YMMV / Etrian Odyssey Nexus

• Disappointing Last Level: A common criticism aimed towards the final standard dungeon (Yggdrasil Labyrinth) is that, aside from swapping its tileset's colors from green and gray to blue and related shades, it feels too similar to the four main Shrines (themselves criticized for their lack of variety in their contents).
• Salvaged Gameplay Mechanic:
  • Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth's expanded character customization (voices and RGB sliders for hair and eye colors, in particular) is great and all, but players can only customize characters they are creating or which are serving as replacements for retired characters, creating headaches for players who want later to restyle their characters (for example, if they later decide to buy the portrait DLC). Nexus allows character customizations to be changed any time you are at the Guild Hall, and also lets players freely pick their characters' portraits independent of the classes the portraits represent (including classes from past games that were not brought back for Nexus). The Origins Collection remaster of the original three games also bring back this feature, despite otherwise mostly drawing from the DS originals rather than the 3DS Untold remakes.
  • Buffs that imbue elements into one's weapons have historically been not very well-liked due to only applying to the target's basic attack, which often goes under-utilized in the late game in favor of far more damaging attack skills. This game introduces "weapon skills" that do apply those imbues, making such buffs significantly more useful, and some weapons even have innate elements that can again be used with those skills without needing the relevant buff to be cast first.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The "Picnic lock", where turning the game down to its lowest difficulty locks the save file into it. Intended to be a deterrent from using Picnic to cheese past a rough part of the game, it instead just drew ire from players who thought it was way too harsh of a punishment (considering none of the previous games invoked a punishment for changing the difficulty aside from missing a few Guild Card marks) and those who liked turning the difficulty down to Picnic for grinding up party members when testing different strategies, basically enforcing the experience DLC to speed the process up. The lock proved unpopular enough that it wasn't included in the Origins Collections remasters of the first three games (which added the Picnic difficulty).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: If you're a fan of Etrian Odyssey V in particular, you will probably be a bit disappointed by its lack of representation in this game. Only two classes from that game appear when every other game is represented by at least four classes^note While only two out of three of the classes introduced in Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard and Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold are in this game, that same game also has all of the classes of the first game, so it's effectively represented by the five classes also introduced in Etrian Odyssey I and Untold as well., and they're both Earthlain classes, and there are no Labyrinths or Mazes that use that game's environments. Granted, this lack of representation is due to Etrian Odyssey V taking place on a different planet, so the Seafarers don't have that game's Yggdrasil to work with and Nexus is already absolutely brimming with content. To make up for it somewhat, this game's UI is borrowed straight from EOV, every class portrait from that game is available as free DLC, and a handful of skills from that game got inherited to the EOI through EOIV classes (such as Botanist's Reflex Herb and Delayed Herb becoming the Medic's Chase Heal and Delayed Heal and the Zodiac gaining the Charged Attack skills from the Warlock class).

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