YMMV / Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City

• Anti-Climax Boss: The Gatekeeper, the boss of the Molten Caves, gets a lot of buildup for what may be the easiest stratum boss. Its downfall is a strict pattern that makes its strongest attack, Tenchi Souha Sho, easy to preemptively block with Aegis Defense, giving the party three free turns every so often to wail on the boss while in its combined form (where it takes doubled damage from everything). While its split parts deal high damage of all types, they lack any way to shut the party down with status effects unlike most other bosses in the game.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Most players default to siding with Armoroad at the mid-game route split, despite the Deep City path having somewhat easier exclusive bosses. The reason is the massive disparity in their unlockable classes: Armoroad's Shoguns have solid attacking and support skills despite their Glass Cannon nature, can be used as a subclass for players not willing to grind/retire somebody, and possess the game-cheesing Warrior Might, whereas the Deep City's Yggdroids are ludicrously gimmicky and at their best don't do anything that other classes can't do better, on top of not being usable as a subclass.
  • If you've got a weapon that you want to strengthen via forging, you'll most likely defer to the ATK forge that you got near the beginning of the game. This forge offers a small boost to physical damage but it affects your skill damage too, while nearly every other forge applies its effects to just normal attacks, which become obsolete in the late game. The instances where your skills can make use of other forges are few.
• Funny Moments: In one Sea Quest, you're meant to help your Guest-Star Party Member, Prince Mito, present the head of Corotrangul to the queen of Sheba as part of his proposal. One successful battle later, Corotrangul crashes back into the sea... and your party realizes that they forgot to claim its head. Mito becomes desperate and his retainers have to restrain him from diving into the sea to get it himself.
• Goddamned Boss: Narmer is the boss of the first stratum, and he's a pain to tackle. Whether it's his tendency to run away before you can even face him (even running away mid fight), hiding underground in hopes that your party cannot snuff him out, and his high damage AoE attacks, newer players will express frustration when trying to put him down. What keeps him from being That One Boss is that, while he's annoying, he's not exactly hard. He can be ambushed, giving your party the first turn, and his mid-battle flee gives a prepared party the chance to heal before tackling his second phase. While a thorn between the ribs, Narmer's more of a nuisance than a threat.
• Growing the Beard: The first Etrian Odyssey is a well-liked game but struggles with a lot of clunkiness and difficulty/balance issues, while Heroes of Lagaard is a Mission-Pack Sequel that's equally fun but comes across as even less polished in some ways. The Drowned City smooths out much of the experience to the level that the rest of the series would follow, on top of a new roster of interesting classes, a greater amount of content due to the addition of sea exploration, and more focus on story elements and worldbuilding. It's typically seen as the point where the series started standing out on its own merits rather than just for being a dungeon crawler throwback.
• Harsher in Hindsight: When the Innkeeper's Son asks you what to write to his penpal, one choice is to talk about flowers. A later quest reveals that her homeland is succumbing to a disease that causes flowers to grow out of the afflicted.
• Memetic Molester: The Abyssal God. He's a gargantuan Tentacled Terror monster, and a Super Boss that can easily wipe the floor with your party. You can imagine what kind of fanart does he usually get.
• Moral Event Horizon: In The Drowned City, not only does Olympia betray the party after pretending to guide them and leave them to die against seemingly impossible odds multiple times, its heavily implied that she similarly led countless other explorers to their deaths, possibly even murdering them herself, thanks to her orders to keep explorers from discovering the Deep City at any cost.
• Player Punch:
  • An early quest involves locating members from the super-cautious and camping-obsessed Pale Horse Guild that have been missing in the labyrinth for several days. Following the clues they leave from campsite to campsite, the last you stumble on is described as a scene of carnage (blood everywhere, tattered and broken equipment and whatnot); naturally, you believe they were all killed by monsters. Subverted when you go to report the quest at the pub, as Missy almost flat-out tells you that the guild members are fine, and that all the blood at the campsite was from the monsters that interrupted their beauty sleep.
  • If you agreed to help Hypatia and Agata enter the second stratum, then you eventually find them there, and Agata presses you to tell him the location of a nest of Sea Wanderers you found earlier while Hypatia begs you not to, as she already had a traumatizing encounter with them before. You just decide whether to tell him or not and think nothing of it when he runs off to find them. Then you decide to follow him, and go to the room and find one of the two either dead or unconscious while the other is cradling their body. There is no way to avoid this happening, as saying "Yes" or "No" only determines which dies (saying "Yes" means Agata gets hurt, while "No" is for Hypatia). There is no way to back out of this, except for refusing to help them enter the second stratum in the first place. Then you literally never see them again, and you're free to pretend they gave up and went home peacefully if you'd like.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • While the Co-Op Multiplayer battles are an interesting concept, each player can add only one member of their guild to the party. The only way to have a full party is to either have five players together or use one of the variants that add NPCs to fill in the empty slots. Not helping matters is how the DS version's connectivity is restricted to local DS Wi-Fi. The HD remaster improves on this a bit by permitting players from around the world to fight together, but there's no cross-platform or cross-region connectivity.
  • You can only unlock one of the two unlockable classes in a given playthrough. If you want to try the other, you'll have to branch off with a new save file, or wait until New Game Plus. This can be frustrating if you go with one of the classes and later realize "maybe I should've unlocked the other one instead."
  • Weapon forges costing money equivalent to a portion of what the weapon cost, on top of the materials used. With forge benefits being useful but minor, the fact that getting them costs a lot of investment that could go towards a stronger weapon outright (though forged weapons at least sell for more) turns many players off from using it often. When the next game, Legends of the Titan, made forging only cost materials and not Ental, it was received far better.
• Tainted by the Preview: When early info about The Drowned City was released, and fans learned the original classes wouldn't return, Gladiators were blasted as being generic and vastly inferior 'replacements' for the Dark Hunter class, despite players not knowing anything about it beyond the physical appearance of one representative. Even funnier when you finally found out that Gladiator is supposed to replace the Landsknecht instead. ^noteThe Princess gets the Landsknecht's ability to equip heavy armor, while the Gladiator is a straight combatant; while their armor choices emulate Dark Hunters, they generally lack the ability to dole out status effects unless they invest in Stun Attack. But in turn, when compared to Landsknechts, both classes can specialize in two weapons: Sword and Axe/Hammer, and their sword skills rely on hitting as many enemies as possible, while their other weapon skill rely on hitting one enemy as hard as possible. Thankfully, this reaction died down over time and even reversed, with the reuse of classes in Heroes of Lagaard being considered a negative for that game and the lack of that in The Drowned City being a point of praise.
• That One Level:
  • The fifth stratum, the Porcelain Forest, has rooms that disable your auto-mapping and cause your cursor to vanish, so you can lose your bearings very easily if you're not careful. The later floors also combine this with one-way teleporting gates that undo your progress if you approach them wrong.
  • The penultimate floor of the Cyclopean Haunt can really put a player's patience and mapping skills to the test as it combines anti-mapping areas with spinning tiles that disorient the player and identical rooms all separated by one-way passages.

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