alleviated by the fact that there's a healing spring on the same floor offering unlimited refills for your party that’s also three tiles wide and has no encounters, but the whole experience is still either grueling or tedious. The remake offers two things that make it more convenient: the first is that the Wyvern's room has encounters disabled so that you can run laps and pass time without worry of an encounter; the second, exclusive to Story Mode, comes in cutscenes that skip past night portions and make the experience less boring.
  • Heroes of Lagaard:
    • "The Beautiful Queen." This is a quest you receive very early on to get a Queen chess piece. It is only by a Chain of Deals that lasts beyond the storyline endboss and well into the Bonus Dungeon that you are finally able to complete it. And it's all for a weapon that can only be used by a Landsknecht, and even if you have one, it's more of a Penultimate Weapon. You only can accept up to five quests at a time, so keeping this active (and you must, if you want to unlock the other related quests down the line) restricts the number of quests you can do. The quest returns in the Untold version largely unmodified, but since every quest (including the quests unlocked in the chain) rewards experience points, some of the frustration associated with this has been alleviated.
    • "Special Projects Team" requires that you spend three days on floor four. Unlike the first game’s five day camping trip, nowhere on this floor has a completely safe zone, making the experience wither grueling or twice as tedious as the original’s quest despite being two days shorter. The only lenient aspect is a hidden section of the map that has a lower encounter rate than the rest of the floor.
    • "The Best-Laid Plans" can be completed if you have a level 50 Survivalist. The game is no stranger to Character Select Forcing, but this is a royal pain because the Survivalist is one of the weakest classes in this game. To make matters worse, it's part of a quest chain that eventually unlocks Briareus, meaning you'll have to raise a Survivalist to be able to reach 100% Completion.
  • Early in The Drowned City, the game gives you the 'Fish Festival' sidequest, tasking you with killing 15 different fish enemies (Fanged Fish or Devilfish) on B4F. At the level you're likely to take it, just surviving long enough to encounter 15 fish is tricky, and surviving to kill 50 takes either a lot of planning or a lot of grinding. Not helping matters is the fact that B4F is also swarming with Great Anacondas.
  • Several Sea Quests in The Drowned City have you assign some of your guild members to assist AI party members. They're generally competent, but there are a few quests that show you the Artificial Stupidity, or pair you up with companions that have the wrong skill set.
    • "Cygnal sisters" brings three Zodiac companions against the Golem. They constantly charge and fire their elemental spells; while the Golem has a weakness to elemental attacks, it loves to randomly use Reflection which retaliates based on the amount of elemental damage it took. The sisters rarely deviate from their AI script, so they'll be knocked out a lot.
    • "Don't cross the bridge"/"Slow and steady" pits you against Scylla, one of the postgame bosses, and your companions are from the super-cautious Guild Pale Horse. Turns out you're fighting with three Farmers, the Joke Character class in a boss fight. While they have a good stock of healing items to keep your two characters fresh, they'll never attack until Scylla is at absurdly low HP. Which is a problem if you're also going for the Curse damage conditional drop as they can randomly steal your kill if you're not careful!
  • A second-stratum quest in Beyond the Myth requires you to investigate a Toxipede nest back in 2F. At this point, a single Toxipede FOE will most likely be a simple cleanout for your guild (and have the blue aura around their map icon as a result), but this quest requires you to fight four of them at once. Poison is still a deadly status ailment at this point in the game due to the damage it inflicts and the lack of an efficient way to reliably remove poison from multiple party members, especially if the afflicted ones are on different lines. And all of the good Area of Effect attacks (the ones that target all enemies, not just one line) aren't available until you unlock Legendary Titles (which have "beat the second stratum endboss" as a prerequisite), meaning that of the quests you get while exploring the second stratum, this will probably be the one you beat last.
  • A fourth-stratum quest in Beyond the Myth requires you to visit the section of the second stratum that is hidden behind a sealed door in order to secure an "Old Book" key item for Ramus. By now, you hopefully know that Fetch Quests will often require you to fight something in the process of getting the necessary item or immediately after getting it. However, this particular item is guarded by two Megavolt Marmots — basically Volt Squirrels on squirrel steroids — that are hidden in a chest in a big open room. Not only do they have some hard-hitting attacks that can easily paralyze and cripple a party capable of taking on enemies in the fourth-stratum, the battle opens up with an unavoidable ambush by these killer squirrels, meaning that you will have to contend with massive damage and likely paralysis on the first turn. If the RNG is cruel enough to paralyze more than one row and/or your healer, you are going to have a bad time. And you thought stealing your Ariadne Threads was the only way squirrels could be dangerous to you...
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • When the first preview screens of The Drowned City were released, some fans complained about the new seafaring setting and the new roster of character classes, bemoaning the loss of the classes from the first two games.
  • Some players who had taken interest in The Drowned City's and Legends of the Titan's overworld exploration and the Untold games' Story modes find it disappointing that Beyond the Myth has neither.
  • Inverted come Beyond the Myth, with its ten entirely new classes being met with excitement.
  • More like They Changed It Back, Now It Sucks in this case: The 2023 Compilation Re-release of the first three games got flak because I and II lack the story modes added by The Millennium Girl and The Fafnir Knight respectively. They also roll back a lot of the well-received changes (especially refinements that improve quality-of-life) from the Untold games, such as the Floor Jump mechanic and fee-free character renames. Some of the improvements were kept, like the skill upgrade interface being a visual tree rather than a list, while others were only partially implemented, like the reduced Rest penalty^note -10 levels in the DS original of the first game, -5 in Heroes of Lagaard and The Drowned City, -2 in the 3DS games, -5 again for the DS trilogy's remakes including that of the first game.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • A DLC boss for The Fafnir Knight is a giant version of an animal. Is it a squirrel, which has been hated since the second game in the series? Nope, it's a giant chicken that's unrelated to anything else.
  • The game's Alternative Calendar has never been explored in any way other than being a way to keep track of time in a way that's more flavorful than "Day x". Conspicuously, the final month, Summoner, is a one-day month, unlike all of the other months which have 28 days, but as far as what's known of the game's canon is concerned, it's a perfectly normal month/day like all of the other 12 months and 364 days.
  • The early game of Nexus toys with the expectations of a veteran player as they visit returning dungeons. The Berserker King getting the drop on the party and Cernunnos showing up as the Lush Woodlands' actual boss, followed by the the Wyvern (originally a Skippable Boss) becoming Primitive Jungle’s main story boss, stand out this way; to a lesser extent, there's also the different modus operandi to meet and fight Narmer/Wicked Silurus in Waterfall Wood, as it will no longer attempt to flee like it did in its original game and you have a Guest Party Star Member helping in battle. However, by the time you complete the second Shrine dungeon and enter the middle phases of the game, the Bait-and-Switch just... stops, and most of the labyrinths' events proceed like in a normal Etrian game, while their bosses are fought normally without any extra gimmicks or curveballs. It takes until the third area for out-of-place foes to pop up in classic dungeons again^note High Lagaard's Salamander as the first boss of Golden Lair and Ginnungagap’s Basilisk as the first boss of Sandy Dunes, but at that point it’s more telegraphed.
  • In Etrian Odyssey II and its remake, the Chimaera battles Hrothgar and Wulfgar, managing to eventually kill them both in the original game. In Nexus, which recreates the Ancient Forest and the Chimaera, Artelinde shows up with Wulfgar’s son, Wulfgar Jr., and both end up confronting a new Chimaera. However, the Chimaera’s history with Wulfgar isn’t brought up or alluded to, which wastes a possible character moment and muddles whether Nexus takes place in the Classic or Story Mode canon. Scylla also shows up, and Artelinde never confronts her.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • Co-Op Multiplayer in The Drowned City is an interesting concept that allows players to combine their tactics and synergize characters to defeat Optional Bosses, though it was not used again in any subsequent game in the series.
  • The four-races system was only used for Beyond the Myth and was dropped for Nexus, likely because it would not be compatible with the game bringing back classes from all previous games. Not just that, but the two classes (out of the 18 returning ones; note that EOI and II are represented by seven classes, III by five classes, and IV by four classes) representing EOV in Nexus are Earthlain classes, with no classes native to any other race available. Were you hoping to have a Necromancer, Masurao, or Shaman in your Nexus guild, for example, even just as subclasses? Too bad! The closest you can get is the free Beyond the Myth portrait DLC that allows you to put any of the EOV player character portraits onto your Nexus characters, which is strictly cosmetic.^note That said, the other returning classes do borrow a bit from the EOV classes; Protectors have a few Shield Bearer Dragoon skills like Full Guard, Ronin borrow several skills from the Blade Master Masurao such as Helm Splitter, Medics function very similarly to Merciful Healer Botanists, and Zodiacs have the all-targeting elemental magic and Charged Attack skills that Elemancer Warlocks use.
  • In a similar manner, those who might have been excited by Nexus returning so many previous classes were disappointed to see only Arcanist and Imperial added as choices, with Bushi left out, despite being a mid-game unlock in Legends of the Titan (kept even in IV's New Game Plus). It also meant another non-human class for those who wanted one were left only with using alternate portraits through DLC.
  • After Beyond the Myth introduced the third row for summons (Rover pets, Necromancer wraiths, and Dragoon buildings), helping preventing previous games' problem of only allowing one party member to summon at a time in a full party and no summons at all if you have a Guest-Star Party Member with you, Nexus ditched the summon-exclusive row in favor of using spare party slots once again. That said, guest member participation is optional for certain bosses if you still want to run an empty-slot meta.
  • Nexus has a number of NPC characters accompany you, but only one of them, Charis, ever actually joins the party. At least she can join you for the boss of the 4th Labyrinth and is useful if you need a second tank or normally don't have one.
  • The Origins Collection versions of the DS trilogy bring back the ability to set each guild member's portrait to any portrait in the game, even those that don't match their class, as well as to change an existing member's portrait at any time at no cost, two features that were introduced in Nexus. These features work well in Nexus due to the presence of free DLC that adds class portraits from every single class from every single game in the series, so you can have a Zodiac with a Celestrian Warlock portrait or a Gunner with a Buccaneer portrait, if you aren't satisfied with the portraits native to each class but still want something that matches the class to a good extent (e.g. a matching weapon type or similar classes). Not so much in the Origins Collection remakes, where each title only has portraits native to it, as well as a couple DLC portraits based on characters from other Atlus games like Shin Megami Tensei and Persona. This means your only options for alternative portraits are portraits that don't line up with your character's class at all, and crossover portraits which might not be something you want if you don't care for the crossed-over games.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The hot springs DLC in Fafnir have, in addition to one for Arianna, a fanservice portrait for ten year-old Chloe, which caused some controversy to some fans overseas. The art book gleefully mentions that the art team was in love with this portrait, even claiming Chloe "seduced" them.
  • The first game's infamous 4th stratum directly references the genocide of the Ainu, with the names of the Forest Folk and their bosses being from Ainu culture. While this was intended as a satire of the colonialist themes common in fantasy fiction, the English version did a Dub Name Change for all of these except for the two bosses, possibly to lessen unpleasant implications.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: All classes have four character portraits to choose from. Two are male, and two are female. This is highly important information for the Survivalist, Troubadour, and Hoplite classes in particular, which have some portraits that can only be identified via process of elimination.
• Woolseyism:
  • Atlus changed the names of the character classes during translation; Landsknechts were originally Swordsmen, Protectors were Paladins, Survivalists were Rangers, and so on. This may have been done to give the game a more original flair and help it stand out. A later example from The Drowned City is Beast King to Wildling, probably because (like most classes) you can make a female version, and it didn't change the class name like it did for Prince/Princess. For the rest of the classes, it was more than likely to avoid classes having the same first letter in their name as to make it easier for the item shop menu to characterize them. It would have been a little difficult to tell the difference between Princess and Phalanx or Ballista and Beast King (the class names in the Japanese version).
  • The Millennium Girl, with the addition of the Highlander class (not to mention the expanded screen real-estate of the 3DS), had the abbreviation icon as "Hi" in the English version, breaking this pattern. The Fafnir Knight does a similar thing, abbreviating Sovereigns to "So".
  • Despite being a cheesy pun, Primevil is a more memorable and intimidating name for an Eldritch Abomination superboss than the generic Yggdrasil Core, and many fans still call it by the former name even after Untold changed the name to the latter (in the Japanese version of both games, it is called Forest Cell).

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