Follow TV Tropes

Following

Video Game / Etrian Odyssey

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/sqremaster_cover.jpg

Etrian Odysseynote  is a first-person tile-based dungeon-crawler series published by Atlus and co-developed with Lancarse, consisting of six major installments, remakes of the first two games, and two Mystery Dungeon spin-off games.

The series' most iconic feature is the in-game cartography system. The player is given a blank grid every time they enter a new area and must chart out their own map. The system is meant to recall retro games, where players had to map out their own progress while playing. Thankfully, the whole point is that the game doesn't force you to break out your own graph paper: you draw your maps on the (3)DS' bottom screen and mark interesting locations with a variety of icons.

Also iconic are the infamous "F.O.E.s" (Formido Oppugnatura Exsequens or, in the Japanese version, Field-On Enemy) — ridiculously overpowered Pre Existing Encounters that roam the dungeons. If the player collides with an F.O.E., combat begins with a monster that is usually immensely more powerful than everything else on the level, and meant to be avoided until the player is much stronger. When there's a message to the effect of "you suddenly sense the presence of a powerful monster that will eat your face, maybe you should run", Etrian Odyssey means it. It's worth noting that each round of combat counts as a step for F.O.E. movement, so taking too long will allow them to sneak up on you and join in the fight. All of this is on top of the already significant difficulty of the rest of the game.

According to the series' original scenario designer, Shigeo Komori, the series was inspired by retro dungeon crawler games, specifically Dungeon Master. He lamented that no one made games like that anymore, and designed Etrian Odyssey in the hopes that it would catch enough interest to revive the genre. While the series wasn't an overnight success, the first game managed enough sales to warrant a sequel and by the time Etrian Odyssey IV rolled around, its first week sales in Japan pulled over 100,000 units. The series has become a sort of cult hit internationally, and is definitely one of Atlus' staple franchises at this point - to the point that two Etrian-mechanics-inspired Persona games, featuring the casts of the modern Persona games, were released in 2014 and 2018 (staggered worldwide, to boot). The series also has two themed crossover games within Spike Chunsoft's Roguelike Mystery Dungeon franchise released in 2015 and 2017.

For similar games to compare and contrast, see the Ur-Example, Wizardry, and/or the main-series Shin Megami Tensei games, including the spinoff Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey.

The games in this series include:

  • Etrian Odyssey note  (Nintendo DS, 2007)
  • Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard note  (Nintendo DS, 2008)
  • Etrian Odyssey Mobile note  (Mobile Phones, 2008 JPN)
  • Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City note  (Nintendo DS, 2010)
  • Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan note  (Nintendo 3DS, 2012)
  • Etrian Odyssey S: Eternal Conquerors note  (Android & iOS, 2012 - 2013 JPN)
  • Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl note  (Nintendo 3DS, 2013)
  • Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold: The Fafnir Knight note  (Nintendo 3DS, 2015)
  • Etrian Mystery Dungeon note , a crossover with the Mystery Dungeon series (Nintendo 3DS, 2015)
  • Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth note  (Nintendo 3DS, 2017)
  • Etrian Mystery Dungeon 2 note  (Nintendo 3DS, 2017 JPN)
  • Etrian Odyssey Nexusnote  (Nintendo 3DS, 2019)
  • Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection (Nintendo Switch and Steam, 2023), a collection of HD remasters of the first three games (also released individually).


This series provides examples of:

    open/close all folders 

    #-C 
  • Absurdly High Level Cap:
    • While the level cap starts at 70 (like in the first game) in Heroes of Lagaard, this can be raised. The condition is to raise your character to level 70, then retire them (which raises the cap by one level), and keep repeating the cycle until they reach level 99. note  But after reaching level 99, for best results, you would need to retire your character one last time so it can reach maximum stats. Thus, for your starting party to reach this perfect cap, you need to gain 1733 levels per character. Makes you wonder if they take a cue from Disgaea.
    • Fortunately, all games afterwards decided to forego this and instead have you raise the level cap by beating certain Optional Bosses. Even then the "reach level 99 and retire to get max stats" mechanic is still in the game, meaning the fewest levels you need to gain for a maximized character is still 168.
    • The Nexus base level cap is now 99, and defeating the Dragons pushes it to a maximum of 130. However, retiring puts a character down to level 30 max, so a fully optimized character needs to gain a total of 230 levels.
  • Achievement System: Some games have several tracked accomplishments for you to shoot for. The common ones include entering a stratum for the first time and uncovering a certain amount of item and monster logs.
  • Action Bomb:
    • A few enemies in The Drowned City, but most notably the Pasaran.
    • A Flame Rat in Legends of the Titan can be one if when paired with a Flame Lynx, which had a move that killed the rat in order to deal fire damage to the entire party.
    • The Ice Bulb FOE in The Fafnir Knight will expand after a few turns in battle, exploding and causing heavy ice damage on the next turn. You still do get experience and rewards if it dies this way, making it a very good grinding target... if you can catch it.
    • Acorns in Beyond the Myth count too. Both Rabid and Steel Acorns have other enemies that can turn them into actions bombs to blast your party, but Steel Acorns also have the ability to do it themselves — if damaged but not defeated they'll "square up" and blast your entire party with petrification on the next turn unless they're destroyed first.
    • The first thing the Amalgolem in Beyond the Myth does is cause an explosion, dealing huge fire damage and separating its limbs into smaller Golems. The main body is intact, and the Golems can re-fuse onto the main body to reform its limbs, setting up for another explosion once the Amalgolem is fully reformed.
    • The Star Devourer from Beyond the Myth is essentially the Amalgolem cranked all the way up to superboss levels, opening the fight with "Full Burst" an attack that deals 15 random target attacks that deal massive damage and have an extraordinarily high instant death rate on the off chance the damage itself doesn't do the job. The rest of the fight similarly involves it trying to regenerate for another shot.
  • Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: One of the many, things that makes these games hard is just how much basic goods and services can cost.
    • The Drowned City cuts the price of revival items by 90%, just 50en! There's a catch. The past games only require materials for unique weapons, but in this game ALL unlocked items rely on raw materials. Even basic medicines require item farming.
    • Legends of the Titan keeps this system, mostly. The starting shop items just require cash.
  • Adventure Duo:
    • The bob-cut Landsknecht and pigtailed Fortress of Legends of the Titan are portrayed this way in promotional art - the only time you might see one without the other is on the Japanese soundtrack covers. Otherwise, not only are they everywhere, but they are always used together. And even in proper Adventure Duo fashion - the Landsknecht is usually being a fairly sensible Hero while the Fortress is often posed a little more dynamically or is doing something goofier (perfect example: the back of the American art collection booklet).
    • This even extends into Nexus - one of the DLC bonuses for Nexus is new art of every "leading lady" character. For the other four games, it's the Protector/Gunner/Princess/Fencer alone. LotT? It gets the LS and the Fort together.
  • After the End:
    • Etrian Odyssey is set up as After the End in the pre-title intro, which establishes that an apocalyptic disaster ended a previous enlightened age; however, the exact nature of the world Before the end is the biggest twist in the game.
    • Heroes of Lagaard takes place on the same world. The game also revolves around the aftermath of the same disaster.
    • In The Drowned City, it is quickly established early on that a much more recent 'Calamity' (one hundred years ago as opposed to 1000) destroyed Armoroad's original prosperity.
    • The Sixth Labyrinth in Legends of the Titan goes a long way towards explaining exactly why no one in Tharsis knows much of anything about the lands to the north. Spoiler alert, it involves ecological disaster of apocalyptic proportions.
    • It's finally spelled out in The Millennium Girl that the disaster of 1000 years ago is (major spoilers) our world's ecological collapse. The Yggdrasil Project was initiated to stop it, but there's a side effect: the COMPLETION of the project causes Yggdrasil's core to go berserk, since it no longer has contaminants to feed on. There are also seven of these.
    • With regards to Beyond the Myth, the game plays it straight. Though the localized version implies that the world may be Earth of a different timeline, it suffered an apocalypse of its own due to the Eternal Tyrant. Dialogue mentioning a Red Planet in the Japanese text, the presence of two moons, and subtle mentions of actual Martian geographical features places the world as Mars.
  • Agony of the Feet: Several skills are describes as aiming for the target's feet, which is simulated by a chance of inflicting Leg Bind. Leg Binds prevent the victim from using mobility-based skills, dodging attacks, or escaping battle.
  • A.I. Breaker:
    • The original Etrian Odyssey had several bosses use Dispel Magic if your entire party had a certain number of buffs. The intent was that they'd follow up with a deadlier attack to punish you for overbuffing, but this can be abused to manipulate certain bosses into wasting their moves on harmless attacks, in particular, the Storm Emperor (here named Dragon) and even the True Final Boss Primevil.note 
    • Provoke in Etrian Mystery Dungeon. If there's anything - including a member of your party - in between an enemy and the Protector, it won't attack if it doesn't have any ranged attacks to directly attack the unit with Provoke, instead just moving back and forth fruitlessly.
    • Some bosses read your inputs and, for instance, ready an elemental counterattack when they notice you have an elemental attack ready. However, clever use of Action Initiative skills lets your party members use those attacks before the counter is set up, essentially forcing them to waste their turns.
    • The superboss of Nexus has Undead Regen, a healing skill that heals based on the amount of damage it took that very turn. It is scripted to use that skill if it took a lot of damage the turn before, but the regeneration isn't guaranteed to go last. With several negative speed modifiers on your party (see Lethal Joke Item below), you can have your party's attacks connect after Undead Regen is used, meaning Undead Regen gives no healing (as it took no damage before its use), and the boss still takes enough damage to force it to attempt Undead Regen next turn.
  • A Kind of One: All three games contain straight examples as well as aversions.
    • The Japanese version of Etrian Odyssey feature Gullinburstis in the 5th stratum, though they were renamed during localization. Both versions of the remake retain the original name.
    • Heroes of Lagaard has the player battling Sleipnirs (and yes, they all have 8 legs)
    • Most bosses are actually aversions, including types of monsters that are normally A Kind of One in other games (like fenrir wolves or chimerae)
  • Alchemy Is Magic: Alchemists fill the Black Mage role and serve as the major source of elemental damage. Though unlike most examples, it's jars of formula that deal damage than straight up magic.
  • Always Accurate Attack: The vast majority of attack skills (One-Hit Kill attacks are usually the exception) will always hit targets that are panicking, asleepnote , leg-bound, blind, stunned, petrifiednote , or immobilized for the current turn due to paralysisnote .
  • Amazon Brigade: Since gender plays no part in stats, you can have a guild of all females.
  • Ambiguously Gay: A bit milder than some other examples, and of course the series practically encourages you to write your own head-canon, but some of the art of the aforementioned EO4 Adventure Duo comes across this way. The bit at the very end of the "Music and Art Collection" booklet (the one behind the CD) turns the most heads in this regard, but in general they're depicted doing a lot together - straight down to grocery shopping and eating meals. If they aren't the trope, they're at least Heterosexual Life-Partners. And some of the personal artwork of Yuji Himukai, the series' lead artist, "pours fire" on the speculation... to put it mildly.
  • Ambushing Enemy: Certain FOEs remain completely off the map until you pass by a certain tile nearby, at which point they materialize on the map and start to give chase.
  • An Adventurer Is You: YOU are the brave adventurers going on an epic journey into a vast labyrinth of mystery and wonder.
  • And the Adventure Continues: The ending of the Story Mode in The Fafnir Knight has Arianna, Flavio, Chloe and Bertrand heading south to Armoroad to look for the Fafnir Knight.
  • Antepiece: A recurring style of Instructive Level Design used across the series, particularly involving FOE puzzles. Often upon encountering a new FOE, it is alone and in a spacious room, giving the player enough breathing space to fully understand its behaviour before the game starts using the FOE in conjunction with other stratum elements, like complex terrain or other FOEs. Only rarely does it draw the player's attention to the FOE via cutscene.
  • Anti-Escape Mechanism: Binding a target's legs prevents them from escaping battle.
  • Anti-Frustration Features: With a long-running series with many series entries, it's natural that several small conveniences be introduced over time.
    • While getting a Game Over will erase all other progress since you last saved, changes you've made to your map can still be saved.
    • Normally, Fetch Quests require you to give the necessary items either to the bartender or the bar patron who posted the quest, which means you can risk selling the required items by mistake. However, if the one to post the quest is the local shopkeeper, they'll just have you sell the items to them directly. You'll still get full sales cash, as well. Oh, and the quota is retroactive; if they already have the items needed when you talk to them about quest details, they'll inform you that there's no need to give them anything else and that you can go straight back to the bar.
    • Starting from the Untold remakes and EO4 onwards, monster drops and chop/take/mine materials are marked with a "!" exclamation mark and the game actively warns you if they are needed for an active quest if you enter the shop and start selling stuff.
    • The Fafnir Knight introduces a small UI indicator that shows when a charged skill is fully charged and ready to be unleashed in the menu.
    • Starting from Etrian Mystery Dungeon, EO4, and The Millenium Girl, the skill menu is revamped into a flow-chart that makes it easier to see the prerequisite skills needed to unlock more advanced skills, making it easier to plan your future skill point allocation.
    • The 3DS entries update the codex interface to include the monster's elemental affinities. The Fafnir Knight and subsequent games update it further so that it also displays the monster's vulnerabilities to ailments and binds.
    • Beyond the Myth makes it a little easier to get conditional drops for when enemies are slain while afflicted with ailments - You can now kill them with the attack that may apply the ailment and get the drop that way.
    • Players in The Drowned City found some severe limitations applying to running a Wildling or Ninja with cloning due to the way Summons would fill up places in the party's 3x2 formation grid. Beyond the Myth adds a dedicated row for Summons like the Rover's Hound or Hawk, the Dragoon's Bunkers and Turrets, and the Necromancer's Wraiths, so you can have up to three adds in front of your party without forcing you to run a specific party formation to let your summons use a spot in the front/back row.
    • The Map in the Untold games and Beyond the Myth features a very significant update over older games: Harvest points and Shortcut arrows change colours when used or depleted. From The Fafnir Knight onwards, treasure chest icons on the map change if you've already opened them.
    • Some FOE puzzle areas reduce the encounter rate, so that you are less likely to be dumped into a random battle and subsequently trashed by the FOE(s) that inevitably jump into the fray. Some boss arenas, like those for the Wyvern, Juggernaut or Primordiphant, completely disable encounters so that you can focus on maneuvering.
    • In the DS games, you can trade Guild Cards with a special standby mode, but given that the series isn't exactly a smash hit, collecting Guild Cards can be difficult to say the least, especially outside of Japan. Starting in the 3DS games, you can trade Guild Cards through QR codes instead, although the standby method still works, this time with the 3DS StreetPass feature which does not require the game to be running to use.
    • Starting in Beyond the Myth, forging a weapon no longer strictly requires specific drops. By recycling fully-forged weapons, you can get Shards that automatically exchange to Ingots when you have enough and you can use Ingots to add upgrade levels in lieu of the correct monster drop. Ingots can also be found in chests and as quest rewards, though such occurances are extremely rare.
    • Nexus adds the ability for players to seamlessly swap character portraits for your Guild members at the Guild Hall any time you want, where in previous titles you often had to Retire a character and hire a replacement in order to choose a new portrait. The custom title you choose to give a character on gaining a subclass can also be freely changed without needing to Rest.
    • Nexus speeds up the process of re-assigning skill points for rested characters. When selecting a skill, rather than level it up one step at a time, you can adjust how many skill points you can put into that skill at once. Also, when trying to learn a new skill, the game automatically allocates enough skill points in its prerequisites at the same time, provided you have enough skill points in reserve to spare.
    • After defeating the 2nd Labyrinth endboss in Nexus, or what appears to be the endboss, another boss appears and you're given no chance to jump back to town. Fortunately, Wiglaf shows up to fully restore your party's HP, TP, and Force gauges (even if they used Force Breaks in the previous fight!), and you're given a chance to save your game before taking on the second boss. However, as the game warns, you should not save over an existing file especially if it's your only file, because if you aren't able to defeat the next boss in any way...
    • During the 3rd Labyrinth in Nexus, the Wyvern drags your party into the next floor in a location where there is initially no quick way to get to the exit and also causes you to lose your Ariadne Threads. Normally, you can only save at a town or geomagnetic pole in other games (in Nexus, poles serve a different purpose), and a complete party heal requires staying at the local inn which costs money, but the first time you go through this area Shileka and Leo have set up a nearby camp where you can save and heal up completely at no charge whenever you want.
    • The Origins Collection Remaster ports of the first three games also include the quality-of-life changes from the later games in the series, including adjustable difficulty settings, improved battle speed, better mapping tools, free character portrait customization, streamlined skill point allocation, and the ability to review the codex mid-battle.
  • Anti-Hoarding: You have a cap of 60 items. Note that if you have multiple instances of one item, each of them will count toward that limit (for example, if you have five Medicas, they will take up 5/60 slots, rather than those five Medicas taking up one slot). This inventory is also where the drops from monsters and gathering spots go, so it's best to use your items so that you can free up room for more of those valuable drops that can sell for a pretty penny and make new items.
  • Apocalypse How: The Millennium Girl reveals one of the few safety measures the Yggdrasil Project installed into the trees: Gungnir Units, weaponry designed to destroy the core at any cost - which is implied to be significantly higher than even conventional nuclear weapons. However, only two of the seven trees were fitted with the devices - Etria's and Gotham's. When the Etrian Yggdrasil started showing signs of instability, there was a party of adventurers ready to stop the activation of the Gungnir Unit and end the threat before it spiraled out of control. Gotham had no such luck, resulting in a massive disaster that leveled it and its surroundings.
  • Arbitrary Headcount Limit:
    • The original series designer/director actually admitted in an interview that he set the party limit to five to ensure that players would always feel like they're missing out on the benefits of whatever class they're not using — with six or more, parties were just too complete. In The Drowned City, however, you can summon monsters or make a clone of a character to fill the sixth slot. Legends of the Titan includes a sixth slot for guests, but removes the ability to fill the sixth slot using a skill.
    • Beyond the Myth adds a third party row just for summons. This still limits the number of summoners you'll want in a party, though, as they'll all be competing for the same three summon slots.
    • There is an enemy limit during battle, and having enough enemies on screen will actually block FOEs from interrupting the battle. Of course, unless you kill all of the enemies at once, that will simply delay the FOE's entry.
  • Armor and Magic Don't Mix: The only body armor that mage-type classes can equip are cloth-based armor. Out of the three armor types (alongside light armor and heavy armor), it gives the best magic defense and the worst physical defense.
  • Armor Is Useless: Played with throughout the series. In the original DS games every three points of DEF added by armor reduced physical damage taken by one point, which is acceptable in the early game. Later on, with helmets and gloves only giving 30-40 points of DEF and enemies hitting for up to a couple hundreds of damage, you're better off wearing accessories that reduce damage by a fixed percentage instead. The 3DS games fix this to some extent by allowing characters to only equip one accessory, as well as having DEF play a much bigger role in reducing magical damage. Stats bonuses on equipment still tend to trump straight DEF upgrades though.
  • Arrange Mode: The Story Modes in The Millenium Girl and The Fafnir Knight are this to the series' traditional "assemble your own party of blank slates" gameplay. Instead of creating characters, you have a fixed set of five canon characters who are pre-named except for the protagonist, there is a fair bit more cutscenes and dialogue, and areas and bosses have many distinct differences including content that is not available in Classic Mode. As compensation for having five fixed characters in your guild and not being allowed to add more, you are given the option to change their classes.
  • Art Evolution: The character designs have grown increasingly complex over time, going from what might be described as "generically anime" and not involving a lot of detail or complex colors, to having a very distinct, detailed kind of "Puni Plush" style that involves a lot of complex use of color and gradients, with very elaborate clothing that is usually European-inspired. This is most easily seen in the Untold games, where the original art from the DS games and the new art can be compared side-by-side, or in the Origins Collection HD remakes, where you can compare the fifth new portrait for each class alongside the original four.
  • Artifact Title: Only the first game and the remake takes place in Etria. Every other game takes place in a different country. The Japanese titles are different (Yggdrasil's Labyrinth or Labyrinth of the World Tree), which makes sense even though the eponymous tree in each game is completely unrelated to the others.
  • Artificial Animal People: The Sentinels are humanoid animals that were created by humans as part of the Yggdrasil Project to help restore Earth after a world-ending calamity.
  • Artificial Brilliance: Some beetle enemies in both Legends of the Titan and The Millennium Girl will sometimes guard an enemy when they themselves are at low HP. Not only will they not move normally if they did anything else due to being too slow, but they would also prevent you from slamming a healthy enemy with a powerful attack, or preventing an ability that requires a certain character to kill an enemy from activating. This is used to strategic effect in the former game, as there are enemies in the Hall of Darkness that react angrily to other enemies being killed. Several boss scripts make them change their tactics accordingly to have them punish players who rely too much on buffs, or have them break out alternate moves if you try to bind them to seal away their signature attacks,
  • Artificial Stupidity:
    • Enemies may try to use skills that won't work due to the required body part being bound, giving you a free turn.
    • Steel Acorns in Beyond the Myth may "square up" and then use Petra Bomber even if their kind is the only one remaining. The attack simply attempts to apply Stone status without doing any damage, which in this game does not cause a Game Over, so if the only enemies left are Steel Acorns and they all "square up", feel free to sit back and laugh as you get free EXP.
  • Ascended Glitch: While the Origins Collection does include quality-of-life improvements from the 3DS titles and fixes some detrimentally coded skills and features, it retains some of the "bugs" that are beneficial to the player — for instance, the lack of a failure check for the Survivalist's 1st Turn skill in the first game, or the RNG manipulation in the third game.
  • Attack Its Weak Point: Played straight in all of the games, but generally not so noticeable in Etrian Odyssey. Most enemies have an element they are weak to, and receive about 50% more damage from an attack of that element.
    • The mage-like classes from the second game on have skills that further increase the damage you do when you hit a weakness. Alchemists have Analyze in Heroes of Lagaard, The Millennium Girl, and The Fafnir Knight. Zodiacs have Singularity in The Drowned City, and the Rune Masters have Runic Guidance in Legends of the Titan.
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • The Infinity +1 Sword and Infinity -1 Sword weapons in Legends of the Titan. They're only slightly more powerful than the third most powerful weapon of its type. However, the killer is that despite having a full six/eight forge slots, they require one of each material used to make the weapon to be used for a single slot. This is a problem because the items are either normal or conditional drops from difficult bonus bosses or the sixth stratum's super difficult boss. Especially since the bosses take a lengthy fourteen days to respawn after they're defeated.
    • Of the penultimate weapons in the fourth game, Kerykeion, the penultimate staff, becomes most frustrating to fully power up, as each forge slot requires conditional drops from three different FOEs. While those enemies are easily found together, the "condition" for the item is that it has a low drop rate, forcing the player to use Formaldehydes if they want to collect those drops with consistency.
    • Also from Legends of the Titan, Blood Surge is initially very practical, but becomes this after putting more than one or two skill points into it. At one point, it boosts your damage by 45% at a trivial cost of 10 HP and 5 TP every turn. Further points give a 5% increase to the damage bonus, but a much higher increase to the HP cost. Maxed out at six points, it becomes +70% damage at a significant cost of 197 HP and 10 TP per turn.
    • Cure 3 in the first game. It provides a full heal, which sounds amazing... but it's a single target heal, and Salve 2 heals so much it's practically a full heal while also targeting the entire party. The situations where it's better than Salve 2 are so miniscule that it's better to just not bother and invest in the class' many other great skills.
    • TP restoration skills will almost always cost way more to cast than the amount they can heal, or are so deep in prerequisite skills that they can do more harm than good to a character's build.
  • Awesomeness by Analysis: Alchemists have the skill Analysis, which increases their damage when they attack enemies' weak points. The Zodiac class supposedly uses the power of math to manipulate the ether.
  • Background Music Override: In all games, the F.O.E. battle theme is capable of overriding the standard enemy music. The override is accompanied by a sound effect that clearly tells the player that shit is about to get real (and, in the games with voiced dialogues, one of your characters will voice their suprise and/or fear). But even the F.O.E. theme is unable to override the boss music (the sound effect signaling a F.O.E.'s intrusion to the battle still plays, but the boss music is resumed afterwards).
  • Bag of Sharing: In Etrian Mystery Dungeon, your inventory can be accessed by guild members manning a defensive fortification against DOE invasions several floors away.
  • Balance Buff:
    • From Beyond the Myth onwards, resting at the inn now revives dead party members as well, something that in previous games require a separate service that you also have to pay for.
    • When classes make a return in later games, they may have several skills or even the entire skill tree reworked, ironing out some quirks and making some skills a lot more effective. Some classes become greatly improved this way.
  • Barrier Warrior: Protectors and Fortresses, while mainly acting as Stone Wall, have skills that can completely block certain elemental attacks or improve defense for the entire party. This also extends to anyone who has their skills, be it through Grimoire Stones or subclassing.
  • Battle Theme Music:
    • Each main game in the series series has a set of battle themes for each type of opponent, with a few variations occuring from game to game: Three themes for enemy encounters (there are only two in The Drowned City), one theme for the Field-On Enemies (F.O.E.), one theme for the main stratum bosses, one theme for the Final Boss, one theme for the Elemental Dragons and other superbosses (this particular theme, "Scatter About", is present in all games except in the fifth), and in some games one for the True Final Boss that is fought in the postgame Bonus Dungeon (the ones that don't have this are games one, two and four: Primevil in the original reuses the standard boss music, Ur-Child in the second reuses the final boss music, and Warped Savior in the fourth uses both the regular boss theme in the first phase and the final boss theme in the second).
    • The first and second games, and by extension their Untold remakes, have each a special battle theme used for certain plot-critical human opponents ("Towering Pair" in the first game and Millenium Girl, "Guardians of the Sorrowful Ice" in the second game and Fafnir Knight). The third game has one such opponent as well (fought if the party joins one of the factions halfway through the story), but he uses the regular boss theme instead.
    • The Untold remakes have each two extra boss themes; the first one is heard when the bosses from the added dungeon (Gladsheim in Millenium Girl, Ginnungagap in Fafnir Knight) are fought, and the second one is heard with the last boss (M.I.K.E. in Millenium Girl, Yggdrasil Core in Fafnir Knight).
    • Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City: There is a separate battle theme for the fights in the sea ("End of the Raging Waves"). This theme is remixed in Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan for the now-frequent Mini-Boss battles (which are otherwise rare in the series), and once again in Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth for the superbosses (replacing "Scatter About" in that role).
    • Etrian Odyssey Nexus: Being a Megamix Game, it has many familiar tracks that correspond to the returning bosses, minibosses and F.O.E. from previous games; in addition, the otherwise new boss of the postgame stratum borrows the theme of the ultimate superboss from the third game ("Calling That Detestable Name"). However, it also has a new theme for the bosses fought in the first three Shrines (the fourth Shrine's boss borrows "Towering Pair" instead), as well as one for the Shrines' and overworld's F.O.E. and one for the standard Final Boss.
  • Bears Are Bad News: In the original Etrian Odyssey, as well as its remake Millenium Girl and two of the sequels (Legends of the Titan and Nexus), there's a breed of F.O.E known as Cutter. They are ferocious ursid monsters with overgrown claws capable of destroying large wooden debris and (during battle) causing tons of damage to the party. Later in those games (except Nexus), their nastier cousins (the Bloodbears) start appearing, and in Legends of the Titan one of them is fought as a Mini-Boss, eventually followed up by a dangerous King Mook (Berserker King). Lastly, in those same games (except Nexus once again), the deadliest breed (Desoulers) appears, an F.O.E. that makes the prior three look tame by comparison.
  • Beef Gate: This is one purpose of the F.O.E.s. Special cases above and beyond even that that are mentioned as such even in game include Wyvern in Etrian Odyssey, Salamox in Heroes of Lagaard, and the Stalkers in both games.
  • Berserk Button: Several enemies behave like this.
    • Most notably, the Iron Crabs found in the deepest floor of the labyrinth in The Millennium Girl will not do anything until one of its allies is killed, upon which it will constantly unleash a powerful attack that can level even the strongest parties.
    • In The Fafnir Knight, Salamander (previously Salamox) will go nuts and start spamming its ultimate attack every turn if you kill any of the Baby Salamanders it summons.
    • Dinogator/Muckdile responds to binds by using the party-crushing Frolic attack. In Heroes of Lagaard, it only does this when it's fully bound, so using only a head bind will keep it pacified. In The Fafnir Knight, it will do this when it has any bind on it.
    • The Charging Rhino in The Fafnir Knight responds to a head bind by using the unstoppable Do or Die, which heals itself for almost half its max HP and buffs its physical attack. A full-strength Lava Beast in the same game will use Waterproof Fire in response to taking Ice damage, which heals for about 75% of its max HP on top of making its elemental attacks stronger.
    • In Legends of the Titan and Nexus, killing both Furyfawns in the Small Orchard will summon a Furyhorn who's out for your blood and can move faster on the map than you can. And if you think binding its legs stops its offense much like with the Furyfawns, it can also inflict Panic with an attack that can only be stopped with a head bind, which you likely won't have yet at the point of either game that you encounter it at.
  • Benevolent Boss: A lot of the town leaders are decent, but worth noting is the Outland Count from Legends of the Titan. He at first comes across as a pampered aristocrat with his fancy outfit and his fluffy lapdog, Margherita. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that he has a very good understanding of the responsibility that comes with his position and he would gladly give anything, even his own life, to protect the city.
  • Biblical Motifs: There are a lot of thinly-veiled allusions between the final strata of Heroes of Lagaard / The Fafnir Knight and the Bible. The labyrinth of High Lagaard is ruled over by the Overlord, who clearly has some delusions of godhood. He's served by a race of winged humanoid bird-people (angels) who collect the bodies of fallen adventurers and bring them to his floating castle - aptly called the Heavenly Keep. Here, he experiments upon them and tries to grant them eternal life, turning them into some of the bosses you face throughout the game. The postgame takes this even further, with the True Final Boss being an Angelic Abomination that is also the first creation of the Overlord - it's item drop is even called the Eden Apple.
  • Body Horror: The Titan's Curse in Legends of the Titan, which appears partway through the third land. It slowly and painfully transforms its victims into vegetation. While discussed and described at length, its effects are almost never shown with the exception of Prince Baldur, who takes on a One-Winged Angel form thanks to the tree's effects.
  • Bonus Dungeon: Every game in the series features a sixth (or seventh, in the case of the Untold games) stratum that houses much harder enemies and a powerful Superboss that serves as the True Final Boss.
  • Book Ends: In a roundabout way, with Nexus being the last game in Nintendo handhelds (DS and 3DS): The very first true boss you fight in Etrian Odyssey is named Fenrir, while the very last boss you fight in Nexus is named Jormungandr. Both entities are named after two of Loki's children in Norse Mythology.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • Making detailed maps can take quite a while, but since the nature of the game makes it so that you have to run through the same floors over and over it pays off when you're able to get through the first Strata in a few minutes.
    • Throughout the series, there are passive skills that simply raise the damage output of the user's primary damage type(s), rather than giving skills for that character to use. Given that it costs nothing to execute a basic attack, and only a few classes can get Critical Hits with active skills in addition to with basic attacks, these are some of the most important skills for physical attackers. This becomes doubly important if you have a party member who can cast elemental enchantments on weapons, as those buffs frequently only apply to basic attacks and not attack skills.
    • TP Up is another useful passive skill, particularly for spell-based classes that derive all of their utility from skills that deplete TP. That all-hitting fire-elemental spell may be cool, but what's even more cool is being able to cast it regularly.
    • Sometimes it may be better to keep a skill an an intentionally low level, as many active skills have steps where the effect improves dramatically but the TP cost spikes to a point where it would be more efficient to not level the skill up to that point. Thankfully, this isn't an issue with passive skills, most of which don't have drawbacks for leveling them up.
    • Party compositions based around the classical defensive core of a Medic-Protector-equivalent pair tend to be fairly generic and lack many gimmicks, but are usually very stable and safe for most fights given the dedicated healing and tanking at hand.
    • Investments in skills to reduce the chance of blindsides or raise chance of preemptive rounds may detract from available points for other skills, but stopping an enemy ambush or gaining a free turn with a guaranteed escape rate can prevent a dungeon trip from ending prematurely due to Yet Another Stupid Death.
    • The Memory Conch accessory in Beyond the Myth and Nexus. It's obtainable early in-game and it bestows a single ability: Leaked Experience to everyone not in the active party. Even though it confers no direct benefit to the equipping party member, as opposed to other accessories that provide large stat boosts, it's useful for larger-sized guilds where keeping the entire roster leveled sufficiently can easily become a chore.
    • In Legends of the Titan and Beyond the Myth, two of the most useful Burst/Union skills are Analyze and Full Retreat. Analyze is available in the second Maze of EOIV and is available to all party members in EOV, and is a simple Enemy Scan technique, very useful for new enemies and especially bosses and FOEs. Full Retreat is initially available to all in both games and gets you out of battle, back to the last stairs, entrance, or geomagnetic pole, and can save the party in a pinch if they become severely crippled (though note that 3 party members who are alive and not with an incapacitation-inducing ailment need to participate) or end up in an FOE battle by mistake.
    • Sometimes a subclass is taken not for their active skills, but for their passives. This is especially true if the main class's skills are so skill point intensive that there aren't a lot of excess skill points to invest elsewhere. Passives can strengthen what's already available for minimal requirement and investment. Subclassing to the tank class (Protector, Hoplite, or Fortress) for access to shields also helps in aiding a party member's durability.
    • Buffs and debuffs. Aside from skewing damage exchange to make fights significantly easier, you can eliminate an unwanted buff (on the enemy) or debuff (on your party) just by casting an opposing (de)buff skill, even if that skill is only level 1.
    • After-Combat Recovery skills like the Medic's Patch Up restores some HP to the party after every battle. This can save up greatly on TP and healing items, especially in the early game when TP is scarce.
  • Boss in Mook Clothing: While F.O.E.s are sometimes considered this by new players, you can choose when you want to fight them. However, many random encounters are just as deadly.
    • Heroes of Lagaard has a returning enemy from the first game, the Muckdile, who traded its not-very-noteworthy F.O.E. status for a deadly rare random encounter. Along with many factors that make it more formidable, it's the single enemy in the game that is immune to Stun, and uses an extremely dangerous attack if you bind its limbs. Not even the True Final Boss of the game does anything like that, and there is no way to know it until it has happened at least once. The remake also has said monster in all its unnaturally powerful glory, but it makes it all the more difficult for the player by making one particular guaranteed encounter shiny, resulting in many parties destroyed or heavily injured before they can even move. What makes it worse is that there is a quest that forces the player to go hunt one to complete it, and the means of triggering this encounter are not immediately noticeable. That aside, the player can, on rare occasions, also encounter normal versions of this monster... sometimes in pairs. The Dinogator also returns in Nexus as the strongest FOE in the game, capable of destroying even max-level parties.
    • The Drowned City has a couple. The Great Lynx, on the first floor, has been known to kill party members with normal attacks. Largebills are a stronger version, though they teach players to go dungeon-hopping during certain hours. These seem to be a giant middle finger at anyone who's trying this series for the first time. Of course, as you go down, things will get worse. And this happens at every stratum in the game. The worst kinds, however, are the monsters that summon/combine/transform to F.O.E.-type monsters if left alive for too long.
    • Practically any ape or lion monster qualifies in Legends of the Titan.
  • Boss Room: Suspiciously large unmapped regions of the final floor of any stratum typically house the stratum's boss. The game even has the courtesy of warning the player of the boss ahead as they stand outside the door leading to it.
  • Bottomless Bladder: You never need to sleep, and one quest in Etrian Odyssey requires you avoid doing so for 5 days. There isn't really that much reason to sleep, with an easily obtainable source of infinite TP on the first floor and the cost of the inn.
  • Bragging Rights Reward:
    • The Ameno-Habakiri, the strongest katana (arguably, due to other katanas a step under it also giving decent stat boosts), is obtained by selling a monster drop from the True Final Boss. However, by the time you get it, your party will be so strong there's next to nothing worth using it on. Exaggerated in The Drowned City where the katana has 8 free forge slots... and forging in each one requires another of the drop. Averted in the Untold games - completing Story Mode of The Millennium Girl will give the player access to this weapon even if they haven't accessed the Bonus Dungeon, while The Fafnir Knight still has DLC bosses that can be even more challenging than the ultimate boss, and yes, the strongest of the DLC bosses will yield a powerful weapon when you defeat it on the hardest difficulty, too. Nexus also has the True Final Boss as one last challenge after you earn the Ameno-Habakiri.
    • In Legends of the Titan, the Ameno-Habakiri is downgraded to the penultimate katana, now requiring the player beat a different but slightly easier Superboss instead. Taking its place in this trope are the Yggdrasil weapons, detailed above in Awesome, but Impractical.
    • Also, every game gives out an accessory that grants impressive stat bonuses and can be used by any party member as a reward for achieving 100% Completion — by logging every enemy, every enemy drop, and every gathered item in the game. Barring DLC or QR code quests there is nothing left worth using it on.
    • Heroic difficulty's tag on your Guild Card. All this does is prove that you've played at the highest difficulty without trying to lower it and that you didn't wait for a New Game Plus, due to the way its set up locking you out of returning to the difficulty if you lower it and forbidding carrying over data from an old playthrough.
  • Broad Strokes: In Etrian Odyssey Nexus, whenever events from the first two games in particular are discussed, it’s done in a rather vague way that makes it unclear if the original or Untold version of events happened. This especially becomes murky concerns Wulfgar Jr, since his father and father’s owner died in the original game, whereas both survived in 2 Untold. Dialogue pertaining to the events of the third game also makes no indication of which ending was chosen.
  • Brutal Bonus Level:
    • The postgame dungeons are typically a sharp jump in difficulty from the previous dungeons leading up to the final boss.
    • Nexus introduces sub-dungeons which are completely optional. If you visit them at the earliest possible opportunity, their new enemies can prove frustrating or difficult, and the boss at the end is nearly guaranteed to beat your party silly. It's often recommended to leave those dungeons alone until you've finished the next main dungeon.
  • But Thou Must!:
    • The first game forces you to follow through with the mayor's plans to genocide the forest people in order to proceed (you can't continue until you accept his mission to annihilate them.) And to make it worse, he explicitly says that he's doing it to protect the town's tourist industry. It also forces you to fight Visil after he tells you that he'll fight you to the death if you enter the door he's in. Notably, you're told an alternative is to go to town and be lauded as heroes for your adventures in the labyrinth, but going back and even trying to turn in the mission doesn't allow you to avoid the battle.
    • After you defeat the boss in Heroes of Lagaard's Crimson Vengeance postgame quest, you have one of three responses for the Guildmaster after you save her. Only one of the responses will actually allow you to proceed, mainly to prevent her from resigning and leaving Lagaard.
    • In The Fafnir Knight, you're outright barred from entering the labyrinth if you find the missing guards but don't take the mission to fight Chimera. Even if you do try to ascend the nearby stairs, you're just told that it's banned until further notice.
    • Averted in the final boss fight of The Fafnir Knight's Story mode: After destroying the Calamity's barrier that prevented it from taking damage, the player gets the option to poetically finish it off by unleashing the power of the pact and using Force Break. However, this 99999 damage attack is completely optional, as the player can choose to just keep using normal attacks and skills or not even notice that Force Break became available.
    • Double Subverted very early into Nexus. In the first dungeon, Birgitta offers to give the player a map. The player can tell her that they can remember everything without one; she's impressed, and actually allows the player to continue map-less. A short while later, though, she politely forces the map onto the party.
  • Can't Catch Up: Very much in effect in the first Etrian Odyssey game, where two of the classes are not available until you advance pretty far in the labyrinth, and if you want one in your party you have no choice but to train them up from level one. Averted in Legends of the Titan, where you unlock three classes while progressing through the story. Each time you unlock a new one you get a couple of scrolls allowing you to train a member of that class up to an at that point appropriate level, as well as getting a Guest-Star Party Member of that class as a permanent party member if you choose the right dialogue options.
  • Cartography Sidequest: Not so much as a side quest per se, as it is one of the core features of the series and one of the first things it tries to teach you in its first missions. But Beyond the Myth expands on this by allowing the player to report sufficiently completed maps to the Council Hall, earning rewards for each stratum successfully mapped on top of being able to start their next labyrinth trip at higher floors of the labyrinth.
  • Cast from Hit Points:
    • The Bushi's Blood Surge skill in Legends of the Titan boosts the user's attack power considerably but consumes a portion of HP and TP with each action made while the skill is active, and their Shockwave skill that hits every enemy consumes 25% of their max HP.
    • A good number of the Highlander skills in The Millennium Girl require you to sacrifice some HP for an attack. Much like Shockwave, the health sacrificed is a percentage of your current HP.
    • Several of the Pugilist skills in Beyond the Myth inflict recoil as a percentage of the user's current HP. The Impact Brawler capitalizes on this, lowering their own health to enable damage bonuses. Their Overexertion skill is a buff that provides the biggest damage boost available to the player with the drawback of also bestowing this trope.
    • The famed Warrior Might of Shoguns returns in Nexus but carries a static HP penalty for every chase. The Shogun can kill themselves by losing HP this way.
  • Censor Steam:
    • Shin, one of the possible fourth stratum bosses in The Drowned City.
    • Also Chloe's hot springs portrait in The Fafnir Knight.
  • Character Customization: Beyond the Myth goes beyond simply giving you a set of four portraits for each class to choose from: you're also able to change each character's hair, eye and skin colors, as well as assign them a voice. This feature is also carried over to Nexus, though you can only recolor portraits native to the classes that are returning to the game.
  • Character Select Forcing:
    • While the player would be able to get through most of the games with a competently-constructed party, several postgame bosses (or even postgame encounters) become near-impossible without access to specific skills. For instance, the first game mandates you have a Protector around to No-Sell the elemental dragons' Elemental Torrents and no amount of defensive buff stacking can guarantee your party's survival. The trope is at its worst in the first two games; the others offer solutions with subclassing or Grimoire Stones so that you don't have to train up a new party member with the required skills from scratch.
    • Some sidequests (most visible in the first two games) require that you have a specific class in the party to complete it. You can't just create a fresh recruit solely for the purpose of this sidequest, either; you must have raised that party member to a level threshold. Later games do away with this, or in the case of the Untold remakes, provide alternative ways to finish the quest.
    • Downplayed with regards to dungeon events. Some events have additional interactions with specific classes in the party to either improve an already positive outcome or automatically save you from a negative outcome. A single event can have checks for multiple different classes as well. If you don't satisfy those conditions, you can still get a positive outcome yourself, though it may take a little trial-and-error.
  • Chest Monster:
    • The Fafnir Knight has Mimics as a FOE in a secret area. Your only way to determine what's a real chest is the FOE proximity indicator.
    • In Beyond the Myth, there's a chest in the locked area of the second stratum that, when opened, triggers a guaranteed blindside by a pair of Megavolt Marmots, i.e. souped-up Volt Squirrels. You have to trigger this chest and beat the enemies for a sidequest item, by the way.
  • Climax Boss: In most of the games, there will be a boss about 4/5 into the main game who is a human enemy, complete with an adventurer class (and often a subclass). This enemy is usually someone from a rival or nemesis faction and is part of a Plot Twist, and they tend to be extremely powerful, being capable of using many of that class's skills to deadly effect. When their HP runs low, they may start using their Limit Breaks to blast your party to bits just when you thought victory was within reach.
  • Cognizant Limbs:
    • In Legends of the Titan, the Heavenbringer is supported by its two arms. The Warped Savior then one-ups it with two claws and two buds.
    • The Amalgolem in Beyond the Myth combines this with Flunky Boss. Its various limbs are targetable, and it can explode, causing its limbs to separate into smaller golems which can combine with the body again to form new limbs.
    • The True Final Boss of Beyond the Myth takes this to an extreme, with its main body being completely reliant on all its limbs to fight. It has a lot of them, leading to a lot of actions per turn if they are left alone, and it is capable of rapidly regenerating them.
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
    • F.O.E.'s come in orange (normal, follows a set path), red (strong, and will actively pursue you), blue (flying), purple (invisible on the map), black (bosses) and, as of the third game, gold (essentially Metal Slimes).
    • In the 3DS entries, while F.O.E's use their own model on the field, they now have a colored aura around their icon on the map indicating their strength. Blue means you can likely defeat them easily, yellow means that you can manage them, but proper planning is a must, and red means "run!". Purple is reserved for bosses.
  • Combat Medic:
    • A counter-intuitive offensive build of a Medic can result in a surprisingly potent front-line fighter. The damage is subpar at best, but Caduceus will stun everything you can hit.
    • The Monk class from The Drowned City takes this even further. He can use Qi to heal his allies, and his muscles to pummel the enemy from the front lines.
    • Depending on subclass choices, a Medic can also make a decent fighter in Legends of the Titan and Nexus. Most people tend to favor the abilities Knockout Blow and Star Drop.
    • Rovers in Beyond the Myth can command a Hound, with skills focused on healing allies.
  • Combination Attack:
    • Some specific combinations of enemies have unique attacks that they can team up for, likely doing massive damage to the party unless at least one of them is killed or disabled in such a way that prevents the attack from happening (for example, a throwing-type attack can be stopped by binding the thrower's arms).
    • In Beyond the Myth, many Union Skills require the participation of at least two party members. Only the one initiating the skill needs to have a 100% Union Gauge, but everyone who takes part will have their gauges reset to 0%. Furthermore, while many skills are equally effective regardless of who participates, some, especially attack skills, are dependent on the participants' stats and positions in the party (for example, Double Attack is best done with two damage-oriented frontliners; if either participant is a backliner, even if that person is a ranged attacker, you can't target the enemy back row).
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
    • Oddly enough, it cheats in your favour with regards to certain NPCs that join your party in battles (and only in battles, making it difficult to see their stats from the menu). Datamining reveals that their skill point distribution would require more points than what would be allowed with their given level, along with some of them having unique equipment that would be ridiculously powerful in comparison to what is normally available.
    • It was eventually discovered that certain bosses will read the player's inputs before deciding what their own moves will be. The most prominent example would be the Golem coincidentally choosing to use Reflection on the turns the player's got an elemental attack queued up. The True Final Boss of The Drowned City and Nexus can also be guilty of this.
    • In The Fafnir Knight and Nexus, human bosses can use Force Boost and Force Break just like your party can. However, one particular boss in Nexus will permanently enter Force Boost when they activate it, and their Force Break does not end the Force Boost.
  • Continuing is Painful:
    • In the early parts of the first two games, revival items are expensive, and Medic is the only class that learns Revive. Even then, Revive is an expensive spell, and doesn't become available until you've invested quite a few skill points to acquire it—if you even decided to use a Medic at all. This means that in the early game, the death of any party member essentially requires you to cut your dungeon crawl short to visit the hospital. The Drowned City and subsequent games goes easier on the player, as the revival items are much less expensive. Sadly, they're also "limited supply" items - the store's supply is limited to the amount of certain drops that you've sold them, and the drop is often either a rarely-acquired harvest item or a conditional drop from a monster.
    • While healing is much easier in Etrian Mystery Dungeon, the consequences for death are made much more dire. If your party is wiped out, you lose all your gold and items in your inventory. If you let a F.O.E. reach the surface, it will destroy one of the town's buildings, rendering you unable to use it for a while. And if one of your party member dies, the monster you were fighting evolves into a more powerful form. To top it all off, the game autosaves when you enter a dungeon to prevent you from save-scumming.
  • Contractual Boss Immunity: Played with in some cases, averted in others. Most bosses do possess immunity to attacks that would one shot them, emphasis on 'Most'. Some bosses and FOE's can only give their special drop this way. Almost none are immune to any form of Bind, and status effects can mean the difference between victory and defeat with some of the more powerful enemies. Even some Super Bosses can be eliminated with instant death effects.
  • Cool Airship:
    • You command one in Legends of the Titan in order to explore the various Lands.
    • In Nexus, Maginia is an entire town on a massive airship.
  • Cool, but Inefficient:
    • In the first four games and their remakes, the stat boost offered by the weapon carries more weight than its actual ATK stat, resulting in several weapons being ignored as they are not worth the expenditure. This has been rectified in Beyond the Myth, with stat bonuses and weapon stats having equal weight in determining how hard one hits. The addition of a Magic Attack stat also makes upgrading your spellcasters' staves worthwhile instead of just comparing TEC bonuses.
    • Forging in The Drowned City and Legends of the Titan can bestow a weapon with special traits, like inflicting ailments, bestowing splash damage, or imbuing the weapon with an element. However, these traits only affect the user's basic attack, and become pointless at a stage when characters start using their skills more often. Past that point, barring any setup that exploits multiple basic attacks, it would be more practical to simply stack bonuses to the user's attacking stat.
    • Various "ultimate weapons" obtained in the middle of several postgame quests in Heroes of Lagaard and The Fafnir Knight have the best ATK stat of all weapons of their kind... but other postgame weaponry — usually those obtained by selling boss conditional drops — have a slightly smaller ATK stat but also grant various handy stat boosts. Most glaring is the Yggdrasil Staff, where most classes who would wield it are not going to even attack with it, making its colossal ATK stat moot. The one saving grace for them is that the player can carry them over to a New Game Plus and equip to new party members, giving them respectable power to blaze through most of the floors without spending hundreds of thousands of ental on the alternatives.
  • Cosmic Horror Reveal: The games all generally start somewhere between Low Fantasy and Heroic Fantasy before suddenly incorporating Science Fiction and Cosmic Horror elements, typically in regards to The Reveal about the local Yggdrasil and its purpose.
  • Cosmic Horror Story:
    • The Drowned City delves into the ocean, finds Deep Ones, and goes on to bring you before their Abyssal God.
    • Beyond the Myth starts with a climb by the Labyrinth of Yggdrasil then takes a sharp jump into the upper atmosphere and then again into deep space, where you fight something with Unicron- or Galactus-level world-consuming power.
  • Crazy-Prepared: The game encourages you to prepare everything that's necessary and then some, because the danger level of the strata requires it.
  • Creepy Cemetery: The third stratum of Beyond the Myth, the Fetid Necropolis, is a graveyard where a major war took place ages ago. Naturally, most of the enemies are skeletons, skulls, wraiths, ghosts, and other reanimated-dead entities. There are patches of sunlight during the day that the resident FOEs will either avoid or be temporarily neutralized by, but only during the day; at night, you get no such assistance on that front, but at least the poison floors will be neutralized and safe to walk on.
  • Cute Monster Girl: Each main game introduces a humanoid female boss monster. Alraune in I, Scylla in II, the Deep Princess in III', the Hollow Queen in IV, Dryad in V, and the Abyssal Princess in Nexus.
  • Cutting the Knot: Floor puzzles are typically designed around maneuvering around the FOEs, with certain solutions taking you on a very long path all around the floor. Being crafty enough to defeat certain FOEs can dramatically shorten the trip or even have you skip entire segments you were supposed to travel through.

    D-F 
  • Damage Sponge:
    • There are certain types of enemies that are weak to all manner of attacks but have a massive amount of HP so that they don't die too quickly. These same enemies like to inflict Curse on the party, punishing the player with massive Curse backlash damage (which is always half the amount of damage the attacker dealt).
    • Many bosses in The Fafnir Knight, though especially on the highest difficulty setting, has massive HP pools for soaking damage. Presumably this was done to counteract the Fafnir's ludicrous damage output levels, thought it becomes a bit of a problem on Classic Mode where you don't have the Fafnir around. It gets more egregious when said bosses summon mooks that are also damage sponges by mook standards.
    • Beyond the Myth. Generic encounters still have much more HP than you'd typically expect, though they do at least have their damage restored to what you'd see in the first three games and The Millennium Girl.
  • Death Is a Slap on the Wrist:
    • Legends of the Titan makes a full party KO a true slap on the wrist on Casual difficulty by simply kicking you back to town. In a similar fashion, The Millennium Girl's Picnic difficulty lets your party continue when they're wiped out, though Standard difficulty will let them continue only once.
    • Etrian Mystery Dungeon subverts this in a very painful fashion. You won't lose characters who fall in the labyrinths, but you will lose equipment and items. Usually, you can get them back if you return to that floor of the labyrinth but there are some circumstances under which you can't, and there are no exceptions made for rare or even unique gear either.
  • Destroyable Items:
    • One of the more controversial elements of Etrian Mystery Dungeon, although they're not exactly destroyed so much as lost. There are multiple ways in which you can permanently lose your equipment, most notably by dying in the labyrinths, and there is no protection given to unique or rare equipment, either. Even your priceless Infinity +1 Sword, only one of which exists in the game, can potentially be taken away from you.
    • In Beyond the Myth, one of the enemies in the Sealed Door areas has a skill that can destroy your Ariadne Threads.
  • Developer's Foresight: In The Millenium Girl, guests Ren and Tlachtga have lines recorded for some very unlikely occurrences on your first mission, including if the enemy flees, if they level up, and even if you get a Game Over, the latter two of which are difficult to have happen since they're so many levels ahead.
  • Difficult, but Awesome:
    • The series' signature Skill Scores and Perks system. Unlike many other turn-based RPGs, you have complete control over your characters' skill builds. Build your characters wrong and you'll have a suboptimal party with poor damage output and poor defenses, and you'll most likely be going back to the guild hall to reset your characters' skill points, wasting time bringing their levels back up. Build your characters right and you pretty much have the RPG party of your dreams.
    • Tagen Battou in The Drowned City. In order to use it effectively, you need to have some spare slots in your party (something you don't want any of to begin with) and fill them up with clones. Since creating clones costs 10 TP and gives half your HP and TP to the clone, dying and/or running low on TP is a very real possibility. If you want even more power, subclassing your Ninja in Gladiator (or your Gladiator in Ninja) would allow them to use Berserker Vow and Charge to deal even more damage. However, if this is actually pulled off, it's capable of finishing off even the True Final Boss in a single use.
    • "Chaser"-type skills, which cause the user to follow up certain attacks with one of their own, have the potential to be really powerful, but require a good team built around them to reach their maximum potential. For instance, the Landsknecht's elemental Chaser skills or the Fencer's elemental Chain skills need nearly every party member to have access to elemental damage to get the most hits, while the player needs to know which skills work best with the Shogun's Warrior Might or the Masurao's Hell Slash. Improper team composition often results in wasted skill points, wasted TP, and lost potential damage.
  • Difficulty Levels:
    • In Legends of the Titan, there's Casual and Normal. Normal is the same as the other games, but Casual difficulty warps your party back to Tharsis when they're all dead, prevents certain items from being used up, and makes enemies easier.
    • The Untold games have Picnic, which seems similar to Casual difficulty but lets them continue on instead of warping them back to Etria, Standard difficulty, which lets the party continue on once, and Expert, which is close to the same difficulty of the original version.
    • Beyond the Myth has Basic, which is closer to Untold's Standard difficulty, and Advanced, which is the traditional Etrian Odyssey experience.
    • Nexus has Picnic (Easier Than Easy), Basic (similar to Basic in Beyond the Myth and Standard in the ''Untold games), Expert (series-traditional difficulty), and Heroic (same as Expert, but you cannot switch back into Heroic if you ever lower the difficulty).
    • The HD remakes of the first three games introduce Picnic (Easier Than Easy), Basic (a few modifiers in the player's favor) and Expert (traditional DS difficulty). This game's Picnic difficulty skews the numbers massively in the player's favor and even has an experience bonus, which can be used to ease re-grinding levels lost from a Skill Point Reset.
  • Disc-One Nuke:
    • If you know the conditional drop for a boss, or manage to save up a Formaldehyde in later games, you can unlock some pretty powerful equipment early in the game. The only obstacle from that point is the hundreds of thousands of En it costs to purchase it... which is when the normally Too Awesome to Use Coupons come in handy.
    • Poison in the early game is a very handy way of clearing random encounters, especially if you have skills that can inflict it to multiple targets. The earlier games had the Damage Over Time effect of poison being determined only by the level of whichever skill inflicted it, which meant that maxing it out as soon as possible often lead to said poison damage ticks hitting harder than what the rest of your party was capable of until you reached midgame-levels of equipment.
    • The Luck Staff in The Fafnir Knight is easily the strongest weapon you can purchase for Hexers. Available in the midgame where you can access the third floor of Ginnungagap, its price and stats are about par for the course for most other staves, except for a whopping +10 Luck bonus. This is a hefty boost to the Hexer's ailment accuracy, and sees use way past the point where it should normally be obsoleted.
    • In V and Nexus, the Vitality increasing accessory is this, being buyable the instant you can access the item shop, at a decently more expensive pricing compared to other available purchases for a long while. The Vitality ring is much more effective than most armor pieces alvailable at the time of its purchase, significantly reducing the difficulty of the early game.
  • Diminishing Returns for Balance:
    • In the 3DS entries, most skills have points where the effect dramatically increases (such as significantly improved power or expanded Area of Effect), usually level 5 and level 10. However, these major-upgrade steps on TP-using skills also come with dramatic rises in TP cost, meaning that it may be ideal for the user to keep a particular skill at level 4 or 9 for a while. Fortunately, passive skills, which don't use TP, aren't affected by this.
    • From III onwards, once a combatant is inflicted with a bind or ailment, they enjoy a temporary increase in resistance to that bind or ailment after it wears off (for about 8 turns or so) to prevent them from getting shut down in a similar manner. This applies for both enemies and player characters, though on the player's end, Legends of the Titan and Nexus grant them Releasal Spell to erase this temporary resistance from enemies.
  • Door to Before:
    • Dungeons often feature two-way shortcuts that must first be opened from the other side to make repeat visits less tedious. Geomagnetic Fields or Poles can also appear at the start (and in a few cases, near the end) of every Stratum so you don't have to trek through the last 5 floors to continue exploration.
    • Nexus features a more traditional version of this trope: After defeating the ruler of a given Labyrinth, the path beyond that boss leads to a staircase that takes you straight back to the world map.
  • Doppleganger Attack:
    • The Ninja class in The Drowned City and Nexus makes use of this, being able to summon shadow clones using the Kagerou skill and then team up with them for a powerful attack using Tagen Battou.
    • The niche of the Heroes in Nexus is the ability to generate afterimages after they attack, which then repeat the skill that spawned them.
  • Downloadable Content: The Fafnir Knight and Etrian Mystery Dungeon have additional content available for purchase. It consists of special quests and bonus bosses, and The Fafnir Knight also has an additional class and extra character portraits.
  • Driven to Suicide: A possible curse the Hexer can do to a terrified enemy has it attack itself.
  • Dual Wield:
    • The Shogun from The Drowned City have this as their Innate Class skill, trading one of their armor slots for a second weapon.
    • Legends of the Titan plays this interestingly. All classes can equip two weapons once they've been assigned a subclass; however, they don't automatically use both weapons to strike. Instead, they rely mostly on their 'mainhand' weapon, but can use the other for related weaponry skills. Only a couple of classes learn skills that enable them to use both weapons at the same time; otherwise, it's functionally more like Choice of Two Weapons or Bow and Sword in Accord. This feature is preserved in Nexus which uses a similar subclassing system.
    • Blade Dancers in Beyond the Myth have a passive that allows them to not just dual-wield katanas, but potentially quadruple-wield them.
  • Dub Name Change: Boy, does this franchise have a problem with this.
    • Most classes have different names in Japanese, which are changed to something else in localization, in an attempt to make them more "distinctive". Some of the renames, however, are due to a rename of one class necessitating a rename of another class so as to avoid having multiple classes with the same first letter (for example in Beyond the Myth, Hounds got renamed to Rovers, which in turn led to Reapers being renamed to Harbingers), in order to keep interface elements that rely on representing each class with a single letter from having to use workarounds like using two letters for some classes.
    • Some NPCs and enemies also tend to get their names changed, either completely or just by one or two letters.
    • If there is a character with a slightly Japanese-sounding name (such as Kurogane, or Furube), expect the localization to change it completely... Unless the character in question explicitly looks like a Japanese warrior (like Ren or Agata), in which case it will be kept intact.
    • The Origins Collection fall into the Inconsistent Dub category; while these attempt to keep the localization changes made for the 3DS games (and correcting some misspellings, like "Cernunos" to "Cernunnos"), these still kept some mistranslations from the DS games' localizations that were later corrected for the 3DS entries (such as Queen Ant and Hecatoncheires still being called Royalant and Briaerus).
    • The HD remaster of The Drowned City changed the Prince/Princess' name to Sovereign (to match the 3DS entries' localization), which defeats the whole purpose of the first example listed, because there is already another class whose name starts with an "S"; the Shoguns. Much like the 3DS games, the Sovereigns are abbreviated to "So" in the equipment display screen.
  • Dungeon-Based Economy: Many of the games feature base camp towns that become richer and better-equipped as you recover treasures and valuable Organ Drops from monsters.
  • Dungeon Crawling: The entire series revolves around this.
  • The Dragon: Ren and Tlachtga in Etrian Odyssey, Colossus in Heroes of Lagaard, and Kujura and Olympia in The Drowned City to their respective faction heads. The Progenitor, despite being the True Final Boss, is The Dragon to the Abyssal God. Logre serves Baldur in Legends of the Titan.
  • Early-Bird Boss:
    • A group of Venom Flies, on the first floor can act like this during the first quest. They're normal enemies that are deadly to level appropriate adventurers, since they hail from the deepest parts of the next floor. This is reprised in Heroes of Lagaard. Choose to transfer data from the first game and go to a similar point in the Ancient Forest, your party will recall being ambushed by Venomflies before the player is given a choice of whether or not to rest. Saying no causes the battle.
    • In The Millennium Girl, the player can unlock a quest that leads them into a secret area and a battle with the Golem at around level 30. Trying to beat it this early is not advised due to the party's lack of stats to last this long. Many guides advise the player to attempt the boss at level 40 instead. The Golem reprises his role as this in Nexus, being found in one of the earlier optional mazes. Due to it resisting all types of physical damage and reviving itself the first time it is killed the battle can easily leave your party starved for TP. Don't think about bypassing its defenses with elemental attacks either, as it randomly counters these.
    • The Blossombeast in Nexus is your first boss, fought when your party's just reached level 5 and you can barely earn enough to upgrade from your basic equipment. It's possible to expend all your resources and be nowhere close to defeating it.
  • Early Game Hell: The games are really tough when your party is low-level — enemies can seriously injure your party members, your skills are generally weak, your healers and mages barely have enough TP to cast their spells with regularity, revival is costly, and equipment upgrades or replacement supplies can drain your funds quickly.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: A lot of these manifest in the DS games, particularly the first two. The Drowned City, the third of the DS games, establishes some features that become mainstays for the 3DS entries. Some of this weirdness was kept for the DS games' HD remakes.
    • The DS games have a 1,000-en fee for renaming your characters. The 3DS games remove this.
    • The DS games have a steeper level penalty for using Rest (resetting a character's skill points): 10 in the first game, and 5 in II and III. All of the 3DS games only take away two levels.
    • The first two games don't have subclasses, and their sidequests don't give out experience on completion.
    • In the first game, there is no way to store your items, and quest items also take up inventory space. The second game establishes a storage system at the inn and splits your quest items into a separate inventoy tab.
    • The first two games had the hospital as a town facility where you treat your wounded, revive the fallen, and purchase medicine. The healing and revival functions would be ported to the inn and medicines to the shop from the third game onwards (which also had the secondary effect of Adapting Out the characters from Trauma Center in the remakes).
    • The first two games have an extremely strict character limit of just eight symbols for not just party members, but enemies, items, and skills as well. This lead to a lot of names being shortened (Corotrangul and Iwaoropenelep becoming Cotrangl and Iwaopeln, Artelinde's name having the "e" lopped off the end), localized differently (Flame Demon to Hellion, Hecatoncheires to Briareus), or otherwise worked around (Wilhelm is only referred to as Der Freischutz in the Japanese text, but received a shorter real name in the localization). Name limits were lengthened starting with The Drowned City and these were adjusted as a result; shortened names were restored to their original lengths for future games, and the Untold remakes (though not the HD remasters) would re-localize fully changed names with a few exceptions such as Etreant.
    • The DS games run at 60 frames per second, while all of the 3DS games run at 30.
    • The DS games use floating orbs to represent F.O.E.s, while the 3DS games use actual enemy models (justified because of the DS' limitations, and the games using 2D illustrations for the enemies). The F.O.E.s additionally don't gain the "strong/even/weak for your level" aura until the 3DS titles.
    • To reinforce their status as obstacles that should be avoided, F.O.E.s in Heroes of Lagaard did not reward any experience points upon being defeated. This meant that outside of getting their item drops there was very little reason to fight them at all, and this change was quickly reverted in the third game.
    • The mapping function has been constantly developed the series progresses. The first game's mapping system was very limited, giving you all of 10 icons and the basic map-drawing tools; there wasn't even a shortcut icon. The second game dramatically improves on this with additional tile colors and 21 icons, and every subsequent game keeps expanding on it. The HD remakes of the first three games back-port a modern mapping system with a greatly raised icon cap to let players make more detailed maps.
    • The DS games show your character's learnable skills in a linear list, while the 3DS games (and the HD remakes) use a visual Tech Tree.
    • The first game has a fixed level cap of 70. The second game gives the player the ability to raise it through the Retire function, but it ends up being more tedious than it looks. The third game instead raises the level cap by beating each member of a trio of Optional Bosses, and this becomes the main feature of every subsequent game, including remakes.
    • The third game introduces some characters in the sidequests to slay the three elemental dragons (or the new trio of super bosses in V). However, none of them are Guest Star Party Members during the fight with the dragons (Wealh gets herself killed, Furube & Hiiragi are too coward to join the battle, and Lindworm just stays in Armoroad until you are done). It wouldn't be until the fourth game that the designated side characters of the dragons' sidequests would actually help you out to kill them.
    • In the first two games, the return-to-town items are called Warp Wires. In all subsequent games, including the Untold and HD remakes of the first two games, they are called Ariadne Threads.
    • The way FOEs interact with map tiles is different between the DS games and the 3DS games. In the DS games, when you are in combat with an FOE, both your party and the FOE occupy the same space. However, in the 3DS games, you and the FOE remain on separate tiles. This also creates a quirk wherein additional FOEs trying to join the fight can be potentially blocked by FOEs already in combat with you.
    • In the DS games, enemies all share a single row. Starting in Legends of the Titan, enemies can have front and back rows much like the party.
    • In the DS games and their HD remakes, magic-based elemental skills come in single- and Area of Effect flavors, with the first two games having skills that are basically just an existing single-target elemental attack but more powerful. The 3DS games, including the remakes of the first two games, introduce spells with element-specific multi-hit properties: Fire spells inflict Splash Damage to adjacent enemies, ice spells hit two enemies that are on two different lines, and thunder spells inflict damage to all enemies in the same row.
  • Earth All Along: Etrian Odyssey's world is actually our world after an ecological collapse.
  • Easier Than Easy: Picnic. The Fafnir Knight in particular, to the point where the game might as well be playing itself. The HD remakes of the first trilogy have their own Picnic difficulty, which skews the numbers even harder in the player's favor.note 
  • Easy-Mode Mockery: In Nexus Picnic, still using The Fafnir Knight's extreme modifiers, locks you on to that difficulty if for any reason you choose it. Mercifully it doesn't have a mark on your Guild Card like Heroic does, it just won't let you use it to bypass the Early Game Hell or a particularly difficult boss and then bump yourself back up in difficulty.
  • Eldritch Abomination: The True Final Boss in every game. ESPECIALLY in Etrian Odyssey, its remake, and The Drowned City. This... thing would make H.P. Lovecraft proud.
  • Elemental Dragon: All games except Beyond the Myth feature a trio of Superbosses in the form of exceptionally powerful dragons which, collectively, invoke the Fire, Ice, Lightning ensemble: The Great Dragon (Playing with Fire), the Blizzard King (An Ice Person), and the Storm Emperor (Shock and Awe). In most games, they're accessed by starting sidequests that are unlocked during the Playable Epilogue, while in Legends of the Titan they appear early on as Drop-In Nemesis threats that can only be dodged until the postgame (when they can finally be challenged).
  • Elemental Tiers: Starting from the fourth game onwards, the base elemental spells work in ways that are different beyond just Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: fire spells deal Splash Damage, ice spells hit one enemy in the front and one enemy in the back, and thunder spells target an entire row. Thunder ends up being the best anti-crowd element in many cases since it can hit as many as four enemies at once with equivalent power for each, while fire and ice can only hit up to three and two respectively, and in the case of fire only the main target gets the full force of the attack.
  • Empty Eyes: Your guild members from the first 4 entries and the Mystery Dungeon games are depicted with no light reflection on their eyes (The Prince/ss class and the Non-player characters were the exceptions). Art Evolution leads to this trend vanishing by the fifth game.
  • Empty Levels:
    • Some skills in the early games. For instance, the Boost Up skill from the first game only increases Boost's effect with every odd skill point (which makes this especially bad is that it's a 10 point level - the last point does nothing). Arm Heal is even worse, since it's also a 10 point skill, but only three of those ten levels do anything (and the later two levels just reduce the already-miniscule TP cost). This is corrected for the 3DS games onward — every skill level will either improve the strength of the ability, reduce its cost, or improve the success rate of the ability. Some levels of abilities will increase in cost, but those are accompanied by larger increases in strength, success rate, and/or duration. However, the improvement in strength and/or success rate isn't always worth the cost or skill point investment.
    • The trope rears its ugly head again in The Fafnir Knight — but not when levelling skills normally. Within the first 10 levels of a skill, the above properties apply, but when pushing a skill past the cap with Grimoire Stones, some skills (most noticeably, the weapon mastery or damage up skills) do not give bonuses at certain levels after 10.
  • Encounter Repellant: The Warding Bell item, and a few different class skills.
  • Enemy-Detecting Radar: All games have this in the lower right corner of the screen. Blue and yellow mean you're safe, but red means it's time to get ready to fight. The radar also tells you when an F.O.E. is nearby; a F.O.E. within 3 squares from you pops out an extra bar with three stages to let you know when they're nearby or right behind you. Very handy in Heroes of Lagaard where some F.O.E.s don't show up in your map, and in The Drowned City, since the fifth and sixth stratums have no-radar areas.
  • Equipment Upgrade:
    • In The Drowned City and Legends of the Titan, certain weapons have forge slots, where you can use more of the weapon's ingredients to upgrade it by adding an additional effect, like Socketed Equipment. Weapons with more forge slots can have a wider variety of effects or have a more potent single effect.
    • In Beyond the Myth and Nexus, forging has less associated customizability (as it only unlocks and improves a single effect/skill tied to the weapon) but also increases the weapon's stats. Each weapon can only be forged up to 5 times; recycling fully forged weapons generates shards and ingots that can be used to forge without expending that weapon's ingredients.
  • Escape Battle Technique: In the first two games, the Protector can learn the Flee skill, which always escapes the party from any battle where they aren't trapped, and has a chance of dropping them at the last staircase they used. In the third game, the Ninja's "Tonsou Jutsu" skill does the same, but it's no longer a guaranteed escape (merely an increased chance), while the Shogun's "Retreat" skill simply takes you out of the battle. It shows up as an early Burst Skill in Legend of the Titan, and a universal Union Skill in Beyond the Myth. It comes back as a regular skill for Farmers in Nexus, where it uses up the party's HP if it succeeds, although the HP cost is negligible at max skill level.
  • Escape Rope: Warp Wires in the first two games and Ariadne Threads in subsequent games, both of which take you back to town immediately upon use and can only be used when not in battle. Lesser variants include the Silver Whistle, which takes you out of the cave or labyrinth to your airship, and the Pole Stone, which takes you to the last stairs, geomagnetic pole, or exit that you used. If you're not carrying any of those items when you enter a labyrinth, either you're too poor for them (early on, the 100 en price is not trivial) and will likely be hanging around the exit or a geomagnetic pole trying to farm drops to sell for escape item money, you have a party member with an equivalent spell who you can trust not to drop below the required TP or die, you're reserving some Union or Limit charges for Full Retreat, or you're Too Dumb to Live.
  • Everyone Loves Blondes: Sort of. There are no real main characters for any of the games (Untold remakes notwithstanding), however promotional materials and assorted artwork for soundtracks, artbooks, etc. for the first three games heavily feature and highlight: for EO1- the blonde female protector, for EO2- the blonde female gunner (she actually shares heavy spotlight with the blonde Protector, as her class returns in EO2), and for E03- the blonde female Princess. This is averted in EO4 which opts to heavily feature the bob-cut dark-haired female Landsknecht instead of any of the available blondes; admittedly, her Fortress partner is a blonde. EO5 brings this back with the blonde Fencer, though.
  • Everything Trying to Kill You: Even the first floor is torture. That stone you can sell? It's being guarded by a trio of powerful moles. That serene clearing where you can rest and regain strength? That's being guarded by a trio of ludicrously powerful poisonous butterflies.
  • Excuse Me While I Multitask: You can draw or edit the bottom screen map during battle or while in conversation.
  • Excuse Plot:
    • The opening of Etrian Odyssey and Heroes of Lagaard are more or less "there's this labyrinth and this town built around it, and you're one of quite a few guys who wants to conquer the labyrinth for gold and glory and to solve its mysteries. Have fun." Things start happening about 3/4 of the way into the game. In a sense, the major plot twist is that there actually is one. The Drowned City is better about this.
    • Legends of the Titan breaks this and has a plot throughout the game, though it starts off the same.
    • Averted with the Story Mode in The Millennium Girl and The Fafnir Knight, where the plotline of the original is expanded upon and spread out over the course of the entire game.
    • Beyond the Myth returns to the standard 'go and explore the dungeon', but the story once again picks up once you reach the the fifth stratum.
  • Expy:
    • The Highlander in The Millennium Girl is similar to Giulio from Gungnir. Ranging from weapon choice, hair colour, them both being involved with a weapon called Gungnir, and their belief that true justice should be given to all. note  That said the Highlander rejects Gungnir after learning that it's a Fantastic Nuke, whereas Giulio accepted it in spite of that fact.
    • Etrian Mystery Dungeon has the Wanderer class. This class can't be anything but a blatant Shout-Out to Chunsoft's Rogue Like series: Shiren the Wanderer,
  • Extended Gameplay: Each game has a stratum, several quests, and several bosses only available after the final boss.
  • Eye Scream: Baldur in Legends of the Titan, due to the Titan's Curse, has a vine growing out of the character's left eye. This has no effect on his accuracy, however, and he gets better after his defeat.
  • Fake Difficulty:
    • The first game has a hidden mechanic that tips the battle in the enemies' favor if your party's levels are lower than that of the enemies. If you're underlevelled, even a mundane random encounter can be lethal, which contributes to the Nintendo Hard factor. Although it's not noticeable while progressing through the game normally, you begin to feel the full brunt of the mechanic if you rotate your party regularly, or have rested or retired any of your characters. This mechanic is also what makes its postgame stratum so difficult, as all the random encounters are close to the level cap while a party just fresh from the endgame is at least 10 levels under.
    • The Fafnir Knight jacks up the HP of a lot of encounters, which can make fights needlessly long. This becomes visible with some of its Flunky Bosses as the adds would also have very high HP that takes several turns to deplete.
    • The ultimate Superbosses typically have a defined pattern to their attacks until later phases in the fight where they begin using attacks randomly. Given the wide variety of attacks they have and the fact that each one can cause a Total Party Kill while needing different counters, the fight easily turns into a heavily punishing Luck-Based Mission. Sometimes if the player trips a particular condition, the boss may just break the pattern and randomly kill the party.
    • For all its ironing of the flaws in its predecessor and source game, The Fafnir Knight has one of the most unfair bonus bosses in the entire series. The DLC Ur-Devil not only holds the record for the highest amount of HP in the series, it summons flunkies that also sport significant HP counts that must be killed to progress the fight. While this is fine and dandy, killing said flunkies causes a retaliatory elemental attack that does absurd amounts of damage to whoever killed them (and whoever's standing nearby), practically killing 2 or 3 party members at once. If the player doesn't burst them down, the flunkies fire off a ridiculously accurate instant death attack. On certain turns, it's advised not to kill them all off either, as the Ur-Devil possesses an attack that turns completely unblockable if all the flunkies are dead on that turn. To top it all off, it will eventually charge for its strongest attack that mandates you to have the Force Break a Beast or Protector in the party to even survive. And this is only one part of the fight!
  • Fanservice:
    • Some character designs are... questionable. Male fanservice isn't skimped over, either. Check out the first male pirate in the third one. Now double back and realize he isn't wearing a shirt under his vest.
    • The Dark Hunter's whip skills are very obviously bondage themed. Their basic binding skills involve gags, cuffs, and shackles, and their final whip skills are "Climax" and "Ecstasy." The Dark Hunter portraits kill any chance that this might not be what it sounds like. Acknowledged by the developer in the Etrian Odyssey comic.
    • The Fafnir Knight has a hot springs quest DLC, which includes special portraits for Arianna and Chloe. They're exactly what you'd expect. There's also the portrait DLC, which is non-sexual fanservice.
    • The Necromancer class in Beyond the Myth. All four portraits wear as little clothing as possible while still being able to claim being clothed.
    • Beyond the Myth has a vocal example. Want to make someone sound like a seductress? Give them the "Sultry" voice option. Make sure you have headphones on or the volume muted when you level up their skills, or you might subject those around you to The Immodest Orgasm.
    • Nexus presents all previous character portraits as free DLC... and then also adds a couple of fanservice portraits as paid DLC, featuring the female Hero in a Chainmail Bikini. As part of the base game, the Sultry voicepack makes a return, and this time around it's the original Japanese voice that legitimately sounds like an ero-game character.
  • Featureless Protagonist:
    • Your characters are blank slates. You get the implied backstory that you're a guildmaster signing up recruits, which presumably means they're all wannabe-adventurers looking for work. Each class has four portraits, two per gender, though it's not always obvious which is which (1 and 3 are male, 2 and 4 are female). That's all the game gives you, and none of it affects the gameplay. There isn't even a default suggestion for their names. The tutorial invites you to imagine that your guildmaster/you as one of the adventurers, but that isn't followed up upon.
    • Legends of the Titan shakes this up a bit. Other classes unlock during the game, just like in other games, but major NPCs can join the party as regular player units with the right dialogue options. You're still welcome to recruit anonymous schlubs, of course.
    • Averted with the Story Mode main characters in The Millennium Girl and The Fafnir Knight.
    • Etrian Mystery Dungeon uses the guildmaster-as-adventurer idea more explicitly: you're forced to make a Landsknecht as your first character, and they must run through a trial dungeon to earn the right to form a guild. You're free to delete them immediately afterwards if you so choose.
  • Fetch Quest: Most quests involve going and finding something in the Labyrinth.
  • Fictional Currency: This series has ental, or en in abbreviated form, used for the many transactions you'll be conducting.note 
  • Fight Woosh: One for every stratum. When a battle starts, there's a rustling of leaves followed by blackened branches styled after the particular stratum covering the screen.
  • Fire, Ice, Lightning:
    • These are the three main elements present during battle, both for the main characters and for enemies. For the main characters, there are classes that may have only one or two of these elements in their skills, but a number of classes do get to learn all three in an equitable manner. How these elements are managed will depend on the class's gimmick.
    • Present in the majority of games are the three Elemental Dragons, each having exceptional powers based on one of the three elements: Great Dragon (fire), Blizzard King (ice), and Storm Emperor (volt).
  • Flavor Text:
    • Found in all of the bestiary entries and most item descriptions.
    • The Alternative Calendar used for the series is effectively this. It is never referenced in any lore nor do any in-game events tie into it; it's just a more natural-sounding way of showing the large-scale passage of time than saying "Day x".
  • Flying Seafood Special: Lots of monsters. Cotrangl/Corotorangul in Etrian Odyssey and The Millennium Girl are a boss examples. Many, many more come from The Drowned City. Narmer, Ketos, Cruel Roamer, and Hammerhead...
  • Flunky Boss:
    • The first stratum boss in every game sees the boss try to involve weaker F.O.E.s in the fight somehow.
      • In Etrian Odyssey and Nexus wolves spawn behind Fenrir and provide a constant stream of reinforcements until he's killed.
      • In Heroes of Lagaard a pack of Slaveimp F.O.E.s spawned as soon as you entered the chamber, and start moving to join the battle when you fight Chimaera, unless you use a Lure Bell to draw them to you and beat them down before hand.
      • In The Drowned City, Narmer will run away in the middle of the fight and spawn a swarm of F.O.E.s you have to either defeat or maneuver around in order to confront him again and finish him off.
      • The Berserker King of Legends of the Titan has a pair of bear buddies who must either be tediously and probably resource-intensively fought down individually (and even then, it's willing to come help them) or they'll add into the fight with the boss. You can use one of the bears to open a passageway which leads behind the boss; not only can you ambush him, but the bears don't add in when you have the Berserker King between you and them.
      • The Cognizant Limbs of the Amalgolem in Beyond the Myth can separate into miniature golems which can then re-fuse with the body to reform the limbs. It also attempts to call more mini-golems into battle in case the first few go down.
    • Also in Etrian Odyssey, there's also the Ant Queen of the third stratum. The fourth stratum boss is particularly sadistic about this; it's functionally immortal until all of the F.O.E.s on its floor are defeated. Leave and they ALL come back.
    • Cernunnos in the original game, Untold, and Nexus occasionally summons Healing Rollers to restore his health. Hope you brought an elemental attacker to deal with the physical-resistant Rollers, otherwise his HP will easily top back up.
    • Legends of the Titan gets a straighter example with the Hollow Queen, who first summons a line of Hollow warriors, then a line of Hollow spellcasters after you kill the warriors.
    • The Fafnir Knight gets a little excessive with this, as nearly every boss in this game calls in extra summons that must be defeated before they cooperate with the main body for an attack that levels the party, which can result in very long battles if combined with the fact that everything in this game has relatively high HP. Heroes of High Lagaard had this as well, but it wasn't anywhere near as bad due to the lower HP everything in that game had compared to the rest of the series. To say nothing of the Dark Hunter's Climax skill, which inflicted a 100% accurate instant death to anything not immune and below 55% HP.
    • The Undead King in Beyond the Myth mixes this with Mirror Boss by summoning undead soldiers that he sacrifices for offense, defense or healing, much like how the player's own Necromancers perform.
  • Foul Flower:
    • Petaloids are a recurring enemy that appear in almost every game. While they don't look as intimidating as most of the enemies you encounter, they always have a party-wide sleep skill that leaves you helpless against whatever monsters are accompying it. Some game feature their Palette Swap Muskoids as well, which can petrify your entire party instead. Very dangerous indeed when you consider that having your entire party petrified was considered a Total Party Kill before the ailment got nerfed in later entries to wear off after a couple turns.
    • The Fafnir Knight made the Petaloid even stronger, turning it into a full-fledged F O.E. that can now fully bind your party members as well as put them to sleep. They often hide in flowerbeds waiting to ambush you, usually in rooms where other F.O.E.s are chasing you as well.
  • Four Is Death:
    • Every four turns the Elder Dragon from The Drowned City uses an attack that deals in the upward thousands unless you have its head bound. Thankfully, it doesn't suffer from binding decay like every other enemy in the game.
    • Its Legends of the Titan counterpart, the Fallen One, has the same attack and uses it every four turns. It is also highly resistant to binds, but fortunately one of his party-binding attacks is scripted to bind his head as well the first couple times he uses it.
    • Also from Legends of the Titan, the Sky Emperor, an FOE normally accessible in the postgame overworld, uses an alarmingly accurate instant-kill attack on the fourth turn.
    • The Millennium Girl's Blizzard King, on every fourth turn, will use a powerful counter if it's attacked.
    • Also in The Millennium Girl, Coeurl will use a powerful, party-wide attack every four turns before anyone can act, outside of skills such as Front/Rear Guard.
  • From Bad to Worse: What's worse than getting caught by an FOE? Getting challenged by a second FOE while you're fighting the first one.

    G-J 
  • Game-Favored Gender: While there's an even amount of portraits for both men and women and the game itself doesn't differentiate from the two, official art prefers showcasing women. Each game uses a woman as its representative or mascot:
    • Etrian Odyssey uses the blonde Protector.
    • Heroes of Lagaard uses a blue-clad Gunner with the Jack Frost hairclip.
    • The Drowned City uses the ponytailed Princess.
    • Legends of the Titan uses the short-haired Landsknecht and the pigtailed Fortress - in a much, much more prominent fashion than the previous examples. See two tropes below.
    • Untold has Frederica, naturally.
    • Ariana would continue the trend into The Fafnir Knight, but the main character lending his name and image to the game got in the way. It's still definitely Ariana's story, though.
    • Beyond the Myth uses the blonde Fencer.
    • Nexus puts focus on the older female Hero.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation:
    • In the original Etrian Odyssey, your party will commit genocide, kill the leader of a town, destroy a tree meant to restore life to the Earth, and supposedly ruin a town's economy. You are lauded as heroes in the second game, regardless.
    • In The Millennium Girl, Arthur will complain about getting his formulas wet in the third stratum, even if you change his class to something else.
    • In The Fafnir Knight, a soldier identifies Chloe as a War Magus and asks her to heal his unit, even if you've reclassed her. She also says that she can only apply first aid, even if she's reclassed to a Medic and learned Cure and Revive.
    • More generally, this series suffers the same problem as most RPGs, where there are numerous easy and efficient ways of reviving the dead including consumable items, skills, and even just resting at the inn... and yet the game will pretend that these things no longer exist whenever anyone would die as part of the story. Unlike some other RPGs, though, this series doesn't even have the excuse of 0 HP leading to a Non-Lethal K.O.; the status of reaching 0 HP is very clearly stated to be death.
    • When killing a boss that is part of the main story, it's treated in dialogue and cutscenes as if that boss is permanently gone, and it's often established that the boss was blocking further exploration and investigation of the labyrinth. However, bosses will eventually respawn, with no effect on the story. If they remained gone permanently, you wouldn't be able to get any more materials from them, which would be especially problematic if you were trying to get a conditional drop from the boss and failed to do so. Boss respawning was acknowledged in dialogue in Heroes of Lagaard, wherein the Duchy describes the Hellion/Flame Demon as having mysteriously revived itself after being killed offscreen, but outside of that it's remained purely a gameplay mechanic.
  • Gameplay Automation: Several games in the series let you set up a path for the party to automatically follow, which also allows you to grind automatically if you make the path loop and weigh down the A button which makes everyone in your party select Attack automatically when they run into an enemy. At least Legends of the Titan has an additional mechanic that automates the process to a further degree and seems to be made especially with this in mind: normally, you'll fill up your inventory with enemy drops sooner or later, and at that point, normally pressing A repeatedly (which is what keeping it held down essentially does) gets you stuck in the post-battle screen and you need to manually select the items you wish to discard to continue, but if A is held down instead, the game automatically discards the item drops from the battle after a few seconds and lets the automated grinding continue uninterrupted.
  • Gender-Inclusive Writing: Text that describes your characters and the actions they take (e.g. in field events) is written with the "they" series of pronouns. The closest thing to an aversion is the Wyrm's quest in the first game referring to your party as "sirs".
  • Genre-Busting: Wizardry-style Dungeon Crawler to the core, with the graph paper mapping built in. Since the third game, additional elements have crept in, like the Sea Chart movement puzzle, and the fourth game's overworld exploration.
  • "Get Back Here!" Boss:
    • Narmer in The Drowned City actively flees the player, so they have to use the terrain and a secret passage to be able to get the jump on it. Halfway through the battle, it escapes, and you have to chase it down again to finish it off.
    • Ice Bulbs in The Fafnir Knight are an F.O.E. example, as they actively flee from the player when approached, only sticking around to fight when cornered.
    • Cocky Capacitors in Nexus actively flee from the player... until two of them meet and fuse into something much more powerful and aggressive.
  • Ghost City:
    • In the first Etrian Odyssey, The 5th stratum, the Lost Shinjuku. Seeing the abandoned ruins of what once part of one of the most populated cities on Earth doubles as an incredible gut-wrenching moment as well.
    • Legends of the Titan has the Forgotten Capital, also the 5th stratum of the game. Though you never get much background information about it, there is something both haunting and serene about seeing those ruins covered in Yggdrasil's roots.
  • Glass Cannon: Every game allows you to build some form of this:
    • Etrian Odyssey and Heroes of Lagaard has the Ronin as the original example, who will go down in a few stray hits but has extremely high damage potential. Another example is the "Combat Medic", a medic built as a frontline fighter (thanks to the extremely high multiplier on their Caduceus skill) with all of the defense you would expect from a healer.
    • The Drowned City features the Shogun, who in addition to sacrificing an armor slot to wield an additional katana has skills that sacrifice their defense for even more attack power.
    • The Bushi in Legends of the Titan and the Highlander in The Millennium Girl, while not particularly fragile, have a penchant for losing HP every turn.
    • Imperials from Legends of the Titan can output thousands of damage but their defenses drop in the wind-up of their strongest attacks. All other times they behave like a Mighty Glacier.
    • Beyond the Myth takes it up to eleven with the Blade Dancer Masurao, who can use all four of their equipment slots for katanas, foregoing armor entirely. While they'll often die to random encounters several levels lower than them, a proper Blade Dancer setup can end boss battles in just a few turns.
  • Godzilla Threshold: Subverted twice in IV.
    • Using the Heavenbringer was the Empire's last ditch attempt to restore life to their dying land, even if doing so would eliminate the vessels and sentinels. Subverted, in that the Heavenbringer wasn't viable long-term, since it would only buy a few decades.
    • The Hall of Darkness is home to the Warped Savior, a giant insect meant to destroy Yggdrasil in case it went out of control. The subversion here is that the failsafe was feeding on Yggdrasil's power, and was corrupted just like Yggdrasil, and the lead scientist locked it away himself.
  • Gratuitous English: In Nexus, which uses Japanese voices only regardless of region, the Quirky voice option (#45) gives your character a variety of "English spoken by a Japanese seiyuu" lines.
  • Gratuitous German: Landsknecht. Wilhelm's nickname "Der Freischütz". There may be other examples.
  • Gratuitous Japanese: The skill names of the Ronin, Ninja and Shogun remain as romanizations during translation in the DS games. The Untold games and Nexus avert this for most part.
  • Great Big Library of Everything: The Midgard Library, the common thread between the Untold games. Simon, Arthur and Raquna investigate Gladsheim in The Millennium Girl on its orders. Flavio and The Fafnir Knight's protagonist are sent to Lagaard to accompany Arianna to Ginnungagap, causing the protagonist to become the titular creature.
  • Green Hill Zone: The first stratum in each game (and related side dungeons if applicable) often has this aesthetic.
  • Guide Dang It!:
    • Want a conditional drop without expending a Formaldehyde? While monster codex entries and certain bar NPCs may sometimes give big hints as to how to do so, the hints aren't always there, and the NPCs are often missable. The names of the conditional drop are also likely to make sense only in hindsight. Then there's actually accomplishing that condition, which is incredibly likely to fail in many, many ways...
    • The games aren't very transparent on the efficacy of your skills. They do divulge how the costs change, but the change in strength is simply indicated by up or down arrows and is not very indicative of the efficiency of that skill point.
  • The Gunslinger:
    • Gunners in Heroes of Lagaard, The Fafnir Knight and Etrian Mystery Dungeon.
    • Dragoons in Beyond the Myth, finally allowing a tanking class to attack effectively while tanking from the back row.
  • Health/Damage Asymmetry:
    • This only starts popping out in The Drowned City, with bosses having more and more HP as the series goes on while your party, whose HP is capped at 999 HP per character, start dealing thousands of damage with relative ease. The same game unfortunately also debuts the useless-for-you status ailment Curse.
    • The trope gets weaponized in a boss fight in The Millennium Girl. Tlachtga has a move that gets stronger as their HP percentage falls, and when that enemy Turns Red, not only are they capable of doing enough damage to one-shot a single party member, but they do this relentlessly. The boss's high base HP allows them to do this while still having enough HP to take a few more hits before dying; if you tried the same with a similar skill, that party member would be prone to Critical Existence Failure.
  • Hero of Another Story: You routinely encounter other guilds in the labyrinths doing their own adventures, or chat with bar patrons and learn from their advice or misadventures. In Beyond the Myth and Nexus, if you have Guild Cards from other players, their highlighted guild members will appear in some labyrinth events.
  • Hero-Worshipper: The innkeeper's son in The Drowned City, and Wynne from Legends of the Titan.
  • Hub City: Each game in the series has one, and it's from there where the player's party can access the inn to rest and save the progress, the shop to buy and sell goods, the bar to accept sidequests and talk to non-playable characters, the office of the city's political ruler to accept story missions, the explorer guilds' gathering hall to recruit and manage party members, and the exit that leads to the Yggdrasil Tree (or the overworld leading to it, in the case of Legends of the Titan and Nexus) where most of the adventure takes place. The names of the cities are: Etria (first game and its remake Millenium Girl), High Lagaard (Heroes of Lagaard and its remake The Fafnir Knight), Armoroad (The Drowned City), Tharsis (Legends of the Titan), Iorys (Beyond the Myth), and Maginia (Nexus).
  • Hungry Jungle: The Primitive Jungle from the first Etrian Odyssey is this in spades. The Drowned City's sixth stratum - the Cyclopean Haunt - combines this with elements straight out of a Cosmic Horror Story.
  • Idle Animation: Idle Chatter at any rate. Mostly present in the Untold games' Story Mode if you stand around doing nothing your party members will occasionally comment on it.
  • In-Universe Game Clock: The game features an hourly clock that ticks as you traverse the dungeon or overworld (the latter in The Drowned City and Legends of the Titan only), engage in battles, or rest at inns. The time of day mainly influences what types of enemies you'll encounter, the behaviors of some FOEs, and which environmental effects are active. Some sidequests require you to enter the dungeon at a specific time, or last for a set number of in-game hours (such as monster slaying competitions and dungeon endurance quests). Certain game mecahnics require time to pass, such as your livestock producing items for you in Beyond the Myth every few mornings. In addition, there is an in-game calendar that ticks up daily and consists of thirteen 28-day months and a one-day month, although the calendar has no influence on gameplay or story.
  • Infinity +1 Element: Some Limit Breaks and other extremely powerful attacks like Megido and Origin Rune deal "Untyped" damage (sometimes referred to as "Almighty" in a Shout-Out to fellow Atlus franchise Shin Megami Tensei). This cannot be resisted by any means, though on the other hand it's also hard to boost as most buffs specifically raise elemental or physical power. Subverted in Etrian Mystery Dungeon, where Untyped damage is both more common and usually weaker than whatever else you could be using instead.
  • Infinity +1 Sword:
    • Every game has its set of "ultimate" equipment that can only be used by specific classes. Typically these equipment have some kind of powerful secondary boosts (like stat bonuses or bonus skills), but they all require either boss loot drops or Conditional drops that are difficult to acquire and costs hundreds of thousands of ental.
    • The original game has the Shinryu Sword, which requires both common and rare drops from the Three Elemental Dragon superbosses, bestows a monstrous stat boost, and can be used by every class in the game.
    • Traditionally, the Ameno-Habakiri, the strongest katana and weapon with the highest ATK stat period, is obtained from an item collected by defeating the postgame's True Final Boss.
  • Instakill Mook: Every now and then you'll find a random encounter with an instant kill attack — its accuracy or success rates would usually be middling to minimize frustration. Special mention goes to the Evilroots of The Millennium Girl, who charge up for a very accurate party-wide instakill if not interrupted or killed quickly.
  • Instant-Win Condition: Several boss fights feature the boss summoning backup, often in the form of FOEs. If the boss themselves is defeated, most of the time it will end the battle right there, causing the backup enemies to retreat.
  • Interface Spoiler:
    • Other players' Guild Cards in the 3DS games make it painfully obvious what a particular stratum looks like and what it's named (due to the Achievement System) even if you haven't reached it yourself yet.
    • The reward for a quest can sometimes give away the true nature of a particular quest. If, for example, you're looking at what appears to be a simple "investigate this phenomenon" quest, but the reward is a lot of ental (usually around 30,000 for endgame quests), you're quite likely looking at a Superboss quest.
  • It's All Upstairs From Here: The second and fifth games have the floors going up. The rest invert this trope, going downstairs instead.
  • Jack of All Stats: The Landsknechts, Troubadours, Princes/ses, Dancers, and Heroes. Among races in Beyond the Myth, Earthlain fall closest to this trope, though saddled with their own drawback.

    K-M 
  • Kamaitachi: Multiple games in the series have Kamaitachi as enemies known as Wind Cutter, Windsnip, or Illgaze. Nexus includes a quest to investigate strange icy winds that have been knocking other explorers down with strange slashes at their ankles, naturally it turns out to be a stronger Icy Wind Cutter.
  • Katanas Are Just Better: Played straight in the first two games- katanas have a higher damage output than normal swords. However, can only be used by one class, which just happens to be the class with the worst armor options. Averted in The Drowned City, where katanas (apart from the Bragging Rights Reward Infinity +1 Sword) are on par with other high damage weapons.
  • Keep It Foreign: The katana-using classes in the first three games (Ronin, Ninja, and Shogun) have skill names that remained mostly untranslated. The Untold games and Nexus gave them proper English translations. The HD remakes of the first two games reverted to Japanese skill names for the Ronin, but the HD version of The Drowned City uses the Nexus skill translations for the Ninja and Shogun.
  • Kukris Are Kool: They can be purchased at the shops early on in Heroes of Lagaard and The Drowned City. In the former they are classified as swords, while they are knives in the latter. Also, the War Magus Artelinde wields one on the end of her staff.
  • Last Lousy Point:
    • Possibly the king of this trope is in Etrian Mystery Dungeon: the Green Shard from the Demented King. You have to survive 60 floors without checkpoints, starting at level 1 with no items, just to have a 1 in 20 chance at getting it.
    • Opening all the treasure chests in The Drowned City. One of them is behind a door that can only be opened in the true ending.
  • Late-Arrival Spoiler:
    • While it doesn't spoil everything, Story Mode in The Millennium Girl definitely takes some of the punch out of the Fifth Stratum Wham Episode, since Ricky's backstory reveals Yggdrasil's nature and entire history right as you're entering the Third Stratum. Raquna even makes mention of being from Ontario on the first floor! And characters reference and talk about the Old World as early as the prologue.
    • Nexus reveals the existence of Imperials as a recruitable class right from the start unlike in Legends of the Titan. Keep in mind that in that game, Imperials were part of the Empire of Yggdrassil, who were initially in opposition to Tharsis and your party but later underwent a collective Heel–Face Turn. Then again, the same could be said about other unlockable classes such as the Ronins, Shoguns and Bushis.
  • Later-Installment Weirdness: Beyond the Myth significantly changes up the formula, not just with a new HUD, but also with several changes to the battle system. These changed mechanics would also be used in Nexus.
    • The game uses a new damage formula that puts equal weightage on your equipment as well as your character's stats. This means that every weapon now has a Magic Attack stat, and every armor has a Magic Defense stat. The TEC stat, which used to govern both magic attack and defense, is split into INT and WIS for those respectively, and character stats now cap at 255 to make them comparable to your equipment's numbers. What this means is that you are heavily encouraged to keep your equipment up-to-date, and your mages now have a bigger benefit to upgrading their weaponry instead of just comparing the stat bonus of your Stat Sticks.
    • On a cosmetic level, the gameplay interface eschews the style used in all past games in favor of one that would not look out of place in a science fiction or Solar Punk game, with heavy use of rounded edges and sans-serif fonts.
    • Character customization has been greatly expanded on. Not only can you choose eye, hair, and skin color, but you can choose the former two color categories with RGB sliders, unlike in past games where each character design has only one alternate palette. You can also assign voices to characters; while the Untold games also have voices, they are only for Story Mode characters and not your made-from-scratch Classic Mode characters. Nexus preserved this degree of customization, but only for returning class portraits; if you wanted to use the non-returning class' portraits from DLC, you are still restricted to their fixed color palettes.
  • Lazy Backup: Justified, since your max party size is five; if you even have additional people in your exploration guild, they're stuck back in town, with no way of knowing if the Five-Man Band in the dungeon is dead or just doing some much-needed level grinding. This is averted in Etrian Mystery Dungeon, where if a party is downed, any guild members at the guild can be sent down to retrieve the downed party to avoid item and money loss.
  • Leaked Experience:
    • Etrian Mystery Dungeon has this, which is justified by the characters training at the Explorer's Guild while not on duty.
    • Combat Study in the third game permits inactive guild members with that skill to earn a portion of combat experience.
    • The Yggdrasil Clover Tea in The Fafnir Knight does the same alongside its primary effect of increased experience gain. This also works on quest EXP.
    • The Memory Conch in Beyond the Myth and Nexus offers this to inactive guild members for combat EXP as long as an active party member is holding it.
  • Lethal Chef: Dalla in Legends of the Titan can be one if she wishes, as seen in a quest. However it's normally averted, as her skill is praised heavily.
  • Lethal Joke Item:
    • The DLC Bikini Armor in The Fafnir Knight offers a laughable physical defense bonus but an incredible resistance to elemental attacks, and is usually not used outside of specialized strategies against bosses. What is not noticed easily is that it is available to Beasts, and that a Beast can equip both a collar (their main "armor" type) and Bikini Armor. This results in the Beast having respectable defenses against both physical and elemental attacks, making it an incredible tank.
    • The Assault Wand in Beyond the Myth has an incredible physical attack bonus and bestows the Heavy Strike skill, a physical attack with a tremendous 950% damage multiplier. However, the only classes who can wield staves are also associated with races with the lowest Strength, and Heavy Strike would merely do damage roughly on-par with other specialized physical damage dealers. ...Unless you reclass a Therian, whose base Strength is the highest among all races, into one of those classes, and suddenly you have yourselves a physical attacker that strikes for thousands of damage each turn without setup!
    • The Steel Shield and Cianontedae shoes of Nexus will completely and utterly tank the equipped character's turn speed, normally a highly undesirable feature. Given to a Gunner or Imperial, however, allows their Charged shots and Drives to be so impossibly slow that the penultimate superboss's counter heal, itself normally faster than only the skills specifically set to go off on the turn's end, ends up checking damage to heal before they can go off, recovering nothing as a result. As long as you can manage a total of 17,000 damage a turn, you can keep it trapped in an endless cycle of trying to heal damage that's coming in too slowly for it to recover from.
  • Light Is Not Good: In The Drowned City, Yggdrasil is considered the light to the Abyssal God's darkness, and it indeed wishes to protect the world from the God's evil, but its tendency to turn its servants in fanatically single minded automatons suggests a ruthless side to it. Though to its credit, it does mourn Seyfried in the Armoroad ending.
  • Limit Break: Present in different forms. Limits in the third and fourth games don't eat up a character's action phase, meaning you can toss one out and have your character perform a regular action in the same turn.
    • In the first game and its remake, activating Boost strengthens any action you take, effectively buffing any skill by 5 levels (e.g. level 5 Immunize becomes a level 10 Immunize while boosted).
    • Heroes of Lagaard replaces Boost with Force abilities, powerful class-specific moves more reminiscent of the classic Limit Break. The Fafnir Knight modified this system by having two forms of Force abilities. There is Force Boost, a class-specific buff that lasts for three turns (this includes the protagonist's transformed state), and Force Break, a single powerful move that renders Force abilities unusable until the party goes back to Lagaard. This new system is adapted into Nexus.
    • The Drowned City's "Limits" are no longer character specific - you equip 'scrolls' to certain characters to use them. Most scrolls need to be on multiple characters, instead of being single-character moves like in the previous games. The upshot of this is that only one of the characters who is assigned to the scroll needs to have a full gauge in order for the Limit to be used, though the skill can still only be activated through a character with a full gauge.
    • In the fourth game, they're called "Bursts" and are accessible to every character, but you can only equip 2 of them initially, with the number going up to 5 by doing specific quests for the Guildmaster. Depending on their strength, they can take anywhere from 1 to 5 stocks from the Burst gauge to perform, which you fill up mostly by killing enemies: there is some equipment that allows you to fill it up quicker, and Dancers can learn skills that fill it up faster the more dances are in effect or allow them to randomly consume 1 less Burst stock when using a Burst skill.
    • Mystery Dungeon has "Blasts", which for the most part function like 4's, except that you can use any you have unlocked without needing to equip them, and there are also class-specific ones. In this game, the gauge charges by touching amber tiles as well as killing monsters.
    • Beyond the Myth has "Union" skills. Each party member has a Union gauge that increases with actions, and when someone's Union gauge is full, they can execute a Union skill they've learned. Each race has different Union skills that can be learned by characters of that race. Using a Union skill requires a set number of participants to use; the secondary participants need not have their Union gauges full or have learned the skill themselves, but said gauges will reset after use of the skill. Sometimes who you pick will also determine the skill's effects (using Double Slash, for example, is best used with two damage-dealers who are frontliners or ranged attackers).
  • Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Oddly, the earlier games in the series invert this due to the ways damage is calculated. Physical-attacker classes have the power of their skills determined by their STR stat and the attack power of their equipped weapon, while the skills for elemental-attacker classes scale only off the "magic" stat, TEC. Early in the game, when classes are lacking in varied skills and good equipment, mage-type characters like Alchemists and Zodiacs excel at knocking out enemies in one hit or crowd-clearing because of their high base TEC and their ability to hit weaknesses. Towards the end of the game and in the post-game, however, their damage starts to wane because they don't benefit from weapon upgrades unless they increase TEC, their skills don't get more technical than "hit the target harder", and few common buffs boost elemental damage, while physical fighters don't hit these roadblocks and continue getting stronger. This starts to fade around Legends of the Titan due to rebalancing, and by Beyond the Myth both damage types are roughly equal due to character and weapon stats being overhauled.
  • Little Miss Badass:
    • Some of the female adventurers look very young.
    • The Drowned City has Gender Flipped it, with a few male designs that tread into shota territory.
    • According to the "Explorer's Log" comics by character designer Yuji Himukai, the "representative" Hexer (the girl with the pale lavender hair) in the first two games is all of twelve years old at the start of Etrian Odyssey. (Funnily enough, though, the female Protector, who is the nearest thing to a main character EO1 has, is apparently in her mid-twenties when most people would peg her younger.)
    • Frederica, the titular Millennium Girl, takes the cake. She looks to be 15 at the oldest, and runs around gunning down monsters with you. This is, of course, played for irony, as not only is she actually an adult, if a young-ish one, and was a researcher for the Yggdrasil Project, but chronologically she's a thousand years old if a day.
  • Long-Range Fighter: In addition to classes that use ranged weapons like bows and guns, as well as magic-focused classes who can easily attack enemies from either row, some skills apply a damage bonus if the enemy is in the back row.
  • Long Song, Short Scene: Legends of the Titan's save theme is actually longer than the time it takes to save your game (about 12 seconds); the only time you will hear it go on longer in-game is if you generate a Guild Card QR code and idle at the prompt that shows you where your code image is saved on the SD card. The same goes for Beyond the Myth's save theme as well.
  • Luck-Based Mission:
    • At some points in the fight, you just have to pray that the enemy does not use its most powerful attacks, or misses with it.
    • If you challenge the superboss of Heroes of Lagaard at night, you'll quickly find out that it uses all its attacks completely at random. Yes, it can instantly kill the party on the first turn if you're unlucky.
  • Luck Stat: Notable for being extremely useful in this game. Luck determines, among other things, the chances of landing status ailments and binds, which can become lifesavers in battle.
  • Magic Is Rare, Health Is Cheap: Gathering materials for Medicas, the strongest of which commonly fully heals a party member, doesn't take much effort. Farming for TP-restoring items, where their strongest barely restores over 100 TP, on the other hand, typically involves rare or conditional drops from incredibly strong FOEs. TP restoration skills are either conditional or weak enough to never restore more than their cost.
  • Magikarp Power:
    • Certain class abilities are either unavailable without prerequisites, such as the Ronin's Midareba, which, in Heroes of Lagaard requires ten points in Overhead and five in Dead Law, which itself requires one point in STR Up. Others are near-useless until pumped to near-max level (the Hexer being the infamous example). However, all classes are Magikarp when the game begins, with different rates of growing out of it than others. Ultimately, it depends on the player's build and preferred direction of the classes.
    • In IV, V and Nexus, entire pages of a class's skill tree are gated by levels (You can't access Master Titles in V until level 20). It's not unusual for a class that hasn't been faring very well in the early game to suddenly begin pulling their weight once you reach that level threshold and get their best skills.
    • Fully powering up the Ronin's Peerless Combo attack in The Fafnir Knight is an incredibly costly undertaking, as the skill powers up based on three other skills, each with their own set of requirements.
  • The Magnificent: When a character takes a Prestige Class in Beyond the Myth, they gain an epithet that can be chosen by the player. The same naming system can be used when a character takes on a subclass in Nexus.
  • Mama Bear:
    • In Legends of the Titan and Nexus, if you kill the two Furyfawns patrolling the Small Orchard (a relatively easy task; they're some of the weakest FOEs in the game), their parent, a Furyhorn, will show up on the map, completely pissed off that you killed its children, and will chase you with a movement rate of two steps per step you take until you either retreat to the eastern side of the map or leave, at which point it will go on the usual passive patrol routes.
    • If you choose to engage the Furyhorn in Nexus and expect it to be a solo target like before, said Furyhorn can summon Duteous Fawns for good measure, which can perform a Combination Attack with their parent for massive damage if they aren't killed quickly.
  • Marathon Level:
    • There's a quest in Etrian Odyssey that has you spend five consecutive days on a single floor. It's really simple (there's a small area that allows you to heal for free and allows you to walk back and forth without monsters appearing) but it's really, really long. Mercifully, while the quest appears again in The Millennium Girl, you can choose to rest at night and also sleep in the following morning to help speed things along. Unless you're playing Classic Mode.
    • Appears in Heroes of Lagaard as a quest, which requires you to spend three consecutive days on the fourth floor. Unfortunately, there's no safe zone like in Etrian Odyssey.
    • Any teleporter maze easily qualifies when it is sufficiently complex and devoid of shortcuts to speed up return trips.
    • Ginnungagap B3F during the Story Mode of The Fafnir Knight. It's a long, labyrinthine trek full of Axolotls that can take away your Force gauge if you attack or kill them and Death Wall FOEs that will rush you from across the room and are impossible to run from unless you run when it's guarding. Moreover, once you enter you can't leave until you finish, although you get three Return Flutes just in case you get stuck and you can't save inside, preventing it from becoming Unwinnable by Design. Annoyingly, if you're playing Classic Mode, you receive no warning that this will be a Marathon Level until you enter the floor, by which point you are unable to leave.
  • Mega Dungeon: Each game is built around one, with a town outside it where you can rest and restock.
  • Metal Slime:
    • Pasarans in The Drowned City, which have a chance to randomly spawn on certain floors. While they're slower than other F.O.E.s, they make up for that with the ability to walk through walls. If you actually catch up to them, they'll constantly attempt to escape (binding their legs prevents this) or self-destruct (binding their heads prevents that). On the other hand, successfully killing one gets you a lot of Experience Points.
    • In the ocean, you have tanniyn. They're quite rare, take several hits to successfully kill (although you can unlock improved harpoons) and will sometimes attack and damage your ship as you fight them. When you kill one, however, their drops are worth a small fortune, especially if you get some Tanniyn Liver.
    • Pookas in Legend of the Titan. They also try to escape off the map as soon as they can. If you can chase one down, though, they go down in one hit. but instead of giving experience, they give out stat-boosting books.
    • There's also golden enemies, which the game calls "rare breeds": any non-boss enemy can be a rare breed and taking one down multiplies all the experience gotten from that battle by 5, but they also have one of the highest turn priorities and often try to run away. In extremely rare cases, multiple enemies may end up as rare breeds, but you won't get any more experience than you'd get for killing a single one in a single battle. And yes, F.O.Es can also be rare breeds: while they don't run away like normal enemies, they gain significant stat boosts every turn and if you can't kill one quickly enough, they'll quickly become too strong to take down. In Legend of the Titan you can also turn any overworld F.O.E into a rare breed if you feed them rare-quality food that they like.
    • While absent from The Millennium Girl, The Fafnir Knight brings back these types of enemies via EOU's Yggdrasil plant enemies. These are weak enemies only capable of using a basic attack and give little EXP upon dying. However, they drop tea ingredients that can either increase your Material/Gathering Rates, increase the chance of getting high quality Grimoire Stones, or multiply EXP from every encounter by three while also sharing it with the guild members not actively in the party. While normally rare and hard to find, a DLC released alongside the game makes these enemies spawn at guaranteed rates and dropping massive amounts of ingredients when accepting their missions.
  • Meta Twist: The series has a well established pattern of fellow adventurers who are helpful and friendly early on, only to become antagonists after some major plot twist. So in the fifth game, when Lili and Solor show up for the first time, experienced players were already planning for the inevitable betrayal and battle. It never happens. While they become a major part of the plot around the third stratum, it leads to them fighting the boss alongside you. Another twist is that, whereas previous games introduced a civilization in the fourth stratum (and almost always a hostile one), in this game's fourth stratum the only character found is a friendly, mysterious girl whose race remains unknown until the sixth stratum, where she shows her true form as an alien from another world, the Arken. And her civilization was tragically slaughtered by the Star Devourer, making her the Last of Her Kind.
  • Mirror Boss: Each game has a boss fight with enemies that can use the same skills that are available to your recruitable characters. Being bosses, though, their versions of skills are stronger to compensate for lack of numbers, and they may have additional unique skills that don't correspond to the player's arsenal. The player can fulfill this trope to the letter if they bring the exact same classes to the fight.
    • Ren and Tlachtga in the first game demonstrate the strengths of a Ronin and Hexer.
    • Arteline and Wilhelm from the second game use the abilities of a War Magus and Gunner on you respectively. They even have a Force Boost and Force Break in the remake.
    • Averted in the third game; while you will face Kujura or Olympia depending on your route, their abilities are distinct from that of the Shogun or Yggdroids you can use.
    • Kibagami and Logre in the fourth game. Their main classes are Bushi and Imperial, which only become available after you've bested them and completed their associated stratum. They are willing to use subclassing to their own advantage too.
    • The Undead King in the fifth summons minions and commands or sacrifices them for attacks, much like the player's own Necromancers.
    • Blót in Nexus has his fight hinged on creating afterimages like your own Heroes.
  • Mission-Pack Sequel: The games tend to only incrementally update between installments, but Heroes of Lagaard is by far the most guilty of this as it's more or less the same game as the original. There's a few things that have been balanced, specifically old classes and returning FOEs, and there are some new conveniences like more icons for your maps and the ability to strafe, but the game is basically an expansion pack.
  • Mook Chivalry:
    • Played with regarding FOEs. They will NOT avoid battle with you just because you're already fighting some other squad of enemies; instead, if they enter your space they'll happily butt into battle and most likely tear you to shreds if you don't have a way of escaping battle immediately. This is a major part of why the map screen is present at all times in dungeons, even during battle. On the other hand, a mid-battle FOE encounter can be avoided if there are enough enemies on-screen; the FOE will be barred from entering, at least until a slot opens up for them.
    • While the party is engaging an FOE or boss, the enemy icon is depicted still occupying its space mid-battle; only its defeat will free up that spot. This reduces the number of available directions from which other FOEs can join in, and there can only be a maximum of four FOEs (one from each cardinal direction) added to a battle. Any other FOE that can't access the player's position has to wait its turn even if it's actively chasing down the party.
    • In Nexus there is one FOE that does play this trope a bit straighter: Sea Wanderers in the eighth Labyrinth are found in schools of four, but if you fight one, the rest of the pack will wait until battle ends to resume movement. This is notably different from their behavior in The Drowned City, where their mates are more than happy to join in on the fight as usual. This is because in Nexus (and the rest of the 3DS games), FOEs you are in combat with remain on separate tiles instead of occupying the same tile as yours, while in the DS games including The Drowned City, any FOEs you are in combat with occupy the same tile as you; as a result, FOE gang-ups are less likely in the 3DS games.
  • Money Spider:
    • Averted in the first two games. There is one town with one shop, to which monster giblets are sold to raise money and follow the Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness via unlocking more powerful new equipment that just happens to be made from the giblets of more powerful monsters. Compared to other RPGs, this works surprisingly well in both gameplay and story and makes a surprising amount of sense. In The Drowned City, the third game, once you get to the last stratum, a team of farmers with the appropriate skills will make your money issues moot. Mining, chopping, and gathering will net you more or less 100k per visit. Then again, by the time you do reach the last stratum, you won't have much need for money. Good thing it carries over to a new game.
    • Etrian Mystery Dungeon is a bit more merciful, giving you a seperate inventory for usable items and supplies. Justified since it's a Roguelike; you're going to need every one of those item slots just to stay alive.
    • In Nexus, players who don't want to take the time to build a party of Farmers and Survivalists can make easy money in the Ancient Forest by farming Bloodhound Bats. They are relatively easy to defeat by FOE standards, respawn endlessly, and have non-conditional drops that go for 1,800 en each.
  • Mook Maker: Some monsters, of course some bosses too.
  • Monster Compendium: The Monstrous Index, which records the enemies and bosses defeated with a brief description for each, and showcases the elements, melee attack types, ailments and binds they're weakest against.
  • Monster Lord: Various bosses are typically depicted as leaders of common random encounters in their stratum. For instance, the Ant Queen.
  • Multiple Endings:
    • The Drowned City has three. One where you side with Armaroad, one where you side with the Deep City, and a hidden true ending.
    • Not for the main story in Beyond the Myth, but the post-game ends with a different speech from Arken depending on whether you fight and defeat the Star Devourer or just walk through its boss room without unsealing it.
  • Mythology Gag:
    • In The Fafnir Knight, the random enemies on the final floor of Ginnungagap all originate from the previous game's Claret Hollows. Like the Claret Hollows, Ginnungagap is home to an Yggdrasil Core.
    • There are some lion enemies in Legends of the Titan that are a callback to the lions that Wildlings from The Drowned City can summon. These lions start off asleep, but once awoken will make one powerful attack before going back to sleep.
    • At one point in the 5th stratum of Beyond the Myth, the party encounters a squirrel and the game presents them an option to pet it. Those who played Heroes of Lagaard or The Fafnir Knight should know what this entails. The squirrel steals your Ariadne Thread, but this time, this is an Adventure Log event that awards EXP. A brutal version of this callback exists in the secret area of the 2nd stratum, known as the Fire Squirrel. It has an attack that destroys an Ariadne Thread.
    • There is a secret FOE that randomly spawns on the 25th floor of Beyond the Myth. Its overworld sprite, rather than a detailed 3D model, is the orange ball used in the first three games.
    • The Shrine theme of Nexus is actually a remastered version of an unused theme from the first game.

    N-P 
  • Nerf:
    • Status effects other than death in Beyond the Myth have all been tweaked to wear off once the battle ends. Of note is petrification, which has traditionally been one of the worst status effects in previous games due to persisting until it's treated with an item or a clinic visit, with a Game Over resulting if everyone gets petrified (thus, a stoned character is effectively dead); in Beyond the Myth, it wears off either after battle or after a few turns, whichever comes first, and no longer triggers a game over, i.e. it's now just a fancy stun status.
    • Future installments of EO made elemental protection skills like Mana Guard and the Protector-equivalent's elemental shielding skills less powerful than the Anti-Fire/Ice/Volt skills from the first 3 games, which would grant absolute elemental damage immunity at rank 5 or 7 and progress to outright elemental absorption.
    • Floor Jump in the Untold games allows one to instantly move between the staircases of any sufficiently-mapped floor, almost negating the need for Ariadne Threads unless you're making headway in uncharted territory. It also serves as a convenient Puzzle Reset in some cases. In Beyond the Myth, you can still begin on any floor you've reached in which the previous floor has been successfully registered, but you can't jump floors while within the labyrinth anymore.
    • Due to the efficiency of TP restoring or cost reduction skills in the earlier games allowing for parties to be almost completely self-sustainable, the cost of such skills have been either greatly increased or terribly watered down in subsequent games so that the party either always consumes more TP than they can regain on skills alone.
  • Never Mess with Granny: Beyond the Myth would see a series first, the option to have one of your recruits be an elderly woman (as opposed to older men who've had representatives since the first entry). She's the second female portrait for the Rover class, which for added cool means that she's an old woman with a wolf or falcon at her beck and call (though official artwork pairs her with a falcon). The HD remaster of The Drowned City also adds old ladies as the fifth Farmer portrait.
  • New Game Plus:
    • Present in The Drowned City, allowing players to pursue the Multiple Endings without having to completely sacrifice their experienced guild. It's also present in Legends of the Titan, but certain things cannot carry over this time.
    • In The Millennium Girl, when you start a New Game Plus after the completing Story Mode, you have the option to carry certain things over to Classic Mode, including levels, money, and even all your Story Mode characters. However, the reverse won't allow you to actually use your custom-made characters in Story Mode. The same applies for The Fafnir Knight.
  • New Work, Recycled Graphics: The mobile game reuses a lot of assets from the first DS game, such as all the classes introduced there, lots of enemies, and even the first stratum is very reminiscent of Emerald Grove. It does however have a bunch of new non-playable characters and enemies, and the soundtrack and the other labyrinth's stratums are completely original.
  • Next Tier Power-Up:
    • About halfway through The Drowned City, Legends of the Titan, and Nexus, you unlock subclassing, which allows adventurers to learn the skills of different classes.
    • In The Fafnir Knight, the protagonist gains his final two transformation upgrades shortly after completing the third stratum. These upgrades are also the most significant of them all — the first marking the point where his damage potential skyrockets, and the second where he inherits the Black Guardian title and gets a new look and Force Break to match.
    • Although Beyond the Myth lacks subclasses, it does have Master Titles after the second stratum is completed, which add new abilities to your characters' classes. Each class has two mutually-exclusive choices of titles.
  • Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot:
    • The Drowned City's Class and Subclass system allows characters to take on a secondary class, leading to, say, a Princess with Ninja skills, a Farmer-slash-Pirate, a Monk with a Wildling's summoning skills, or even literal Ninja/Pirate, Robot/Ninja, or Robot/Pirate.
    • Nexus brings back the Ninja class but not the Pirate/Buccaneer or Yggdroid classes, however you can choose portraits independent of character class, including free DLC that gives you, among other things, character portraits from Etrian Odyssey III, including Buccaneer and Yggdroid portraits. The same game also includes the Vampire pseudo-class. You can create combinations like a Ninja Pirate Vampire, a Reaper Ninja who's a wolf, or a Vampire Ninja Highlander Elf.
  • Nintendo Hard: It is an Atlus series, after all, and one inspired by Wizardry at that. A difficult early game, deadly FOE encounters that basically mean "run or revert back to your last save", character customization that is easy to mess up without a guide and leave you with poorly-built characters that require Skill Point Resets at the cost of their levels, and everything good being expensive and/or requiring rare materials means that only patient and determined gamers need apply. It is not uncommon for whole parties to wipe on the first floor. Legends of the Titan onwards feature a Casual difficulty that removes some of the rage-inducing elements, at the least.
  • No Fair Cheating:
    • The True Final Boss of the first game, Primevil, can only be beaten because he follows a strict pattern with his attacks, allowing you to use elemental resistances on appropriate turns to survive. If you use too many buffs, however, he'll instead act completely at random, becoming nearly unbeatable.
    • The ultimate DLC bonus boss of The Fafnir Knight is designed such that you must have a Protector's or Beast's Force Breaks to survive its strongest attack, which it is scripted to use at certain points in the fight. But if you bring duplicates or both a Protector and Beast, it prematurely breaks your party's Force bars, disabling your lifeline in the fight.
    • Some of the newer games had the Picnic difficulty, which drastically increases your own damage output while reducing damage taken. There was nothing stopping from lowering the difficulty just to get past certain challenging fights. In Nexus, switching to Picnic locks you into that difficulty, basically removing all challenge for the rest of the game.
  • Non-Combat EXP:
    • From The Drowned City onwards, completing a mission or a quest will reward the current party with some EXP.
    • In Beyond the Myth and Nexus, completing field events may result in an "Adventurer's Log" entry that also rewards EXP to the current party.
    • The Training Orb in Beyond the Myth and Nexus allows the party to passively gain experience while walking.
  • Non-Entity General: The exact nature of you, the guild leader, is never made clear in the non-story modes of the games, especially since your party can be completely changed at any point you have access to the guild headquarters. One possible way to avert this is to create a character that represents you and then keep that character in your party at all times.
  • Non-Malicious Monster: For all their ruthlessness, the majority of this series' monsters cannot be called downright evil, even the F.O.Es. They are more like wild and territorial animals, for they never go out of their way to get out of the labyrinth and invade the nearby town. Very few actively seek to harm explorers out of sheer malice, such as the Blizzard King, and the Abyssal God with the Deep Ones.
  • Non-Standard Game Over: Heroes of Lagaard has one if you choose to leave the Grail of Kings with the Overlord in the middle of the final battle.
  • Numerical Hard: In games with adjustable difficulty levels, the difficulty changes by adjusting the amount of damage the party takes and deals, and the strength of healing skills. The Fafnir Knight does something extra on top of this, but only in its final DLC boss — the difficulty will also determine what phases of its attack pattern the party will experience, and the HP thresholds for those phases.
  • Obvious Rule Patch:
    • Several game breakers were nerfed, or the mechanics that enabled them reworked in later titles.
    • Immunize, Barrier, and the Anti-Element style skills were made a lot less powerful and more TP-intensive in later games.
    • Multi-classing mechanics and the stat books were revised from The Drowned City to Legends of the Titan.
    • Developers responded to players completely eschewing armor and wearing nothing but resistance accessories in The Drowned City by making it only possible to equip a single accessory at a time from Legends of the Titan onwards. In addition, they made armor more useful in Beyond the Myth to incentivize its use by changing the armor formula so armor points are as useful as your VIT and WIS stats for defense.
  • Old Save Bonus: By entering a password, players could start Heroes of Lagaard with their first guild's name. Characters and items were not carried over; instead, NPCs recognized you as an experienced guild and reacted accordingly. This had its advantages (special in-Labyrinth events that offered extra items and deals) and disadvantages (the first guard not giving you five free Medicas, even though your crew is still made up of rookies...) Interestingly, while data similarly cannot be carried into Legends of the Titan, the game tells you that your data from LotT can carry over into other games. The Millennium Girl retains this feature as well. And in The Fafnir Knight, old characters can show up to offer you a grimoire stone.
  • One-Winged Angel:
    • In the first game, Visil merges with the Yggdrasil to fight your party as the Etreant.
    • In The Drowned City, Gutrune succumbs to the Deep One's corruption and transforms into the Deep Princess at the end of the Deep City route.
    • In Legends of the Titan, Prince Baldur transforms into the Cursed Prince as he opposes your party at the end of the fifth stratum.
  • Ominous Latin Chanting:
  • Ominous Save Prompt: In Nexus at the end of the 2nd Labyrinth, after defeating the Berserker King, an even stronger boss, Cernunnos, shows up, and you are prevented from just jumping back to town, though Wiglaf shows up to fully heal your party, Force Gauges included, and a save prompt appears. The game will strongly advise you to save in a new slot, as loading the save back up will jump you to the boss fight right away; you can wedge yourself into a "no choice but to start the entire game over" situation if you don't have a town save to fall back on; yes, you'd have to fight the Berserker King again, but it's a small price to pay to be able to revise your tactics for what comes after..
  • One-Hit Kill: Instant Death effects are readily available, both to players and monsters alike. Better have your nectars and healers ready for revival. Typically FOEs that possess instant death will only be able to employ it once your team has been saddled by binds and status ailments that make you more vunerable to them, like Sleep and Leg Binds.
  • Organ Drops: Some of the loot you gather include valuable body parts from some of the monsters, like the hard chitin of giant insects, claws and fangs from beasts, various parts of plant monsters, and so on. Justified, as some of these body parts are then used by the shops you sell them to - chemicals derived from the loot can be used to concoct healing potions, claws, fangs, hard chitin, and metallic remains of enemies can be used to forge weapons and armor, and other materials are used to make essential tools like the Warp Wire.
  • Our Mermaids Are Different: The Deep Ones of The Drowned City are the spawn of an alien Eldritch Abomination.
  • Palette Swap: Each playable character portrait has an alternate set of colors in The Drowned City and Legends of the Titan.
  • Path of Most Resistance: Expect various sidequests to give the best rewards if you take the options that require the most effort to complete.
  • Peninsula of Power Leveling: Any location with easily-respawning F.O.E.s can qualify, once the party is strong enough to defeat it repeatedly.
    • In The Drowned City, once you get the Star Key, you can fight Golden Idols on B 1 F. While they can wipe out your entire party with their petrifying breath, once you find a way to block the ailment or prevent them from using the ability, all they have is a weak physical attack. Defeating them gives you 4000+ experience points and occasionally an item that sells for almost 2000 en.
    • The Scarlet Pillars in Legends of the Titan contain Dreameaters can be easily turned to a rare breed with locally-found plants, and respawn every day, compared to the usual 7 for the other F.O.E.s.
    • The sixth stratum of The Fafnir Knight contains Icy Bulbs, whose only threatening attack is to detonate itself to execute a powerful ice attack, which is telegraphed and easily negated with a timely Ice Wall. Because they're integral to various floor puzzles, just leaving the floor causes them to respawn. The trick then comes to cornering them, as they're the only FOE that actively tries to flee from the player.
    • Mounting Horrors in the 6th stratum of Beyond the Myth have no instant kill resistance and their main gimmick is the ability to nearly endlessly clone themselves. Any high-end party with reliable instant kill access can farm them with ease. Sonar Worms in the 4th Stratum are similarly vunerable to instant death, are more accessible to players in the midgame, but don't respawn as quickly as the Horrors.
    • Hexgourds, found in the Illusory Woods in Nexus, have scant HP for a postgame FOE, but make up for it with immunity to most damage sources. Normally they'd be Demonic Spiders, but they have a weakness: The Ronin's immunity-piercing Helm Splitter lets them kill a Hexgourd in 2 to 3 hits. Hexgourds also respawn immediately upon defeat, so a party that can kill them with ease can also use them as a postgame experience farm.
  • Permanently Missable Content:
    • In the original Etrian Odyssey, Kupala reveals her name in an optional cutscene that becomes unavailable if the player progresses normally.
    • In Legends of the Titan, Wufan and Logre suffer a Plotline Death instead of joining the player's guild if the player makes the wrong dialogue choices.
    • If you commence a run in Classic Mode of The Millennium Girl, you won't have access to Gladsheim and its associated monsters, drops and treasure chests, which count towards 100% Completion. You also can't get the Ameno-Habakiri which can only be forged from the drop of Story Mode's Post-Final Boss, among various other equipment.
    • In Nexus, if you ever reduce the difficulty level below Heroic, you lose access to the difficulty and the Heroic badge on your Guild Card for the rest of the game. (Heroic is the same as as Expert, with that sole exception.) Similarly, if you ever decrease the difficulty to Picnic, you cannot raise the difficulty back up for the rest of the game.
  • Pimped-Out Dress: The Princesses sport some really fancy dresses, complete with armor.
  • Plant Person:
    • The Alraune, a recurring boss throughout the series, and the Dryad from Beyond the Myth both take the form of a woman fused with an enormous plant.
    • The original Etrian Odyssey and its remake The Millennium Girl feature the Forest Folk, a plant-based race dwelling in the lower reaches of the labyrinth.
    • In Legends of the Titan, this is the fate of everyone who gets inflicted with the Titan's Curse, which inevitably ends with death. Your party eventually figures out how to cure it with the help of the Medium.
  • Platform-Activated Ability: In all dungeons in the series, there are luminescent spots onto which the player's character party can stand to mine for ore, chop plants or gather items like fruits and vegetables (the exact action is mentioned by the game, which suggests you to use the appropriate icon to mark the spot in the map). There are skills that, depending on the case, either allow a character to make use of one of these actions in case they don't know how to do so yet or boost the benefits of chopping/mining/taking (like finding rarer items) in case they do; it all depends on each character's corresponding class. The spots can only be used a few times before running out, but after a day passes they're replenished. Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth adds luminiscent spots in specific water moats in the dungeons that indicate where the party can fish (as long as at least one of the characters has the Fishing skill unlocked).
  • Playboy Bunny: An exclusive female character from Etrian Odyssey S dresses like this.
  • Power Copying: Grimoires in The Millennium Girl and The Fafnir Knight allow a character to use an enemy's skill. Certain weapons in Beyond the Myth — often ultimate weaponry crafted from boss drops — bestow the wielder with one of that boss's skills.
  • Power-Up Food:
    • You can collect everything from meat to vegetables while flying your airship in Legends of the Titan, which can be eaten for temporary stat bonuses, increased EXP gains or resistance to ailments.
    • There's an entire sidequest revolving around this in The Fafnir Knight. Throughout the game you help a NPC figure out old recipes by bringing her monster parts, which she uses to make all kinds of food. Eating at her restaurant provide a temporary bonus during your next dungeon trip depending on which meal you choose.
  • Power Up Letdown:
    • Equipment strength doesn't scale very evenly in the earlier games. It's not unusual to find that a relatively early piece of equipment is stronger or more cost efficient than something available much later.
    • In later games, upgrading skills to half their maximum level or to their maximum level offers a significant increase in power but also increases the TP cost or amplifies the magnitude of other skills. When it comes to buffs or debuffs, they often only get a duration increase at those milestones without any change to their strength. At earlier levels, the increased TP cost is usually not worth the skill point investment as it can quickly deplete that party member's fighting stamina in normal dungeon runs.
    • Some skills have a static effect but further investment reduces their TP cost. Either their base TP cost is so low that there is no reason to reduce their cost, or the TP discounts are so insignificant that the skill point investment is not worth it.
    • When it comes to passives that don't have TP costs, some of them have such a miniscule effect, either from the get-go or past a certain point, that players avoid investment in the main course of the game, only using them to either unlock other skills or as a dumping ground for excess skill points.
  • Precursors: The Ancient Civilization in The Millennium Girl. Also, Arken and her race in Beyond the Myth.
  • Prestige Class: In Beyond the Myth, classes can pick a Legendary Name which lets them specialize in a particular area. For example, a Fencer can become a Phantom Duelist, which boosts their agility and allows them to function as an evasion tank, or a Chain Duelist, which gives them harder-hitting attacks and lets them better synergize with their party.
  • Previous Player-Character Cameo: Some of the QR Quests from Legend of the Titan have connections to previous games. For instance, the "Finest Plains" quests are from Farmers, with Kirtida complimenting one's distinctive hood.
  • Prolonged Video Game Sequel: The first five mainline games have each six strata, while the Untold remakes of the first two games add one more for a total of seven. Nexus? Fourteen, as it not only has its own strata but also brings back many familiar ones.
  • The Punishment Is the Crime: Nexus's idea of Easy-Mode Mockery, specifically for playing on Picnic, is to lock you to that difficulty for the rest of the game if you ever choose it, i.e. if you wish to forfeit one challenge, you will have to forfeit any and all future challenges on your file as well.
  • Purely Aesthetic Gender: Your party members grow the same stats in their class regardless of what character portrait you give them.
  • Purposely Overpowered:
    • The Seven King Grimoire in Untold combines the best skills from the seven baddest bosses in the game. Getting ONE King Grimoire is a Guide Dang It!; ALL SEVEN are needed to make this one.
    • The Fafnir Knight himself in Untold 2 grows in power to become an incredibly powerful boss-crushing warrior; this is part of the narrative as he eventually gains the power to solo the final boss of Story Mode.
  • Puzzle Boss: Almost all bosses will have their own gimmicks to enforce specific strategies, to the point where you have to interact with map events to weaken some of them.

    Q-T 
  • Quirky Bard: Strongly averted in Etrian Odyssey, where Troubadours are the second-biggest Game Breakers behind only Immunize Medics. They were nerfed hard when Heroes of Lagaard removed Healing and Relaxing, but they still pull their weight with Bravery and (arguably) Stamina.
  • Random Drop:
    • Some monster drops have abysmal drop rates, requiring you to invest in passives that raise drop rates so that you don't have to kill many waves of that monster just to find one. Not helping matters is that you may sometimes need to gather multiples of the random drop to make a piece of equipment available for sale.
    • Subverted with conditional drops, which will always drop when the enemy is killed with a certain method or under certain conditions. Double Subverted when you discover certain conditional drops don't necessarily have a 100% chance of dropping even when the condition is fulfilled, and some "conditions" behind certain drops are merely "drops very rarely".
    • You can bring anyone who tried to get it in Etrian Odyssey to tears with the phrase "Shinryuu Sword." The materials used to make this particular sword are non-conditional items rarely dropped by the three elemental dragons.
  • Random Drop Booster: Several classes across the series have a passive ability that increases the monster drop yield. The Formaldehyde, introduced from the third game onward, forces monsters to yield all possible drops provided they are killed in the same turn it's used.
  • Rare Candy:
    • Stat Books in The Drowned City. They can be found in treasure chests, given as quest rewards... and dropped from powerful F.O.E.s after they are slain. Thankfully, there are items and skills that can be used to ensure that they are dropped. They return in Legends of the Titan, as rewards from catching and defeating Pookas, but each character can only use 10 of each type of stat book.
    • White Potions in Etrian Mystery Dungeon instantly raise a character's level by 1. Golden Potions increase it by 3.
  • Reasonable Authority Figure: Whoever is in charge of the local council or assigns the main missions is usually this. Some of the games however play with this notion.
    • Subaltern Quinn of the Radha in Etrian Odyssey and The Millennium Girl nothing but supportive of your guild. Chief Visil appears to be this at first, but it later turns out he's actively trying to get your guild killed: first by assigning what is a supposed Suicide Mission, then by dispatching two other explorers to take you out and finally by confronting you himself. Of course, from his point of view his actions are perfectly reasonable.
    • Both the Senate from Armoroad and the Deep City have their own understandable but conflicting opinions about dealing with the threats in the labyrinth of The Drowned City, forcing you to make a Sadistic Choice about who you'll side with. The situation escalates and it does not end well for whichever faction you do not side with, unless you manage to reach the obscure Golden Ending.
    • All authority figures in Legends of the Titan are very reasonable. Even Wufan, who took some Vessels with her to rescue the Medium instead of waiting for the council to make a decision, as well as Baldur, who was originally following the same ideal as his father. Baldur averts this later, however, due to becoming more desperate as the barren land rapidly approaches his empire... though he does get some points back in post-game when he fights to protect his people during their relocation.
  • Recurring Element: The series has picked up a lot of returning ideas across its many games beyond just the unifying theme of Yggdrasil:
    • There are many recurring class archtypes:
    • The first stratum boss of every game calls FOEs near them into battle and forcing the party to either play quickly, focus down the minions, or find a way to circumvent their arrival. The first game has Fenrir and Skolls, Heroes of Lagaard has Chimaera and Slaveimps, Legends of the Titan has Berserker King and Bloodbears, and Beyond the Myth has Alamgolem and its mini-Golems. The Drowned City is a half-exception, as Narmer is a Cowardly Boss and only summons Bog Lurkers to make it harder for the party to chase it down.
    • In three games, the halfway point of the second stratum features a superboss who serves as a field enemy, and is involved in a main quest to avoid them while accomplishing a goal on that floor. It's Wyvern in the first game, Salamander in Heroes of Lagaard, and Primordiphant in Beyond the Myth.
    • Most games have a duo of experienced adventurers representing "new" classes (either unlockable or just new in concept) who meet the party throughout the story and eventually fight them as bosses. There's Ren (Ronin) and Tlachtga (Hexer) in the first game, Artelinde (War Magus) and Wilhelm (Gunner) in Heroes of Lagaard, Kujura (Shogun) and Olympia (Yggdroid) in The Drowned City (on opposing sides instead of being a duo), and for a solo example, Blót (Hero) in Nexus. A few games put twists on this:
      • Legends of the Titan features Wiglaf (Dancer) and Kirjonen (Fortress), who help the guild frequently but are never fought. Meanwhile, of the three unlockable classes, Kibagami (Bushi) and Logre (Imperial) are fought, but Wufan (Arcanist) isn't.
      • Beyond the Myth features Lili (Necromancer) and Solor (Harbinger), who are also never fought; Lili assists with a main story boss while Solor joins the party for part of a dungeon crawl and a post-game boss.
  • Recurring Riff: Scatter About, the theme of the Elemental Dragons, appears in every installment of the series (except in the fifth game, and most likely the mobile game). The End of The Raging Waves from the third game is remixed to The End of The Raging Winds in the fourth game and has since been making a return in each game barring the Untolds.
  • Recycled Soundtrack:
    • Most of Etrian Mystery Dungeon's soundtrack is remixes of themes from the other games.
    • Being a Megamix Game, Nexus borrows a lot of tracks from the other 3DS entries where appropriate, as well as matching new arrangements of The Drowned City's soundtrack (the only DS game in the series that did not get a full 3DS remake).
  • Redemption Demotion: Logre and Prince Baldur are far stronger as bosses than as allies, though they'll still hit hard due to their Imperial class. Justified in Baldur's case, as he was fought in a One-Winged Angel form that he is no longer capable of taking on.
  • Remixed Level: Most of the maps in the Untold games and Nexus are very different from their original versions, forcing the player to make their maps from exploration instead of memory.
  • Respawning Enemies: Slain F.O.E.s in Etrian Odyssey come back after three in-game days. Plot related bosses come back after eleven. From Heroes of Lagaard onward, this increased to 7 days for normal F.O.E.s and 14 days for bosses. Certain F.O.E.s critical for puzzles respawn faster — sometimes as soon as you leave the room or floor — to prevent a puzzle from becoming impossible.
  • Retraux: The whole series came about because a certain game designer really wanted there to be Dungeon Master for the DS. Every aspect is lovingly oldschool, even down to the music, which was actually entirely composed on a PC-88. Example from the third game. The soundtracks for Legends of the Titan onward avert this, using live instrumentation, but the Untold games feature the ability to switch the soundtrack with an FM version (available in Beyond the Myth as DLC), playing this trope straight once again.
  • One Curse Limit: Combatants can each be only affected by one status ailment at a time. This does not apply to binds, and furthermore, a combatant can have multiple binds.
  • The Reveal: The final stratum of each game has a habit of accompanying some great revelation.
    • Etrian Odyssey and its remake has Lost Shinjuku, revealing the true nature of the world beneath Etria.
    • Heroes of Lagaard and its remake reveal what the fabled floating castle is and its inhabitant.
    • In The Drowned City, you learn significant details of the backgrounds of the leaders of Armoroad and the Deep City as tensions between the factions reach new heights.
    • Legends of the Titan reveals another human society within Tharsis and their involvement in the region's history.
    • Beyond the Myth has the Untamed Garden, a large biodome high in the sky and the origin of Arcania's Yggdrasil Labyrinth.
    • Nexus has this happen just before the final dungeon, revealing just what the great treasure of Lemuria is.
  • Revisiting the Roots: After The Drowned City introduced world-map exploration, Legends of the Titan expanded on this concept, Untold introduced a story mode with "canon" characters, and Mystery Dungeon mixed the game format up with a more roguelike-formula, Beyond the Myth goes back to focusing on scaling a huge dungeon with your guild of blank-slate characters.
  • Royal Rapier: Princes (and Princesses) and Buccaneers use them. Usable by Landsknechts and Arcanists in Legends of the Titan as well. While Fencers in Beyond the Myth equip swords, their Rapier Mastery lets their swords behave like rapiers, turning the attack attribute into stab instead of cut.
  • Royals Who Actually Do Something:
    • The Prince(ss) class from The Drowned City, renamed to Sovereign in later games. It's Exactly What It Says on the Tin - an actual member of the ruling family from some nation or another, coming out and exploring the dungeon with the common adventurer types.
    • Prince Baldur from Legends of the Titan also counts due to taking an active role in trying to save his Empire, by any means necessary.
    • Arianna from the Story Mode of The Fafnir Knight is a Sovereign and a literal princess. She starts as a bit naive and sheltered but can easily keep up with the rest of the guild.
    • Both Persephone and Enrica in Nexus are royalty who are very involved in the exploration of the Yggdrasil and its surrounding labyrinth, with the latter even personally joining up with your party at some point.
  • Run or Die:
    • Unless you're significantly overleveled for the floor you're on, this is what you do whennote  you get into a battle with a F.O.E. Pray that your back is clear or that you can escape from battle to another floor, or you're trapped.
    • In the fourth game, the elemental dragons take up a massive 9 squares on the map, move 2 squares at a time and get a cutscene when they show up on the field. If one of them catches up with you, you don't even get a Hopeless Boss Fight - just a message that the dragon smashed your skyship and you, and your party is sent back to town with at a random number of the party dead or at 1 HP. You also lose food collected on the world map, excepting any collected for quest purposes. Still better than an instant Game Over.
  • Sad Battle Music:
    • "Towering Pair", the battle theme of Ren and Tlachtga from Etrian Odyssey and The Millennium Girl, as well as the theme of Blót in Nexus.
    • "Guardians of the Sorrowful Ice", the battle theme of Wilhelm and Artelinde in Heroes of Lagaard and The Fafnir Knight.
    • The boss theme of the mobile game sounds oddly depressing.
  • Sarashi: The Ronin class and the younger female Masurao.
  • Scare Chord: In the 3DS games, a distinct chime plays when an FOE spots you and starts to chase you.
  • Scenery Porn: The games all have lush labyrinth scenery with eyecatches showing off their full beauty. Of course, don't let that fool you, as these beautiful mazes have monsters waiting to kick the asses of unprepared parties.
  • Schmuck Bait:
    • Several event prompts in the labyrinth tease the player with the promise of a useful-looking item or healing opportunity, only to sic a scripted, inescapable ambush encounter on them. There's no telling whether a choice is completely beneficial or is not worth the time until one experiences it. Beyond the Myth and Nexus go a step further by making these events adventure logs, awarding the player free experience if they willingly took the bait and lived to tell the tale.
    • In the first game, there is a chest in a dead-end room. Approaching it causes an FOE to show up where there wasn't one before, in a preemptive example of Teleporting Keycard Squad.
    • In the second game and its remake, a squirrel steals your life-saving warp wire every time you try to pet it. Particularly dangerous for genre-savvy players who expect it might give some reward eventually, but every encounter plays out exactly the same. This same event would be replicated in Beyond the Myth, too — only this time it's also an adventure log. A similar event appears in the Illusory Woods of Nexus. To rub salt in the wound, this sub-dungeon is one place where the player needs Ariadne Threads to escape the incredibly persistent FOEs after them.
    • The locked-door areas in the first and second strata of Beyond the Myth like to pair up weak enemies with new enemies that are as powerful as those found in the fourth stratum. Naturally, you might try to kill off the weaker monsters first to isolate the stronger one, likely using a row- or all-targeting attack in the process, but that enemy has a vicious attack waiting if they're the only one left: Shielded Phasmids can deal damage proportional to how many of their allies have been killed, while Fire Squirrels have an attack that can destroy your Ariadne Threads.
    • In the first Labyrinth of Nexus, a field event results in some extremely polluted water falling onto your party, making them take severe HP and TP damage, with one of them recommending that everyone afflicted shed their equipment and wash the grime off to avoid any further damage. Which is so not the correct choice. Doing so results in an enemy ambush that is nigh-impossible to win due to everyone being severely underpowered (with not just nominal damage output but also no access to weapon-requiring skills) and ill-suited to take any enemy attacks. The less disastrous choice is to keep everyone equipped and attempt to walk back; after taking a couple more steps (with, unfortunately, even more damage sustained from the grime), everyone will figure out how to efficiently wash themselves clean and you can safely proceed (preferably to heal up and get back to town immediately).
    • Generally speaking, if an enemy is weak to all elements and physical attack types, that same enemy will also have a way to inflict Curse, getting your attackers killed by taking the bait. Or they may have a Last Ditch Move that inflicts debilitating status ailments (such as the Ananas series of enemies), effectively mandating that they be killed last.
  • Scolded for Not Buying: Several shopkeepers in games with voiced lines will complain if you enter their shops but don't use any of their services:
    • The Millennium Girl has Shilleka comment "Next time you should buy something."
    • Jenetta in Beyond the Myth will complain "Whaaaat? You gotta sleep sometime!" to a party on the 3rd or 4th Stratum.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can: Easily applies to most of the series' final and ultimate bosses.
    • The Yggdrasil Core of The Millennium Girl and The Fafnir Knight are the root of their respective games' conflicts in Story Mode, as various parties find ways to keep the sealed evil from breaking out.
    • The defeat of the Overlord in Heroes of Lagaard (and its remake in Classic Mode) cues the unsealing of the Ur-Child, and Canaan, doubtful of his master's commands, works with the party to open the way to let them fight it.
    • The Yggdrasil of The Drowned City set its roots on Armoroad to contain the Abyssal God.
    • The Heavenbringer in Legends of the Titan actually does get unsealed, and your guild goes to defeat it before it can cause lasting damage. The Warped Savior in the same game is kept contained in the Hall of Darkness to buy time for its researchers to develop a means to weaken it.
    • The Eternal Tyrant in Beyond the Myth is kept sealed in the apex of the Yggdrasil until Arken can find a group of adventurers strong enough to defeat it for good. The Star Devourer is sealed by Arken's people to keep the exit of the Empyreal Bridge clear. In a twist on the usual trope's traditions, you can opt to unseal the Star Devourer yourself to fight it.
    • The nigh-immortal Jormungandr in Nexus is kept sealed under Lemuria's Yggdrasil so that its aggression cannot harm Lemuria's refugees and new allies. The final chapter is set in motion by an antagonist working to unseal it.
  • Seasonal Baggage: The first four dungeons in Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard are respectively modeled after the four seasons, symbolizing the time the player's characters have invested in exploring the Yggdrasil: Ancient Forest is summer, Auburn Thicket is autumn, Frozen Grounds is winter, and Petal Bridge is spring. The Ancient Forest and Petal Bridge return in Etrian Odyssey Nexus as Nostalgia Levels, but the other two don't, so their association with this trope is lost.
  • Second-Person Narration: All mainline games in the series employ this type of narration, since the characters you play as are part of a guild you've built from scratch, including customization in name and class. The Story Mode of the first two games' respective remakes use the monologues or dialogues from the pre-built character guild, however.
  • Secret A.I. Moves:
    • Enemies have a completely different set of skills than you, though the effects broadly parallel your skills. The Millennium Girl and The Fafnir Knight plays with it, since many enemies skills can drop on Grimoire Stones. However, the composition of the stone is randomized unless you know exactly how to manipulate the system. Even so, it can take quite a while to get the Grimoires you want or need.
    • Beyond the Myth and Nexus have certain weapons crafted from enemy drops that can bestow a certain skill, normally used by that enemy, on its wielder.
  • "Shaggy Dog" Story: Some labyrinth events can come across as this. One dungeon has a hidden crayfish in a pond, which continuously snaps at whoever tries to catch it, and taunts you every time it does and every time you nearly catch it only for it to escape anyway. Whenever by sheer luck you actually manage to grab it, you exult in your victory for five full seconds before questioning why you wanted it in the first place and kicking it back in.
  • Shop Fodder: The items dropped by enemies have no uses aside from being sold to the shops. Once sold, they are used by the shop owners to craft new items for you to buy. A few dropped items in Heroes of Lagaard can be used to heal instead, though.
  • Shoplift and Die: Like any good roguelike shopkeeper, Lizley in Etrian Mystery Dungeon will have her pet Red Lions tear you a new one if you try stealing from her.
  • Shout-Out:
    • There's many cameos and miscellaneous references to another fantastically difficult Atlus series, Trauma Center, including Dr. Hoffman, Healing Touch and Caduceus in Etrian Odyssey, Dr. Stiles, Angie, and Healing Touch in Heroes of Lagaard, Under the Knife 2 Angie in The Drowned City, and Dr. Cunningham as a playable Medic in Legends of the Titan. In addition, while Dr. Hoffman is absent in The Millennium Girlnote , the English dub has a couple of familiar voices from Trauma Team.
    • Take a look at the names used in this video. Terezi, Kanaya, Gamzee, Equius, and Karkat. And three of them were only revealled a few weeks before the vid was released, at most. Someone at Atlus USA must really like MS Paint Adventures. They also hired a member of the Homestuck art team, Alexandra "Lexxy" Douglass, to illustrate for the art book included with North American preorders of Legends of the Titan. There's also a QR quest that has a shield named after her nickname as a reward.
    • Missy, the barkeep of the Butterfly Bistro in The Drowned City, is a dead-ringer for Yuyuko Saigyouji.
    • One of the ninja's ability is called Izuna.
    • There's a very, very subtle one to a meme from /r9k/.
    • In Untold, Austin is a clear Sherlock Homage. Reinforcing this, a barfly related to him (heavily implied to be his Moriarty figure, Baroudeur) is described as "man with twisted lip".
    • On a slightly more subtle note, one of the Gunner class portraits wears a pin on her hat bearing the face of the Jack Frost monster from the Shin Megami Tensei series, and Olympia from 3, prior to her Robotic Reveal, wears Pyro Jack's face, from the same game.
    • The "Golden Gun" from the second game is described as "a golden gun that can be disassembled and carried freely."
    • Wilhelm is based off the opera Der Freischütz, from which he gets his nickname. This is further compounded by his incredibly high accuracy when you battle him, as well as using magic (elemental) bullets, just like the main character in said opera. The gun you get from his drop is also from it.
    • A lategame quest in Beyond the Myth has its client, Ghai the Fiery, want the party to bring him various dishes to take him to "Flavorland".
    • Egar's pet mouse is name Bredge; his explanation is that he wanted to name it "Biggs" while his wife wanted "Wedge", and they reached a compromise on that.
    • The Megavolt Marmot, as described in its appearance in the fifth game, is a "pocket-sized monster but can thunder-shock anyone that tries to catch it."
    • There's an enemy in Nexus called Air Wolf.
    • One of the equipment items you can get in Nexus is called the maimai Bat.
  • Shows Damage: From Legends of the Titan onwards, enemies that are low on health have distinct "exhausted" animations. They show the same animation as well if they're afflicted with a status ailment.
  • Sinister Scythe: An available weapon type in Beyond the Myth and Nexus. Scythes are required for many skills used by Harbingers.
  • Skill Point Reset: Resting a character allows you to reassign their skill points, at the cost of a few levels. note 
  • Socialization Bonus: StreetPassing with the 3DS games swaps guild cards with other players, and gives you some benefits, like being able to use one of their guildmembers or acquiring items from them. Players can share Guild Cards online by generating QR codes and uploading them. In Beyond the Myth, having other guilds' cards allows those guilds' spotlight members to appear in field events, helping immerse you in the idea that your guild isn't the only one making their way up the giant tree.
  • Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: Played straight most of the time, as the weapons created with the materials sold to the shop just happen to get stronger as the game progresses. There are exceptions, though, such as how killing bosses in specific ways can get you items that create some of the strongest items in the game early on. You still have to gather the money to buy those very expensive weapons, though.
  • Sound Test: All games have a Play BGM feature available after the corresponding Final Boss is defeated. In the earlier games, it can be accessed anytime from the Options menu, but in later ones it's only accessible from the title screen.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: Compared to the Bonus Dungeon themes of the other games in the series, the Forbidden Forest from Heroes of Lagaard and its remake comes across as too peaceful for an extremely Brutal Bonus Level. The battle theme averts this trope, reminding you just where you are.
  • Spell My Name With An S: Before the official names in The Millennium Girl were released, Raquna's English name was spelled either the official English name, Racoona (the Japanese website's spelling), Lacoona, or Laquna by fans.
  • Splash Damage: In later games, the unique trait of the standard fire-elemental spell is doing lesser damage to enemies adjacent to the target.
  • Spoiler Opening:
    • The Millennium Girl's opening reveals who the villain is.
    • In a more minor example, Fafnir Knight's reveals Artelinde and Wilhelm battling the guild.
  • Square Race, Round Class: Beyond the Myth introduces multiple races of adventurers, with each race having 2 or 4 classes native to them. You can change a character's class, keeping their race and race-native traits (race skills and stat distributions) in the process, at the cost of five levels. You are free to have a Celestrian attempt to be a Dragoon or an Earthlain try to be a Botanist if you really want to.
  • Stat Sticks:
    • Prior to Beyond the Myth, only physical attackers really cared about the direct power of their weapons. Healers and elemental attackers instead benefit most from weapons that come with Technique stat boosts, which powered up their skills, while pure status inflictors prefer Luck boosts. This lessened starting with Beyond the Myth when weapons were given magic attack values alongside stat rebalancing, though there are still occasional class builds that will greatly prefer certain attached stats (or a unique skill attached to a weapon) over raw power.
    • Weapons in The Drowned City and Legends of the Titan can be forged to add stat boosts and modifiers to however many slots they have. Classes who don't benefit from weapon strength much will end up sticking with weapons with lots of empty forge slots to enhance the stats they do use. Add in Dual Wielding available with certain classes or subclassing, and some characters may wind up carrying two weapons at once for extra forges in place of an armor piece, even if they don't plan on using weapon skills offered by one or either of them.
    • A common Min-Maxing tactic is to give a class a weapon they don't have weapon skills for purely for the action speed boost that type of weapon provides. Giving daggers (the only weapon anyone can equip without subclassing) to magic users/supports is the most common example.
  • Status Effects: With the exception of binds, which can be stacked with each other and with other ailments, all status ailments are mutually exclusive (e.g. if you poison a paralyzed enemy, they'll lose the paralysis):
    • Binds come in three flavors: head, arm, leg. Skills that would require a certain body part cannot be used if the corresponding part is bound. Head binds usually disable spell-based skills, arm binds usually disable physical skills, and leg binds not only disable mobility-based skills, but also disable evasion and prevent escaping battle. Binds can be applied on top of the other ailments, and each combatant can have multiple body parts bound.
    • Blind causes the victim's accuracy to plummet and disables their evasion.
    • Curse causes any damage dealt by the victim to also hurt the victim as well.
    • Fear causes the victim to occasionally fail to act, losing some TP in the process. It also exposes them to some of the Hexer's skills designed around manipulating fearful enemies.
    • Panic causes the victim to randomly attack battle participants, including their allies, and disables their evasion.
    • Paralysis causes the victim to occasionally lose their turn. If that happens, they also become unable to dodge.
    • Petrification turns the victim to stone, completely preventing them from acting or dodging but raising their physical defense. In most games, this lasts until it's cured by an item, spell, or clinic visit (having a stoned character stay at the inn does nothing for them, just like having a dead character do so); thus a petrified character is considered dead and if all alive party members are petrified, it's a Game Over. This was Nerfed in later games to wear off over time or once battle ends and to no longer cause a game over.
    • Poison causes damage at the end of every turn.
    • Plague only appeared in The Drowned City and functioned similarly to poison, except that it could also spread itself amongst your party members.
    • Sleep prevents the afflicted from acting, similar to petrification, but can be easily removed through the victim taking damage...and it so happens that there's a damage bonus to sleeping targets.
    • Stun causes the victim to lose their turn if they haven't taken it yet, however it wears off at the end of the current turn.
  • Stealth-Based Mission: A common FOE puzzle involves sneaking past an FOE or three through the room. Sometimes only the FOE who catches you will chase you, sometimes all of them will chase you, and in rare instances they won't chase you but they will summon even stronger FOEs to pursue you.
  • Sting: The 3DS games will precede the random encounter battle theme with a riff if you get ambushed or if you gain a pre-emptive round.
  • Stone Wall: The Protector, Hoplite, Fortress, and Dragoon. They have skills which increase their own defense and draw attacks to them. They also double as Barrier Warrior. Most of them have negligible damage output so they'll just be doing nothing meaningful if the party doesn't need their protection; some of those classes have a skill that does inflict reasonable damage, but it tends to be deep in their respective Tech Trees. The one exception is Dragoon, if they take on the "Cannon Bearer" Legendary Title, which elevates them to a Mighty Glacier that can blast enemies as well as they can protect their allies.
  • Stupidity Is the Only Option:
    • It can happen that you're wedged next to a non-chasing F.O.E. and unable to move to a vacant space, or the only possible move would put you in the space that it will step into at the same time. If you are not engaged in combat with another enemy already, or have an item or skill that can instantly call forth a random encounter, the only way to make time advance in the labyrinth is to move; the game does not give you the option to simply wait in place and let the F.O.E. pass safely.note  This means you'll have no choice but to fight it and quite likely die (unless you are powerful enough to actually defeat it), or waste TP on an escape skill or use a similar item.
    • In the fourth Maze in Legends of the Titan, one kind of F.O.E. doesn't move at all unless you trigger an alert from a different F.O.E. The former completely lacks weaknesses and resists most attacks. If an alert is activated, it's capable of moving much faster than the party can. Naturally, there's an occasion where it's acting as a roadblock, and you have to activate it in order to advance in the dungeon. Fortunately, after you've progressed, you can open up shortcuts that skip these puzzles on return trips.
  • Summon Magic: Wildlings summon animals into battle, whose specialty is inflicting status effects.
  • Superboss:
    • It says something that a game that was already Nintendo Hard felt the need to kick it up a notch for the post-game content. Three of them in particular have been in nearly all the games: the Wyrm, the Drake, and the Dragon. They were renamed to Great Dragon, Blizzard King, and Storm Emperor in Legend of the Titan onward.
    • The third game adds another dragon to the mix, the Elder Dragon, who, being the one who had the quests for them unlocked in the first place, proves to be even harder than the aforementioned three!
    • The fourth game brings in a fifth dragon, the Fallen One, who is implied to be the fourth's dragon's counterpart, and it shows with its abilities.
    • Beyond the Myth is unusual in that the three elemental dragons are absent, being in their place all-new postgame superbosses: Dryad, Zombie Dragon, Lamia, and Primordiphant. The former three are the ones that raise the characters' level Cap, just like the elemental dragons in previous games.
    • Each game also has an ultimate superboss that dwells at the final floor of the entire labyrinth, and these tend to be stronger than everything else in the game and require near-maxed-out parties and specialized tactics to beat. There is Primevil/Yggdrasil Core in the first game and its remake, Ur-Child in the second game and its remake, the Abyssal God in the third game, the Warped Savior in the fourth game, the Star Devourer in the fifth game, and the Abyssal Princess and full-power Jormungandr in Nexus. The Fafnir Knight introduces a DLC boss that is fought on the labyrinth's 31st Floor and is even stronger than the Ur-Child.
  • Super Mode: Force Boost in The Fafnir Knight and Nexus gives the user a powerful class-specific buff for 3 turns. The Fafnir's own Force Boost emphasizes this trope more than the other Force Boosts, as it induces a transformation in the character and has several exclusive associated skills.
  • Suspend Save: Used in all games from Heroes of Lagaard on.
  • Suspicious Video-Game Generosity:
    • It's not unusual to receive certain situational battle consumables that would make an upcoming boss fight a lot easier when used. A notable example is the Blast Grenades in The Millennium Girl which can interrupt Fenrir's ability to call in reinforcements.
    • The game typically warns the player about an upcoming boss fight when they enter the room preceding it or stand outside the entrance to the Boss Room. Usually this warning is spliced into a story-focused cutscene to build up to the boss's presence. The few times the game doesn't do that often lead to some nasty experiences of walking into a boss fight totally unprepared.
    • If an enemy, particularly an FOE or boss, shoots off an attack that inflicts multiple hits or targets the entire party, but blatantly misses even without blindness or hit and evasion buffs in your favor, that doesn't mean you can laugh. That same enemy, or an ally of the enemy, will often have a way to buff their accuracy, debuff your evasion, or inflict evasion-removing status ailments or leg binds, then repeat the same attack for severe damage if not an outright Total Party Kill.
  • Take That!:
    • One is made in the Legends of the Titan comic towards players who don't like the new Casual mode.
    • In The Fafnir Knight, the minister complains that some newbie adventurers will just plagiarize the maps of veterans for their starter quest, which may be a nod to new players looking up maps online.
  • Taken for Granite: One of the Status Effects is petrification. In most games, a stoned character is effectively dead, and requires a specific item or a clinic visit to treat; a party with only dead or petrified characters results in a Game Over. In EOV and later, however, stoned characters turn back to normal after a few turns or after the battle ends, meaning that at most they're unable to act for a little while.
  • Tech Tree: Each class has a rather elaborate one. The transition to the 3DS allows for a more graphical depiction of the skill trees, and this aesthetic was reworked into the HD remakes of the first three games.
  • Teleportation: Many games feature floors within the Yggdrasil Labyrinth designed as mazes that revolve around this concept. In this kind of floor, there are spots where the party can stand on to be taken to a different part of the same floor, and the challenge consists of making way to the next floor. The game provides number-coded labels can be used to mark these spots in the map, though even with them these mazes can get very disorienting (especially if the teleportation is one-way only). The exact nature of these teleporting spots, and sometimes also the way they work, will depend on the stratum where they're located in.
  • Teleporting Keycard Squad: If a quest has you picking up a unique item from the labyrinth and you don't encounter any resistance up to getting the item other than the usual Random Encounters, there's a strong chance that an Elite Mook, a squad of them, or an FOE will be waiting for you the moment you get your hands on the item.
  • There Are No Tents: Aside from the deathtrap/field of flowers in the first strata, all other games besides The Drowned City play this straight.
  • There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Every postgame Super Boss has an attack that does this. Preventing said attacks from happening is a key part of the fights, as they are often impossible to survive through raw HP and defense stats alone.
  • Three Plus Two: The main parties of the story modes of both Untold games consist of three friends (the library trio in The Millennium Girl and the player, Flavio and Arianna in The Fafnir Knight) and two outsiders (the Highlander and Frederika in The Millennium Girl and Bertrand and Chloe in The Fafnir Knight). Interestingly, the player goes from being one of the two outsiders in The Millennium Girl to being part of the three friends in The Fafnir Knight.
  • Theseus' Ship Paradox: Even if you completely replace all of your starting guild members with new ones, be it through the Retire mechanic (especially in Etrian Odyseey II for the raised level caps) or recruiting completely fresh characters, your guild is still treated as the same one.
  • Time Stands Still:
    • The Ronin's Limit Break in Heroes of Lagaard.
    • In The Drowned City, Sea Quest battles don't cause the in-game clock to advance — or rather, it may move forward during the battle itself, only to revert to its original setting once the fight's finished.
  • Timed Mission: In the last Area of the Gladsheim in The Millennium Girl, you have to cross the map to deactivate Gungnir to stop it from destroying Etria within 50 turns. This includes defeating the boss, the AI called M.I.K.E.
  • Too Awesome to Use:
    • Coupons in The Drowned City allow you to purchase any item at half price, from basic supplies to an Infinity +1 Sword. You can also only get eight of them. Ever. Even a New Game Plus doesn't allow you to get more.
    • Formaldehyde, from the same game, guarantees a 100% drop rate on all the items a given enemy drops if it's killed on the turn the item is used (which, in turn, can complicate things on when to use it). They're also in short supply and a New Game Plus doesn't restock these chests. You can make them once you reach the sixth stratum, by selling item drops from F.O.E.s there. Just remember that each item you sell makes one unit of Formaldehyde. It returns in Legends of the Titan and later games, but are much more rare. On the bright side, the chests containing them are restored on a New Game Plus. You still need late-game drops to buy more, however.
    • From The Millenium Girl onwards, one of the difficulty options in each game offers one chance per labyrinth trip to resume after a defeat instead of being booted back to your last save.
    • Force Breaks in The Fafnir Knight and Nexus. They are very powerful skills that can be activated during a Force Boost, but completely shut down the user's Force meter until they leave the labyrinth. While not as extreme as, say, using a Formaldehyde or a Coupon, it can still leave you with the question of "do I Force Break now, or save it for a later battle / later in this boss fight?"
    • Gold Ingots in Beyond the Myth can fully unlock a weapon's potential with a single use. However, they are exceedingly rare — often obtained in treasure chests or as quest rewards in the postgame — and the only way to get shards to make more of them is to recycle expensive weaponry made from lategame enemy or boss conditional drops. It's likely that players would go an entire playthrough without spending a single one.
  • Transformation Is a Free Action: The hero in The Fafnir Knight appears to be able to transform using Force Boost instantaneously during battle and during cutscenes.
  • Trauma Inn: The inns fully heal HP and TP regardless of how long the characters stay, although the inns can't revive or cure petrification, which are handled by the hospitals outside the inns. The Drowned City and subsequent games has the revival clinic as part of the inn, though. Beyond the Myth makes full-health revival part of staying at the inn, with no extra charge.
  • Traversible World Map: Legends of the Titan has one, unlike every other game in the series. The series' traditional "Stratums" are now broken into smaller dungeons and larger labyrinths.
  • Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Some bosses, especially each game's superboss, follow a strict pattern, and may even possess deadly attacks that heavily punish a party that has no way to mitigate or block it. You'll either end up following a guide or scrutinizing boss behaviour over a lot of attempts to figure out a step-by-step strategy to beat it. The Fafnir Knight exaggerates this trope by making almost every major boss behave this way.
  • Trick Boss:
    • After chasing down the Bloodbear in the first labyrinth of Legends of the Titan, you corner it and defeat it, and the battle even has its own unique music. After it falls, though, a loud roar echoes through the area, and you realize that the Bloodbear's not even the labyrinth's boss...
    • Nexus ups the ante with its version of the Lush Woodlands. You've defeated the Berserker King, great! Then Cernunnos shows up, unlike in Legends of the Titan, and forces you to fight it. Wiglaf does heal your party back to full HP and TP (even from death), and you get a chance to save, but if you can't defeat this new minotaur-like monstrosity and have to reload an earlier save (assuming you have one, it's possible to put yourself in an Unwinnable by Design situation here and have to start from the beginning of the entire game) to reconfigure your party or grind , it's back to the drawing board, including fighting the Berserker King, already a tough boss at this point of the game, all over again.
  • True Final Boss: All games have one. They tend to be quite Lovecraftian.
    • Millennium Girl plays with this by making its Final Boss a weakened version of the original game's True Final Boss. Then you unlock the Bonus Dungeon where you can fight it without a handicap.
    • Nexus plays with the trope, too. The Bonus Dungeon hosts a superboss that drops an item that makes the ultimate katana as per series tradition, but defeating her causes the Final Boss to revive with increased stats. Defeating the revived and strengthened final boss thus becomes your final challenge and fills in the final slot in the Monstrous Codex for 100% Completion.
  • Truer to the Text: The Origins Collection remasters of the first three games are based on the DS originals rather than the 3DS remakes, and as such lack Story Mode and classes from later games, and much more of the Early-Installment Weirdness was kept, such as 60 FPS graphics instead of 30 FPS, enemies having still sprites instead of animated models, FOEs being represented as glowing balls rather than using the monsters' models while exploring, EO1 Medic's Immunize protecting against all damage types rather than just elemental, and renaming characters costing a fee. However, these remakes do retain some quality-of-life changes like being able to review the Monstrous Codex mid-battle, multiple Difficulty Levels, and the skill point allotment interface being presented as a visual Tech Tree.
  • Turns Red: It's commonplace to see a boss break out of its usual AI pattern and begin using its stronger moves more frequently and randomly as it falls to low health. In some cases, it can boil down to a Luck-Based Mission in trying to survive the boss's next attack.
  • Two Girls to a Team: Interestingly, despite the promotional artwork's consistent preference for the female versions of classes, the main parties of the story modes of both Untold games consist of three men (one of whom is The Hero) and two women.

    U-Z 
  • Underground Monkey: They're mostly regular enemies, but some F.O.E.s appear as modified enemies as well.
  • Under the Sea: The Undersea Grotto from The Drowned City.
  • Uniqueness Decay: The Millennium Girl has the Highlander, the main character of Story Mode. The Fafnir Knight and Nexus has the Highlander as a class instead of a specific character, and the player can create multiple Highlanders for their party.
  • Unlockable Content:
    • The second game would let you carry over some information from the original Etrian Odyssey for benefits.
    • Etrian Odyssey IV and Etrian Odyssey Untold both have QR unlockables. In the case of the former, some official codes can be used to give new missions, items, or armor to characters. Both games also allow other players to send guild cards to others, allowing them to have access to the other players' party members or Grimoire stones respectively.
    • The habit of using QR was continued in Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold as well as the spin-off Etrian Mystery Dungeon.
  • Unwanted Rescue: "Sassy"-voiced characters in Beyond the Myth complain whenever they're healed, even if they were healed from death.
    "I didn't ask for this."
  • Unwinnable by Design: In Nexus, it is possible to be locked into a situation where you literally have no choice but to start from the very beginning if, at the end of the second Labyrinth, you take the save opportunity right before fighting Cernnunos and overwrite your save and it is your only save file. Since reloading your save from there takes you immediately into the fight, if you are completely unable to defeat the boss (due to being underleveled or having the wrong party composition, for example), your save file is as good as bricked. That said, if you choose to save, the game does strongly warn you to save to an empty slot to avoid this situation before letting you pick a save slot.
  • Useless Useful Spell:
    • Completely averted with regards to ailments and binds. Not only are they useful, but they can literally mean the difference between life and death. The Hollows and the Hollow Queen from Legends of the Titan is practically impossible unless you have spells or weapons that cause head and leg bindings, which the stratum thankfully gives you on that floor. It also helps that almost all attacks that inflict ailments or binds do at least as much damage as your normal attacks, are dirt cheap to use or affect multiple enemies and try to inflict the status effect multiple times over several turns after a single use. Once they land, you can get free attacks off them or gain massive damage boosts against any enemy with a status aliment.
    • Sadly, Curse (affected player/enemy takes damage whenever they inflict damage) plays this straight — thanks to the Health/Damage Asymmetry, monsters are going to barely be tickled by the curse damage, while Player Characters will lose most or all of their health from the damage incurred by doing a normal attack, forget about any hard-hitting techniques. This gets particularly grating with any conditional drops that require an enemy to kill itself with the reflected damage.
    • The Medic's Refresh skill in the first game starts by being only able to cure one type of ailment, and further investment will increase the number of ailments it can remove. Since skill points are at a premium in this game, it's more efficient to just use Theriaca B which cures all types of ailments on the whole party. All subsequent games have the skill cure all ailments from the get-go, with further investment only affecting its range and cost, and the Theriaca gets watered down to affecting only one party member at a time.
    • Owl-Eye and similar skills like Sight Formula, which are designed to reveal nearby FOEs, become this in the Untold games, due to the reworked mapping system having a sight range that lets you see nearby, actively moving FOEs even in uncharted areas, leaving their only use in discovering invisible FOEs which are easily tracked on return trips. Later games expand on the use of similar skills to be able to reveal additional elements like shortcuts and treasure chests to avert this trope.
    • Several other skills can fall into this, usually because of their base class lacking the stats to take full advantage of them. For instance, the Ronin's poor Luck is not going to help with the instant kill factor of Beheading Cut, and there's very little reason investing in the Alchemists' Pain Formula series when it requires you to put your Squishy Wizard in the front line. This shows up more often in the Untold games where the player is encouraged to create Grimoire stones in order to pass those skills to classes which can make better use of them.
    • The least useful buffs in the series are accuracy and critical rate buffs. Passives are treated a little differently as they will always be active and don't require a turn to set up or maintain.
      • Accuracy buffs get quickly obsoleted once the player gains consistent access to ailments or binds that prevent the enemy from dodging. If those ailments are not available and you're still concerned for your Powerful, but Inaccurate attack, accuracy-increasing equipment can rectify that without needing to spend the time to apply the accuracy buff.
      • Critical hits normally only apply to normal attacks; past a certain point in the game you are expected to be using your skills a lot more often. Certain Critical Hit Classes gain skills that let their skills land critical hits, but they will also have personal passives that raise their critical hit rate and damage, making an additional critical hit buff all the more superfluous.
    • As mentioned above, skills that affect your normal attack get obsoleted as your active attacking skills will eventually be a lot more useful than a modified normal attack. (The exception is the very first game, where your TP pools are so small you may reach a point where you're left to basic attacks in a tough fight.) The Millennium Girl is almost egregious with such skills since it has an abundance of skills that upgrade the basic attack, but your limited skill points are better spent upgrading your attack skills. Elemental imbue skills get glossed over for similar reasons (on top of only affecting one party member at a time) and only shake off this reputation once Nexus introduces several weapon-dependent skills that can be affected by elemental imbues.
    • Mass revival skills in Nexus suffer from a bug that impairs their success rate. Essentially, their success chance is rolled twice, and you need two successes to be get the revive to work. So, for instance, a skill with a base 75% success rate instead has an effective 56% rate, and that's why the mass revival skills don't seem to work consistently. The only exception is the Arcanist's Dismiss Revive skill, and that's because their Circle Mastery passive pushes the rates high enough to be a guaranteed success.
  • Video Game 3D Leap: While the first three games already have three-dimensional dungeons to begin with, Legends of the Titan upgrades enemies and battle backgrounds to full-fledged 3D, with the former being animated.
  • Video Game Caring Potential:
    • As you journey across the labyrinths in Legends of the Titan, you can meet and talk to various soldiers in various predicaments, like getting lost or being separated from their unit. Helping (or sabotaging) them is optional, but if you do help, towards the end of the plot as you advance towards the final few bosses, the soldiers you helped appear and hand over several healing items as they thank you for the assistance.
    • Beyond the Myth has several dungeon events where the player can opt to feed some of the more docile wildlife in the labyrinth. Helping them out results in the animal returning on a later floor and rewarding the player's kindness in free items.
    • A second-stratum quest in Beyond the Myth assigns you with the task of slaying a "dire beast" that caused trouble for the quest poster. As it turns out, the "dire beast" is a helpless and dying wolf that got caught up in the poster's shady money-making schemes. You can either do what the quest tells you for the full 1500 en reward from the profit-seeker, or you can nurse the wolf back to good health, pissing off the quest poster greatly and missing out on his reward but earning a compensatory 900 en from Mirina herself as a reward for putting your morals over money.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: Short on cash during Early Game Hell? You can recruit new explorers, strip them of their starting gear, dismiss them and sell the Starter Equipment for a small amount of money. You can do this indefinitely!
  • Violation of Common Sense: In Beyond the Myth and Nexus, you get rewarded EXP for engaging in field events, even if choosing to do so is a blatantly unwise decision that leads to a difficult fight or your party members otherwise taking damage.
  • Vocal Dissonance: In Beyond the Myth and Nexus, nothing stops you, from say, giving your character a young girl portrait with an old man voice, amongst other possibilities.
  • Voice Grunting: Present in The Millennium Girl, The Fafnir Knight, Beyond the Myth and Nexus. The Untold games apply this only to Story party members, while the latter two provide voicebanks to apply to your characters.
  • Wake-Up Call Boss: Yes, despite the games being Wizardry Hard, there are bosses that can crank the difficulty up even higher and give the player a hard time until they make the most of the game's systems.
    • Special mention goes to Fenrir; the party has yet to escape Perpetual Poverty, or have the levels/skills to fight effectively. Adding to the problem, first stratum enemies and FOEs don't yield enough experience to make grinding easy.
    • So you got past the Great Lynxes and Largebills on the first two floors of The Drowned City and you're breezing through the rest of the first stratum? Don't worry - Narmer is waiting at the end of the fourth floor to remind you that this is still an Atlus game.
    • In Legends of the Titan the Berserker King (the first boss) is a crash course in isolating the boss from nearby F.O.E.s. The second boss is another, in demonstrating that binds are not Useless Useful Spells, if its minions throughout the floor beforehand haven't taught you that already.
    • Untold 2's Flame Demon, the game's counterpart to Lagaard's Hellion. Only this time around, there's a couple twists. Firstly, the boss's HP is four times as much as it's counterpart. Secondly, it uses Kingly Fire, a well-telegraphed flame based attack which can send your entire party into single digits unless you prep with skills like Fire Wall. Thirdly, in the lead-up to using Kingly Fire, it summons backup in the form of Flame Cubes, which will mop up your party by self-destructing if the player had the foresight of blocking Kingly Fire but didn't think of destroying the Cubes first. Only careful prep work and strategic thinking that the party hasn't really needed to use before this will see the party through.
    • The Amalgolem in Beyond the Myth basically teaches you that just because it's an end-of-stratum boss fight doesn't mean you shouldn't bother with Area of Effect attacks.
  • Weakened by the Light: This is a core element of several FOEs in the third stratum of Beyond the Myth: during the day, there are patches of land where the sun shines, and FOEs will either avoid these sunlit zones or retreat upon stepping into one of them. The sunlight obviously isn't there at night, making avoiding these FOEs more challenging.
  • Weapon Specialization: Each character class has one or two weapon types they can use, and some weapons can be used only by certain classes. In The Drowned City, two weapon types, knives and books, can be used by anyone, although ninjas can benefit more from knives. In Legends of the Titan, all knives and all staves are available to all classes, with certain classes having preferences to these weapons.
  • We Buy Anything: The town stores initially carry very few items, and requires your guild to venture into the Labyrinths to plunder and farm materials necessary to expand their product line and keep them supplied. This is how you unlock new weaponry, armor and medicine at the store - and an excellent way to drum up cash.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist:
    • Visil in Etrian Odyssey sets up the whole labyrinth exploring thing only to make the city more wealthy in order to keep the purifying thing going. He wants the explorers to explore the labyrinth, but would kill them if they go too deep. From the remake, we have M.I.K.E., who ultimately wants to commit mass murder in order to stop the Core.
    • Overlord in Heroes of Lagaard offers to turn the party immortal by assimilating and experimenting with them, and in the remake's Story mode he attempts to assimilate the party to obtain the power of Fafnir and use it to stop the Calamity himself.
    • Both king Seyfried and princess Gutrune in The Drowned City are willing to go to drastic ends to fulfill their goals.
    • Emperor Baldur in Legends of the Titan seeks the activation of the Tharsis Yggdrasil in an attempt to rejuvenate the wasteland, even if it means the sacrifice of the non-human races.
    • Blót in Nexus seeks to use Jormungandr to plunge humanity into an age of endless strife so as to force them to unite in the face of adversity.
  • Wham Line:
    • The name of the Fifth Stratum in Etrian Odyssey. Nothing prior in the game could have possibly prepared you for Lost Shinjuku.
    • And more an encapsulated Wham Moment from Legends of the Titan: you are following a certain someone after events at the end of the third land. You enter the fourth. Yggdrasil looms overhead, this music starts playing... and the camera pans down to show that you're being confronted by three heavily-armed sky-battleships, which were previously thought to be an impossibility, and the lead ship greets you with a heavily-armored figure saying, paraphrased: "Bring your city's leader here. The Empire will explain its actions." This is when you know things have gotten real.
  • When Trees Attack: The recurring Rockwood/Medusa Tree and Sickwood/Gasser Tree enemies. Arguably the Petaloid family as well, although that's closer to When Flowers Attack. Visil's One-Winged Angel form in Etrian Odyssey, the Etreant, is a fusion of himself and the Yggdrasil Tree, while the eponymous Titan of the fourth game is Yggdrasil itself in a humanoid form.
  • Where the Hell Is Springfield?: This has cropped up as after the first game as it was made explicit that all the games share a continuity and the lore points out that there are seven Yggdrasils dotting the surface of the post-apocalyptic Earth. The first game is an aversion as Lost Shinjuku leaves little doubt as to exactly where you are (a ward near Tokyo, Japan). The rest are very speculative, leading many fans into theorizing where they are located.
  • Whole Costume Reference:
  • With a Friend and a Stranger: Played with in the two Untold games' story modes.
    • Untold has two strangers (the player and Frederica) join with a trio of friends (Arthur, Simon, and Raquna).
    • 2 Untold has two friends (the player and Flavio) meet a stranger (Arianna), and then another pair of friends (Bertrand and Chloe).
  • Womb Level:
    • The sixth stratum in Etrian Odyssey. The walls seem made of flesh, blood cell enemies, damage tiles that look like stomach acid, and the final boss is called the "heart of the labyrinth". In spite of all that, it's still a forest.
    • The sixth stratum of The Drowned City qualifies as well. Only it (fittingly) looks like you're inside a tree's body with the anatomy of a human. Some liberties are taken for the sake of challenge, however.
  • World Tree: Each game's labyrinth is centered around Yggdrasil, or rather a Yggdrasil. The ones in I, II, IV, and Nexus are actually man-made constructs designed to cleanse the Earth of pollution, but they go horribly wrong after absorbing enough of it. The Nexus Yggdrasil is more benign, being synthesized with DNA from the other Yggdrasils, but houses a different threat entirely. The one in V was planted by Benevolent Precursors and restored the planet's ability to sustain life, and they've done this for other planets as well.
  • Wrap Around:
    • Present in the 2nd stratum of Legends of the Titan, but due to the floors there not filling up the entire map it isn't immediately noticeable. One area in the 5th stratum uses this mechanic for a puzzle, and two floors of the 6th stratum play it completely straight.
    • Each floor of the 5th Stratum of Beyond the Myth wraps around laterally. It's less due to any sort of anomalous space-time property and more due to the fact that you're in a space station; the wraparound nature of each floor implies that the structure is torus-shaped.
  • Zillion-Dollar Bill: In Nexus, Persephone talks of a most-sought Lemurian treasure "that brings eternal prosperity".
  • Zonk:
    • In Legends of the Titan and Nexus, the Magma Beasts and Glacial Beasts have conditional drops that are mutuall exclusive with their standard drops. The conditional drop requires you to hit the enemy with the element they're weak to... and is worth only one en, meaning that the conditional is one of the few times where it is a penalty rather than a reward. To get the standard drop that's worth more and can actually be used to make new equipment, you have to defeat the enemy with an attack that doesn't trigger their elemental weakness, and mind you both of these elemental Beasts are resistant to purely-physical attacks.
    • Downplayed with the Kraken in The Drowned City. Its conditional drop requires you to beat it while its legs are bound, and since all of its skills use its legs, a leg bind will turn it into an easy punching bag. Getting this conditional drop prevents you from getting the normal drop, which is used to make the strongest gun in the game. This is another instance of a conditional drop being a penalty, but at least the conditional still fetches a good price and is used to craft a late-game spear.

Save your page progress?

Top