History YMMV / EtrianOdysseyI

* CommonKnowledge: The Medic's Immunize skill (an extremely strong damage reduction buff) is often assumed to be bugged in the player's favor, either in terms of damage calculation oddities or how it affects both physical and elemental damage, which is easy to believe in a game with ''many'' buggy skills. However, analysis of the game's code has led to the conclusion that it works basically as intended; it's just very overtuned.

** 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 VoodooShark that comes across as even ''worse''; another issue people had with the remake was that what it actually amounted to was [[spoiler:''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 AuthorsSavingThrow, while 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.

* BrokenBase: The plotline of the fourth stratum is ''extremely'' divisive with players, inevitably given that it covers [[spoiler:committing genocide on native beings of the labyrinth]]. The player's guild isn't meant to be in the right in the situation (though ProtagonistCenteredMorality clouds this), but in any case it's either seen as an effective PlayerPunch 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 [[spoiler: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 VoodooShark that comes across as even ''worse''.

** While the 5th Stratum has some suitably dramatic reveals [[spoiler: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. \\
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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 FinalBoss, 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 [[spoiler: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 RandomEncounters along the way from what can feel like FakeLongevity. While it lacks the outright ''malicious'' design of the [[BrutalBonusLevel 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. \\
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Furthermore, there are no entirely new random-encounter enemy designs; they're all [[UndergroundMonkey based on previous-stratum enemies]] but with a mere PaletteSwap, 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 [[spoiler: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.

** In an inversion, getting HundredPercentCompletion in the first game has [[spoiler: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: [[spoiler: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 HundredPercentCompletion dialogue as Quinn showers you in praise for your efforts.

** 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 TrialAndErrorGameplay 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.

* SalvagedStory: ''Millenium Girl'' addressed the shortcomings of the original game's plot. After the original version's plot was heavily criticized for [[spoiler:portraying your Guild as little more than loot-obsessed sociopaths who literally commit genocide and ''doom the world'' purely for the sake of finding treasure, ''Millenium 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 WellIntentionedExtremist, the party is given actually genuine motivations to oppose him beyond "he's in the way of our treasure", the consequences of his defeat are far less dire.]] The ''HD'' remake kept the original game's plot, as it is just a remaster of the DS game.

** While the 5th Stratum has some suitably dramatic reveals [[spoiler: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:
*** 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 FinalBoss, 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 [[spoiler: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 RandomEncounters along the way from what can feel like FakeLongevity. While it lacks the outright ''malicious'' design of the [[BrutalBonusLevel 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.
*** There are no entirely new random-encounter enemy designs; they're all [[UndergroundMonkey based on previous-stratum enemies]] but with a mere PaletteSwap, 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 [[spoiler: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 TrialAndErrorGameplay. 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.

** 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 TrialAndErrorGameplay. 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.

** 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, making 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 TrialAndErrorGameplay. 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.

** 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, making 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 TrialAndErrorGameplay.

* DisappointingLastLevel: While the 5th Stratum has some suitably dramatic reveals [[spoiler: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:
** 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 FinalBoss, 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 [[spoiler: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 RandomEncounters along the way from what can feel like FakeLongevity. While it lacks the outright ''malicious'' design of the [[BrutalBonusLevel 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.
** There are no entirely new random-encounter enemy designs; they're all [[UndergroundMonkey based on previous-stratum enemies]] but with a mere PaletteSwap, 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 [[spoiler: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.