History YMMV / EtrianOdyssey

** 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.

* ParanoiaFuel: 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 [[GameOver "save your map data" prompt]]. While some classes can learn passive skills to block an ambush, they don't have a 100% success rate.

** 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 RocketTagGameplay-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 GlassCannon 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.

** In the original game, it costs a fee to store your items at the inn, meaning that offloading unnecessary items from your 60-slot inventory can eat through your ental, especially if you do it repeatedly. In the case of equipment, this can at least be [[LoopholeAbuse circumvented]] by creating new characters (provided you haven't hit the 30-character cap) and just having them hold onto those items. Later games don't charge a fee for storing your items.

* FanonDiscontinuity: 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, instead preferring the Japanese versions' meaning "Field-On Enemy". Or "[[FanNickname Freakishly Overpowered Enemy]]" or more obscene variants thereof.

* FanonDiscontinuity: Whenever "F.O.E." as an acronym is expanded, there are very few people in the English-speaking community who say "Formido Oppugnatura Exsequens", the official meaning in the localized versions, instead preferring the Japanese versions' meaning "Field-On Enemy". Or "[[FanNickname Freakishly Overpowered Enemy]]" or more obscene variants thereof.

* FanonDiscontinuity: Whenever "F.O.E." as an acronym is expanded, there are very few people in the English-speaking community who say "Formido Oppugnatura Exsequens", the official meaning in the localized versions, instead preferring the Japanese versions' meaning "Field-On Enemy". Or "Freakishly Overpowered Enemy" or more obscene variants thereof.

** Shilleka from ''Etrian Odyssey'', for [[MsFanservice exposing a lot of skin.]]

** Arthur from ''The Millennium Girl'' receives a lot of attention from fans due to being rather comical.
** 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 the duo more popular than Jenetta. 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.

* SalvagedGameplayMechanic: Unlockable classes are subject to LateCharacterSyndrome, 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.

** Shilleka from ''Etrian Odyssey'', for exposing a lot of skin.

** "Cygnal sisters" brings three [[SquishyWizard Zodiac]] companions against the Golem. They [[AttackAttackAttack 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 never deviate from their AI script, so they'll be knocked out a lot.
** "Don't cross the bridge" 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 JokeCharacter class in a boss fight. While they have a good stock of healing items to keep your two characters fresh, they'll [[DirtyCoward 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!

** Several Sea Quests in ''The Drowned City'' have you assign some of your guild members to assist AI party members. The quests where you fight the Golem, though, get the player quickly acquainted with ArtificialStupidity, as your AI party members have a tendency to use elemental attacks on it very frequently. While it does have a vulnerability to elemental damage, it also has Reflection in this game, which causes it to counterattack when struck with such damage, leading to dead party members for most of the battle. "Cygnal sisters" is the worst of the bunch as you have to handle three [[SquishyWizard Zodiac]] companions who [[AttackAttackAttack constantly charge and fire their elemental spells.]]

** 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 those games condenses them down to single-level skills.

** One of the three-headed Dragon Bosses in ''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.

** ''Beyond the Myth'' has Conrad and his Freeblade guild, who demonstrates Guild Card perks including field events where a character from one of the player's Guild Cards (which can be [[PlayerDataSharing exchanged via QR codes or StreetPass]]) can show up but then sometimes ''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 HeroOfAnotherStory.

** 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 chime for Swashbuckling activating.

* SalvagedGameplayMechanic: Unlockable classes are subject to LateCharacterSyndrome, but 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.

** The first four games have classes that are unlocked partway through the game (Ronin and Hexer in ''I'', Beasts in ''II'', Shogun and Yggdroid in ''III''; Arcanist, Bushi, and a spoiler class in ''IV''). Creating a character in any class always starts them at level 1, and those late-unlock classes are no exception, even when said spoiler class is unlocked at the second-to-last dungeon or stratum. This means if you want to try out those sick new classes, you'll have to put your game progress on hold for a while. You can retire a character to get a head start on leveling (half of the retired character's class or level 30, whichever is lower), but that means having to effectively erase an existing character, which depending on guild size may not be something you want to do. Couple with a lack of good experience sources in some games, and it's very difficult to get someone up to speed with your mainstays. The fourth game, at least, gives you a few key items that can jumpstart a character to level 20, 30, and 40 with each new unlocked class, bypassing this problem. The later games, remakes included, just have all their recruitable classes available from the get-go.

* ThatOneLevel: There's always one particular floor that is really tedious to map and navigate, or is crawling with deadly encounters.
** The Primitive Jungle -- the second stratum of the first game -- isn't looked upon fondly by most players. The enemies that populate the stratum use ailments a lot more often, and this stratum introduces damage tiles, putting a lot of strain on your Medic's TP or mandating a good supply of healing items to traverse. But above all, it's a ''bland'' change of scenery, as the jungle has just as much greenery as the [[GreenHillZone Emerald Grove]], just darker.
** [=B20F=] of the first game, the finale of the Sandy Barrens and [[spoiler:the LastStand of the Forest Folk]], is a MarathonLevel to the point where the whole floor can charitably be called the stratum's boss. The boss itself, Iwaoropenelep, is visible at the start, but revives upon being killed until you kill over a ''dozen'' [=FOEs=] spread across the floor without leaving to rest at the inn[[note]]In the original game, only the Cruella/Diabolix [=FOEs=] need to be killed to stop Iwaoropenelep's revival, and killing the Hunters and Ogres just stuns it for a free preemptive strike: this is no longer the case in the ''Origins Collection'' remaster, where everyone must be killed[[/note]]. Even if the party can reliably kill the [=FOEs=] by this point, having to take them all on in one trip while crawling back to the healing spring on an earlier floor as needed adds a lot of stress. While there are no random encounters, the floor's interconnected corridors make it easy for one or more enemies to join in on a single fight if one is started in a bad spot, which becomes even worse when Iwaoropenelep starts moving through the maze after about half of them are killed. Even after defeating everything, there's still dealing with Iwaoropenelep itself, who's ThatOneBoss in its own right and can render all that hard work for naught if you don't backtrack and save at the Geomagnetic Pole. ''Untold'', to many's relief, overhauled the floor into a much less strenuous StealthBasedMission.
** The Claret Hollows, the BrutalBonusLevel of the first game and its remake, might as well be That One ''Stratum'' because its floor design will push the player's patience to the limit. Not helping matters is that the first game has a very primitive mapping system so it's very difficult to construct a good map to help you through. You're likely to ''hit the icon cap'' while mapping the floors out.
*** [=B26F=] is rife with one-way passageways that lock you into a dead end that leads into a warp that returns you to the beginning. Its parallel in ''The Millennium Girl'' reduces the number of duds.
*** [=B27F=] mostly consists of a wide open area, littered with invisible pitfalls that drop you into a large open dead-end of the next floor. Said next floor is littered with damage tiles and fast [=FOEs=] that can swoop in on your position and ambush you. There's no convenient way to intuit the invisible pitfalls, so it's mostly trial and error; all in all it totals to close to '''300''' pitfalls to navigate around! The remake staggers the pitfalls' locations, makes them visible, but also partially obscures them with a BlackoutBasement element to make the experience more fair.
*** [=B29F=] is ''the'' most tedious teleporter maze, perhaps in the entire series. With more warps and destinations than your icon cap can handle, you will easily find yourself lost and driven [[MeaningfulName Half-Mad From Self-Doubt]]. Again, its parallel in the remake only slightly simplifies the maze.
*** To top it all off, in the original, the only shortcut in the stratum is ''[[CheckpointStarvation right at the very end]]'', linking the beginning of the stratum to the doors to the ultimate {{Superboss}}, so if you're making any return trips you ''must'' traverse the floors in their entirety. Mercifully, the remake adds shortcuts in each floor to shorten your return trips, in addition to the whole Floor Jump mechanic letting you focus on mapping out new ground.
** [=B3F=] of Ginnungagap in ''The Fafnir Knight''. When you enter for the first time, you're forced to undergo a trial to the very end. You are unable to use Ariadne Threads to escape the floor (they'll instead take you to the beginning of the floor), and the the F.O.E. of the floor is utterly relentless, chasing you down and preventing you from escaping if it engages you in a battle [[note]]It actually is possible to escape from it, but only if you try when its eye is closed[[/note]]. Thankfully, saves are disabled, so you can't become permanently stuck in it, but the alternative of losing your progress still stings a lot.
** [=B24F=] of ''The Drowned City'' combines [[BlackoutBasement regions that disable auto-mapping]] with tiles that spin the player around and disorient them.
** [=25F=] of ''Beyond the Myth'' is the epitome of the rather annoying anti-gravity mechanic of the 5th Stratum. For context, there are switches throughout the stratum that cause your party to levitate, and while they are in this state, moving will cause you to keep moving in that direction until you hit something, such as a wall, door, or an FOE; functionally, it's like applying FrictionlessIce to the entire dungeon, except it also lets you cross the pits in the floor. [=25F=] in particular requires you to trigger a switch and go through multiple FOE-infested rooms, and the rooms are big and difficult to map when your movement options are so limited. Eventually you hit a second gravity switch, the second one in the entire floor (whereas previous floors have switches at more frequent intervals), to land back on the floor and have to backtrack through all of those rooms full of [=FOEs=] just to make your way to the FinalBoss.
** [=29F=] of ''Beyond the Myth'' is not just any teleporter maze -- it's a teleporter maze that sends the player ''all the way back'' through the unexplored parts of the earlier floors and back up again, traversing rooms with [=FOEs=] that frustrate a player trying to thoroughly fill out their map. [[CheckpointStarvation Shortcuts that speed up return trips are scarce]], and from time to time there will be certain teleporters positioned to send the player back to already-explored regions of the map if they enter it from the wrong angle, wasting a lot of time returning to where they left off. [[spoiler:To top it off, near the end is a door with a teleporter placed directly behind it that sets the player back by a good amount, and if they forgot to unlock a shortcut not too far away, well...]]
** The main dungeons of ''Nexus'' draw from previous strata in the series but don't overstay their welcome. The side dungeons, on the other hand, tend to feature annoying gimmicks that discourage exploration when they're immediately unlocked:
*** The Giant's Ruin can get very irritating because of the deliberately inflated encounter rate. Not helping matters is that this is done to set up FOE gimmicks, as they are statues that will not move or engage in battle until the player already is in battle, but can still block chokepoints at the wrong times. Also, damage tiles there are ''guaranteed'' to initiate a battle. To make matters worse, the random monsters have markedly more HP than any non-FOE enemy you've fought up until that point, which gives those statues more time to catch up to you.
*** The Blossom Bridge in throws some extremely confusing floating platform puzzles at you that can take hours of frustration to figure out, assuming you don't just [[MoonLogicPuzzle give up trying to figure out the logic behind each puzzle]]. It also has Big Moths, who can generate a swift GameOver by using Confusion Dust to spread Panic to your party so that they can quickly kill themselves while being unable to evade the enemies' attacks.
*** The Illusory Woods makes for a rather rude awakening in the transition to the ''Nexus'' postgame. Before you even start, the game warns you to make sure you have Ariadne Threads on hand. That's because the [=FOEs=] here can chase you everywhere and can even ''pass through walls''. Once one of them has been alerted to your presence there's no escaping it except by returning to town. To make matters worse, the place is infested with DemonicSpiders that give the FOE more time to close in on you.

* TaintedByThePreview: The announcement of the Etrian Origins Collection revived a dormant fandom after years radio silence regarding the franchise. That joy died immediately as it was discovered the PC port has intrusive Denuvo DRM, the remasters are based off of the original DS versions instead of the updated Untold ports for 3DS, and are sold individually at $40 each rather than a single collection and the optional bundle costs $80 ($10 more than ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaTearsOfTheKingdom Tears of the Kingdom]]'''s already controversial price).

* MoralEventHorizon: In ''The Drowned City'', [[spoiler: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.]]

* SalvagedGameplayMechanic: Unlockable classes are subject to LateCharacterSyndrome, but 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.

** 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.

** 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 his/her fist skills with a Mace, even though he/she doesn't have the Shogun's Second Sword class skill. Whoops.

** Accuracy-boosting equipment in ''Nexus'', through a bug, become incredibly effective. When equipped to a dual-wielding character, they give twice the stated boost; on a single-wielding character, it's '''tripled'''. This eliminates the downside of anything intended to be PowerfulButInaccurate.
* HarsherInHindsight: When Erik asks you what to write to his penpal in ''The Drowned City'', one choice is to talk about flowers. [[spoiler:Her homeland is being destroyed by them.]]
* HighTierScrappy: In ''Nexus'', many players make it a point to not use Heroes in their guilds, due to [[GameBreaker effectively being the Fafnir Knight of this game]]. They're [[MasterOfAll Masters of All]] who can do basically everything well especially damage, as well as generate Afterimages to serve as decoys and to double down on damage. ''Un''like the Fafnir Knight, you can have multiple Heroes in your party, and they’re perpetually powerful.

* ReplacementScrappy: 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. [[labelnote:note]]The 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.[[/labelnote]] Thankfully, this reaction died down over time.

** The first four games have classes that are unlocked partway through the game (Ronin and Hexer in ''I'', Beasts in ''II'', Shogun and Yggdroid in ''III''; Arcanist, Bushi, and a spoiler class in ''IV''). Creating a character in any class always starts them at level 1, and those late-unlock classes are no exception, even when said spoiler class is unlocked at the last Land. This means if you want to try out those sick new classes, you'll have to put your game progress on hold for a while. You can retire a character to get a head start on leveling (half of the retired character's class or level 30, whichever is lower), but that means having to effectively erase an existing character, which depending on guild size may not be something you want to do. Couple with a lack of good experience sources in some games, and it's very difficult to get someone up to speed with your mainstays. The fourth game, at least, gives you a few key items that can jumpstart a character to level 20, 30, and 40 with each new unlocked class, bypassing this problem. The later games, remakes included, just have all their recruitable classes available from the get-go.

** The 2023 CompilationRerelease 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.

** In the case of the HD remakes of the first three games, it's more They Changed It ''Back'', Now It Sucks, as well as overlap with ItsTheSameNowItSucks with those well-acquainted with the DS originals. The remakes roll back a lot of the well-received changes (especially [[SalvagedGameplayMechanic refinements that improve quality-of-life]]) from the ''Untold'' games, such as Story Mode, 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[[/note]].

** In the case of the HD remakes of the first three games, it's more They Changed It ''Back'', Now It Sucks, as well as overlap with ItsTheSameNowItSucks with those well-acquainted with the DS originals. The remakes roll back a lot of the well-received changes (especially [[SalvagedGameplayMechanic refinements that improve quality-of-life]]) from the ''Untold'' games, such as Story Mode, 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 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[[/note]].

** From ''Heroes of High Lagaard'', there's the War Magus and the Beast classes. With War Magus, its problems are that it requires ailments to be inflicted to use their offensive skills, necessitating a sword Dark Hunter or Hexer. Even if you do land an ailment, none of the WM's skills are any good beyond Cursecut, which requires an ailment so useless that you're better off not having your Hexer try to inflict it, their healing skills are lackluster compared to the healing-focused Medic, and their buff skills being worse than the Troubador, ultimately making them [[MasterOfNone bad at every role]]. As for Beast, its main problem is that its Loyalty passive (which is required for some of its defensive skills) has it take attacks for other party members while using the ''intended'' target’s defence instead of their own, has a high 40% chance to activate at level 5, and ''75%'' at level 10, and lacks much to offset the damage that it soaks up, or does it so poorly that a Protector does the job better. 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. While it can boost its defences, it's ultimately a mediocre soak tank that isn't designed to be able to actually soak damage. 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 every skill requires Loyalty points, and Rampage requires a full ten invested in there before you can use it, by which point your Beast is useless.