Headscratchers / Etrian Odyssey

• In Heroes of Lagaard, whenever you send off one of your guild members to do something for the duchy, they automatically make your team wait at the bar until they finish. But there's an in-game clock, and it never advances when they're working. Even if the dialogue implies they've been gone for hours... If they leave at, say, 6 PM on Emperor 7, they come back at 6 PM on Emperor 7. Why didn't they just have that member 'leave' for a set amount of in-game time? You could still go off and do other things with the rest of your team, and there wouldn't be this sense that time stands still whenever one of your members goes off to work solo.
• Why do people act as if it's a big spoiler and Plot Twist that Etrian Odyssey series takes place in a post-apocalyptic world? It's established in the original game's manual and intro trailer. The twist is that the world before the apocalypse was a technological world, not another magical world.
  • Actually, the twist is that the pre-apocalypse world was our world.
    • True, but I wasn't aware of that at the time, plus that's an even heftier spoiler.
• Why does the pink haired Landsknecht always have one of his eyes closed? Is he straining himself? Or does he only have one eye?
  • Maybe they snapped his picture at the wrong moment? Really, it's up to the player what they want to make of that. Same with the busty Arbalist and Buccaneer — either of them could be winking, or missing an eye...
• So just what the hell is up with the Hollows? Are they just surprisingly well organized monsters? Former Vessels that were somehow corrupted by an unknown force? Or something else?
  • This gets explained in the sixth strata. They are the third of three races created by the Yggdrasil survivors to help reestablish society. The Hollows, having only one communal mind, were the only of the three races who remembered their origins; hence why they attempted to bring the Medium back to Yggdrasil.
• There's something in the story mode in Untold: How did Visil NOT know about Gladsheim and everything there, and why was the formula not in MIKE's database? The project was a worldwide one, so there has to have been communication between the facilities. Not to mention if Visil was the head of the project, he must have known about the stuff going on in Gladsheim, as he probably had to green-lit the cryosleep and the missile.
  • Perhaps those memories were lost in The Fog of Ages, or were covered up when The Yggdrasil core began brainwashing beings connected to Yggdrasil to protect it instead of working to destroy it.
  • Alternatively all of that was remembered. Call in a lone explorer, have them map out the ruins of the area and figure out if the Gungnir is going to go off, kill the guy he hired with nobody else aware of Gladsheim, take the maps to get to MIKE and shut him and the Gungnir down. The Highlander getting a party and needing to poke around in Yggdrasil to progress were unexpected problems to the plan. Lack of communication between facilities is to be expected looking the series over, since other than Etria and Gotham no region ever came to the same conclusion on how to manage a rogue Yggdrasil, if they even came up with one at all. Even regions that had a plan were running conflicting redundancies, immortality and human sacrifice seals for High Lagaard or the Warped Savior and fragmenting Yggdrasil for Tharsis.
• The reward for one hundred percent completion in the original game is the Radha's spokesperson telling you that Etria is going to decline since you've uncovered all the Labyrinth's mysteries. That's just wrong; now that the place has been fully catalogued, it's going to turn into a resource extraction center, and that's before you get archeologists, architects and historians excavating Tokyo.
  • Additionally, the adventurers wouldn't even be out of a job, since they would still be needed to gather monster-related resources and protect any non-combatants that want to research it. Instead of declining, it's very likely that Etria will become the place to be if you want to work in a combat, medical, scientific, or historical field!
• How do skyships work in Legends of the Titan? More specifically, how do they get to where you are when you jump from town to caves, or vice versa, or when you use warp items (especially Threads)? Is there some sort of autopilot feature that conveniently bypasses all those nasty FOEs and dragons on the map, or is there some sort of unexplained teleportation technology onboard the ship? At least jumping to or from poles can be explained by overworld poles working the same way as their dungeon equivalents but for larger volumes.
• So...is Nexus the Grand Finale of the series? Or at the least, how is EO going to work on future systems? A major component of the series is mapmaking with the stylus, and the 3DS may well be Nintendo's final resistive-touchscreen system. I can't see Etrian Odyssey cartography working on the Switch's capacitive touchscreen which requires fingers or a specific type of stylus, the former being relatively imprecise and the latter not being a particularly popular purchase amongst smart-device or Switch owners. Not to mention, even if such a feature was implemented, it would effectively make the game handheld-only, something that I'm sure many Switch owners would be displeased about.
  • There is a teaser from atlus showcasing silhouettes who look very much like Etrian characters, so it's possible Nexus is just the finale for the 3DS console.
    • It does not answer the question of "how will it work on non-*DS platforms?" though. As for my answer/guess to my own question, I get the feeling Atlus will just make a spinoff series that doesn't involve player cartography.
• Why isn't there an Untold remake for the third game? I get that Nexus is the last Etrian game for the 3DS, but The Drowned City is one of the best known games in the series. Doesn't make much sense to not remake it when they did it for the last two.
  • It's probably too late at this point for Atlus to remake it on the 3DS when the 3DS is going out of style. While Atlus is no stranger to releasing games on current-generation-minus-1 platforms when the current generation is a few years old (Persona 4 was released two years into the PS3's life, Persona 5 got a simultaneous PS3 and PS4 release three years after the latter hit the market, Devil Survivor 2 was released a year after the 3DS, Nexus got its Western releases two years after the Switch's debut), starting development on a 3 Untold is likely considered Awesome, but Impractical by Atlus at this point. Most likely, they either had a choice between 3 Untold or making Nexus just in time for the series' 10th anniversary.
• Why do squirrels love to steal Warp Wires / Ariadne Threads? Do they need them for something? And what about those Fire Squirrels in EOV? Just what made them so salty towards adventurers that they have to go and burn up harmless escape tools in mid-battle?
  • Maybe they heard that Ridiculously Cute Critters tend to become series mascots, and want to make sure they're unforgettable?
• Why can accuracy-reduction debuffs and blindness cause Apollon / Sagittarius Shot to miss, even if the debuff/ailment was applied after the arrow was already launched?

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