YMMV / Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard

• Base-Breaking Character: Arianna from The Fafnir Knight. Is she a kind-hearted heroine that, despite being an airhead, is a nice reprise from the dark things that happen in the story? Or is she an idiot that has no idea what she's doing and ruins serious moments with her inability to grasp situations the party ends up in? The fact that the game's artbook says she was created to be the opposite of the fairly popular Fredericka isn't helping her.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The "Etrian Nightmare"/Hurt Babirusa in The Fafnir Knight. It shows up out of nowhere, the party (in Story, anyway) makes a comment on it, then they fight. After the battle, there's no dialogue and the party just acts like it didn't happen.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Expect most players of Heroes of Lagaard to run War Magus, Gunner, Hexer, Dark Hunter, and/or Ronin due to how strong they are compared to the other classes.
• Contested Sequel: Both versions of the game fall into this:
  • Time hasn't been especially kind to Heroes of Lagaard, being stuck between the well-known first game and the series-refining third game. By comparison, Heroes of Lagaard can come across like a Mission-Pack Sequel due to reusing the first game's classes and its plotline hitting many of the same beats, and it has plenty of its own issues such as odd experimental mechanics, very lopsided class balance (with top-tiers from Etrian Odyssey being nerfed into uselessness while low-tiers became overpowered), and being very buggy. Still, it has its fans for improving on aspects of the first game (mainly by refining mapping and removing level correction) as well as its faster pace, beautiful strata environments, and more interesting town dialogue, and ultimately most still find it a decent game in its own right.
  • The Fafnir Knight is potentially the most divisive game in the series. Its fans love it for the at-the-time largest class roster, the customization offered by the improved Grimoire Stone system, numerous quality-of-life changes kept for the rest of the series, and a more interesting Story Mode with better character writing. Non-fans dislike the aspects of the first Untold that were retained, the questionable balance (if not as much as the original game), the overly complex FOE and boss puzzles, and the high amount of paid DLC. The vastly different boss encounter design from every other game in the series (featuring fights with very high health, strict but dangerous patterns, and frequent summoned minions) tends to be the deciding love-it-or-hate-it factor.
• Even Better Sequel: The Fafnir Knight, in comparison to The Millennium Girl, boasts a better storyline and features 15 classes to use. The Story Mode characters and NPCs are also given more conversational lines than before, the restaurant management is an improved version of the Guildkeeper's enhancement system from EOU, Grimoires have been improved to be easier to acquire and actually show what skills you get mid-battle, the new Story Mode dungeon is available in Classic Mode, among other various and well-received changes.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Part of the problem veterans have with The Fafnir Knight is that the difficulty is toned down compared to previous entries, even on the hardest difficulty. Boss fights in particular feel less like a challenge and more like a slog, due to everything being a Damage Sponge. Even its Picnic mode tips the damage multipliers so far in the player's favour that it removes all sense of challenge.
• Player Punch: The player gets punched when they find a wounded Kurogane and realize what happened to his partner Flausgul... It's particularly jarring because they appeared to be getting set up as recurring characters you could expect to meet in the labyrinth far more often than you actually do to get see them.
• Salvaged Story: 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.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Heroes of Lagaard attempts a number of unique mechanical ideas that unfortunately fall flat more often than not, and most of them were scrapped for The Fafnir Knight:
  • FOEs give no experience points at all, the only time in the series where this is the case. Combined with the overall high power of FOEs compared to the first game, it seems designed to deter players from trying to brute-force them, but has the consequence of making them unrewarding to fight outside of material drops (which aren't guaranteed) and getting them out of the way.
  • In a series where getting blindsided by an encounter at the wrong time means a Total Party Kill, this game adds enemy formations that are guaranteed blindsides. Most of these formations are single enemies with tactics that aren't likely to cause serious damage on the first turn, but being forced to take cheap shots wasn't well-received and no other game features this for its encounters.
  • Class-specific shortcuts and quests that require specific classes. Interesting in theory, but usually results in having to cart weaker characters around (which isn't an option later on, when these shortcuts start getting nested within each other and party size limits get attached to them) or grinding up characters from all twelve classes, and since quests don't give experience yet the time investment is questionable. Most notoriously, the good ending of one lengthy questline requires beating a superboss with a Survivalist in the party, in a game where Survivalists are in the running for the weakest class. Class shortcuts were scrapped for The Fafnir Knight, and class sidequests were given alternate solutions.
  • Quests in general get a bad rap in Heroes of Lagaard, due to their length, complexity, many failure conditions, and lackluster rewards (especially the "ultimate" weapons, due to providing high attack but no bonuses). In particular, much of the post-game content, including most of the sixth stratum, is locked behind completing lengthy questlines, so players who ignore them will be restricted in exploration.
  • The Gear Registry constitutes part of 100% Completion, so not only do you have to hunt down every single Rare Random Drop, you will need multiples of some of them if you want to unlock all the equipment in the shop. It's a lot of extra tedium for little return, thus the Gear Registry never made a return for the rest of the series (barring the HD remaster).
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: The remake features Force Breaks that have powerful effects, the restaurant giving many different potential powerful buffs to use, enemy damage being scaled down even on higher difficulties, a few classes being buffed a little too much, and most importantly, the titular Fafnir Knight himself being broken beyond belief. The game attempts to hide the difficulty behind making everything a Damage Sponge, but all this does is make the Knight's overwhelming power even more obvious in Story, or mandate a Hexer in Classic, as Poison Curse was also drastically buffed, and can be made even stronger with the restaurant. This was cemented even further with the buff to the Picnic difficulty mode, which allows even the infamously difficult FOEs to be defeated by setting the game's combat to auto... provided they don't use ailments, at least.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The Petal Bridge theme contains a segment that resembles the French song "Alouette".
• Underused Game Mechanic: Numerous skills and items in Heroes of Lagaard are dedicated to luring and stunning FOEs to get around them easier. However, most FOEs are easy enough to avoid by paying attention, while red FOEs are immune to the effects even though they'd be the most desireable targets. These skills/items typically get play in the first stratum for dealing with Chimaera's Slaveimps and are forgotten about afterwards; no other game, not even the remake, features them.

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