It's difficult <miss> to say <miss> what it is about <miss> Etrian <miss> Odyssey <miss> 2 <miss> that makes me despise <miss> it so much.
If you enjoyed reading that opening sentence, know that it's a microcosm of the opening game that only mildly subsides later.
Look, I didn't play the original handheld versions, and I've not played later entries where most of the love for this series comes from. I found Etrian Odyssey 1 HD in my general dungeon crawler games search, and while it was certainly flawed, I was charmed by the ability to draw the maps in real time while you played, and generally enjoyed the experience throughout, and since the normal evolution of game series is that the sequel irons out the bugs that crop into the initial entry due to them no longer having to design all the assets/systems from scratch, I had high expectations for this.
Turns out Atlas's design mantra is to copy/paste everything that worked in its original creation, only now you climb up the dungeon instead of going down, then take everything that sucked and spray it all over the place ... because that's fun. Right from the get go the opening quest doesn't ask you to explore the initial surroundings, but walks you partway into the area and dumps you in there, demanding you find your way out. There are encounters that guarantee to ambush you every time, where the creature just comes in and one shots one of your back row for giggles. If you played the first game and know of the evil that was the sleep plants, they've now given that cancer to half the monsters on every floor, only now they do confuse which 9/10 times results in your front row just one shotting your team in a manic bout of treason.
By floor 6 you're meeting gargoyles that can petrify a character on hit, only the ability to remove petrification is on one class and high up in their talent to the point you need to dump every level point into the ability to have it. use an item you say? Wish you could, because those don't become available to purchase until 5+ floors later, and that's even assuming you have the money to do so, because consumables are still so ridiculously expensive to be unusable.
Create a harvesting team to mine the nodes, you say? Well, they've added random ambushes to those as well, only the monsters that ambush you aren't those on the current floor, but creatures from two floors higher, most of which open up with an AoE attack that would dump your main party into the dirt. Speaking of AoE, whoever it was in the mid 2000's who thought good game design is monster single target attack hits for 200, monster's AoE attack hits every member for 700 should be ceremonially banned from every making games again.
Remember the crab FoE in Etrian 1 that appeared on the shore and stalked your group if they took too long to kill something? They've added multiple versions of those here, all around standard encounters that, even ignoring the horrendous miss rates, are designed to just waste as many turns as possible with high defenses until these beasts add and just floor you in a single claw swipe. Later on you get pumpkin beasts who have near full immunity to one spell school and every melee school, are invisible on the map, and respawn the turn they get killed, leading you into a never ending cycle of being unable to escape the ongoing train. Oh, and they added zero chance to flee to these things too, just for the giggles.
Then there are the quests. While these were never inspired, they've somehow made them worse, giving you almost zero information on where to go or what to do, often needing to interact with squares that you'd only know were interactable if you notice the small ! mark that appears when standing on them, and many of which require travelling through multiple floors on every visited layer. But if this isn't fun enough, they've also added fail mechanics, many of which you don't even know you've done until you go to turn the quest in only to find "Sorry! Got to do it all again!"
Honestly, I can't think of a game in recent history where I consistently felt like the design goal is to make me feel like I'm wasting my time. I actually looked up the cheese group, because like the previous game, the information on how skills level up is basically up arrow on application rate. What I learned was, just like the original game, 50% of the class talents are, of course, completely worthless, 40% are only worth taking a single point in, and the remaining 10% you just spam for the win. I actually laughed when I saw the stats for the Beast's AoE fear is, I kid you not, 1% application rate for level 1, 2% for level 2, 3% for level 3, 4% for level 4, and 75% for level 5. Wtf is this? It's like they've got placeholder numbers for the ability and the person charged with updating them only bothered to do the final version, which is still woefully low even then.
I can go on and on, but you get the point.
I'm not going to claim the game's irredeemable though. The dungeons are still fun to map and have some interesting added complexity, especially with walls that require specific sized groups of classes to get through. They've added some one time events that can be good or bad depending on your choices that help spice up some of the exploration. There's also an increased focus on FOE's, with new abilities to control them, as well as alternate versions, some of which aren't always visible on the map. But all of this is ultimately lost in the ongoing rage for the ass combat system and a constant need to be spamming Ariadne Thread every 5-10 encounters, only to realise you forgot to buy replacements.
I would strongly recommend trying the first game in the series. If you loved that, get this on sale, turn the difficulty to Picnic, and enjoy the exploration side from there while using a guide to tell you where to go for quests. But otherwise avoid this. This game is a rare case where it's design is so toxic it actually puts a spotlight on the all the flaws of the original whereby I now hate that game more for it.
