Etrian Odyssey / YMMV

Broken Base
- The plotline of the fourth stratum is extremely divisive with players, inevitably given that it covers committing genocide on native beings of the labyrinth. The player's guild isn't meant to be in the right in the situation (though Protagonist-Centered Morality clouds this), but in any case it's either seen as an effective Player Punch that deconstructs explorer narratives or an uncomfortable aspect of the story that forcibly turns your guild into villains with no way around it (with some people finding the deconstruction to be in poor taste even if they catch onto it, given that it's blatantly inspired by a real-world genocide).
- When The Millenium Girl attempted to reframe the events in Story Mode, players got split even more, with the changes either being seen as necessary to avoid things getting too bleak or the explanation given being a Voodoo Shark that comes across as even worse; another issue people had with the remake was that what it actually amounted to was justifying a genocide - and, worse, given the analogies to a real-world genocide, using a plot device to reduce the forest people to mindless savages who attack indiscriminately overlaps with justifications people used for comparable genocides in the real world. Some fans see the original version as too bleak and the remake as an Author's Saving Throw. Others see the original version as a harsh but serious deconstruction of colonialism and the desire to explore and extract resources at any cost and the remake as inadvertently becoming a justification for the same.
Common Knowledge: The Medic's Immunize skill (an extremely strong damage reduction buff that raises resistance to all damage types for one turn) is often assumed to be bugged in the player's favor, either in terms of damage calculation oddities or how it affects not just magical but physical damage. However, this isn't really clear; the skill clearly protects against all elements as described, but it's unclear whether the design or implementation was intended to account for the fact that all physical damage also had an element (and was therefore reduced by the skill.)
Disappointing Last Level:
- While the 5th Stratum has some suitably dramatic reveals such as the now-iconic twist that the series takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, Yggdrasil being built to reverse the circumstances that caused the apocalypse, and its lead scientist being the Chieftain of Etria who is actually over 1,000 years old, this final stratum can ultimately be a disappointment for two distinct reasons.
  - First, the dungeon design leaves much to be desired, featuring lots of long, winding corridors that end in dead-ends, and no through-the-wall shortcuts save for a single one just before the Final Boss, which makes repeat trips extremely tedious. The paths also go up and down floors so it's easy to think that going down to B24F means you're almost there...only to have to travel back up to advance. You eventually unlock elevators that do serve as shortcuts and take you to new areas, but not before you've probably had your patience worn down to nothing from long treks with a million Random Encounters along the way from what can feel like Fake Longevity. While it lacks the outright malicious design of the 6th Stratum, it can make the game's climax overstay its welcome. Even if you're playing the Origins Collection / HD remaster and set the difficulty to Basic to make the fights easier or Picnic to outright eliminate the difficulty, navigation can still be a massive chore.
  - Furthermore, there are no entirely new random-encounter enemy designs; they're all based on previous-stratum enemies but with a mere Palette Swap, with the only new enemy designs being the FOEs and the final boss. Sure, palette swaps exist as early as the 1st Stratum, but at least you get new enemy designs as late as the 4th Stratum (most iconically, the Forest Folk enemies), and the 6th Stratum does feature new enemy designs, which begs the question of why the 5th Stratum has only recycled sprites for randos.
- The 6th Stratum itself is despised not only for being a letdown lore-wise after the 5th Stratum's shocking reveals, but also for having map design that seems to be hard just for its own sake rather than providing a genuine challenge. Most notoriously, in the original DS release, one floor has more pitfalls than icons you are allowed to place on the map, and another floor is similarly unintuitive to map because it's chock full of teleporters and trying to make notes for each teleporter will result in reaching a similar limitation. Then the Superboss waiting at the end makes you follow an exact sequence of anti-element spells that can only be learned by one particular class, the Protector, just to survive, and because this exact sequence is arbitrary and not explained anywhere in the game at all, it feel less like the game is rewarding the player for adapting to sudden setbacks and more like it's forcing the player to suffer endless Trial-and-Error Gameplay or straight up consult a guide if they don't want to redo the fight 50-something times. Granted, as the very last stratum in the game it's expected to be hard, but this stratum in particular suffers from a lot of rough edges that would be refined in later games' bonus strata. The lack of adventure events is at least addressed in The Millennium Girl if playing in Story Mode, where there are a number of conversations that take place throughout the stratum.^note
Esoteric Happy Ending:
- Hooray! You've defeated Visil and uncovered the truth! Too bad it involved killing the guy who probably saved the world and likely plunging Etria into an economic disaster. The Untold remake added extra content following his fight that leads to the Story Mode party destroying the Sealed Evil in a Can at the very depths of the labyrinth.
- In an inversion, getting 100% Completion in the first game has the characters lament that Etria will become a ghost town because there's no longer any mysteries left in the labyrinth. Instead, if you think about it, the exact opposite would occur: Lost Shinjuku and the Claret Hollows are goldmines for scientific research and will have Etria become a hub for scientists all over due to the massive amount of unique and valuable things to research that are quite literally unavailable anywhere else. Also, since the labyrinth is still incredibly dangerous, adventurers will still be needed and will have a far greater life expectancy due to everything being catalogued and mapped. Rather than being a suicidal destination for adventurers, it will end up becoming a scientific Mecca that adventurers will also thrive in. The Untold remake does away with this part of the 100% Completion dialogue, so Quinn showers you with praise for your efforts.
It Was His Sled: The 5th Stratum is the ruins of Shinjuku, Japan and the game, thought to be a medieval fantasy game or set in a fictional world, actually takes place on Earth in the future after a major apocalypse. It's the most well-known twist of the series, to the point where virtually the entire fanbase knows about it, even those who have never played this specific entry.
Once Original, Now Common: The first Etrian Odyssey back in 2007 was seen as a triumphant revival of grid-based RPGs that modernized them without taking away the challenge. It's still a well-liked game many years later, but after a ton of sequels that iterated on and refined its formula, a remake that patched up some of its weaker areas, and greater prominence of dungeon crawlers as a whole, the original ends up looking a lot more archaic and simple than it once did.
Polished Port: Although it did gather some controversy for not including the Untold version's content (most notably Story Mode), the HD remaster for Steam and Switch is nonetheless a faithful recreation of the DS original if you're looking for that as opposed to a full-on remake, adding some convenience features from later games (most notably Difficulty Levels to reduce some of the difficulty that the DS games were criticized for) while retaining some of the original's beneficial unintended effects. It also does a remarkable job of translating the game's mapmaking controls to be usable with more traditional controllers, which can be handy even for those who use the Switch in Handheld Mode or a Steam Deck since the Switch's and Deck's capacitive touchscreens only allow rubber-tiped styluses made specifically for capactive touchscreens and using one's fingers to draw the map can be difficult.
Salvaged Story: The Story Mode in The Millennium Girl (Classic Mode retains the original story) revises some divisive parts of the plot. In the original game's story, the player's guild is portrayed as little more than loot-obsessed sociopaths who literally commit genocide and doom the world purely for the sake of finding treasure. Due to featuring preset characters, The 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", and the consequences of his defeat are far less dire. How well this worked out remains contested, as players who do like the deconstructive elements of the original story find the ways Story Mode writes around them to be less interesting and/or more messy in comparison.
Scrappy Mechanic: The Grimoire Stones are an excellent idea, giving you lots of flexibility with giving your party additional cross-class and monster skills to use. What makes them annoying is that the process of gaining stones is completely random — you have to wait for a chance for a stone to be created, and even then, the skills you get in one is random. Creating the ideal stone takes a lot of praying to the random number gods that the desired skills drop quickly. The following remake, The Fafnir Knight, fixes several problems with this by reducing the degree of randomness involved and even giving the player a few options in controlling what they can get.
Sequel Difficulty Drop: The remake has three difficulty levels and the highest is still just the difficulty closest to the first three games. Millennium Girl also has a significant drop across all difficulty levels with the addition of Floor Jump: previously you could only skip to the beginning of a new Stratum (a grouping of five floors) and only from the Labyrinth's entrance; otherwise you had to traverse all floors the long way. With Floor Jump, reaching any stairway on a floor you've mapped out lets you teleport to said stairway, so long as you're on a floor with at least one stairway you can jump to (i.e. not a floor you just entered). Since even a fully-mapped floor takes a while to go through and Random Encounters are quite dangerous, this saves you a tremendous amount of time and resources when exploring the later floors of a stratum. A lot of these difficulty-reduction changes were rolled back for the HD remake (along with almost everything not in the original game), although it does retain the difficulty settings that can be changed any time you're in town.
Signature Scene: Stepping into the Fifth Stratum to find the ruins of Shinjuku is by far the most well-known Plot Twist of the entire series.
That One Achievement: Attaining the Seven Kings Grimoire in The Millennium Girl is a Guide Dang It!. Nothing in the game clues you in on where and how to get the King Grimoire skills, and even if you do know how ^note it takes a significant amount of effort to get everything to line up and for the Grimoire Stone to appear during the battle. Then you need to fuse all of the skills into a single stone that has 7 slots, and again it takes luck to get a 7-slot stone to drop. At least you can attain these skills off other players' Guild Cards, either through Streetpass or QR codes, but the skills generated from Grimoire Stones obtained this way are, again, random.

YMMV / Etrian Odyssey

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