Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold

Playtime: 48 Hours

Finished 20 February 2025.

Played the game with the prebuilt story mode party again, so all the excursions into Ginnungagap were also mandatory - just like Gladsheim from EOU. Played on Standard difficulty for the most part, but did have picnics with some of the bosses (and one quest) that were particularly irritating, usually after a retry or two due to salt & long dialogue scenes. Tried to do most of the quests available before postgame - the only ones that I didn't complete were the Princess quest (requires defeating postgame superbosses, but available very early in the game for some reason) and the Stratum 5 advertising quest, since I really didn't like that mechanic.

Guild card stats:

- Max Level 58
- Enemy Discovery 71.59%
- Item discovery 58.53%
- Ventured Days 61
- Enemies Hunted 1222
- Walked 21208
- Total en 827625
- Grimoire Fevers 53
- Grimoires Gained 486
- Dishes Sold 18
- Highest Sales 495

My second Etrian Odyssey game is naturally the second Untold game, unsurprisingly a complete remake of EO2. It provides many of the same QoL changes to EO2 that the original EOU applied to EO1, so I'll try to avoid too much of that conversation here and simply focus on major differences in mechanics, atmosphere, etc.

Just like for EOU, I played this game with the prebuilt storymode party, composed of the titular Fafnir, a Protector (Bertrand), War Magus (Chloe), Survivalist (Flavio), and Sovereign (Arianna). I really liked all of the characters in this party too! It's hard to pick a definitive favorite; Arianna is funny due to her naivete about the average commoner's lifestyle, but Bernard is a great "old man" character, Flavio is a good friend, and it's nice to see Chloe open up about herself over the course of the game. More importantly, though, is the difference in fundamental party composition. While the first game had a very stereotypical element-focused party, this one has two main synergies - Fafnir & Arianna for elemental damage, and Flavio & Chloe syncing up for massive ailment damage. This was a very welcome change; I was originally worried after EOU that this game would basically just give you another simple & clean party composition again, but the lack of dedicated healing and emphasis on indirect synergies as opposed to direct DPS was fun to (kind of) figure out. I'll note here that Fafnir's kit is very cool, being centered around ludicrous potential with the Force mechanic (described further below).

So this game's world is very remarkably similar to EO1's world. Another tree, another labyrinth, and a town at its base that facilitates exploration and resource gathering. As opposed to EOU's Fredricka, who you find in Gladsheim and spurs you to explore the origins of that ruin, Arianna is a princess from Caledonia, a distant country, on her way to perform her royal duty by uncovering the secrets of Ginnungagap, another similar ancient ruin. Along the way, you get some pretty contrived reasons to continue adventuring up the Yggdrasil labyrinth's floors and strata, but those don't really matter much since that exploration is the entire point of playing the game anyway. I will say that unlike EOU, the missions in the main labyrinth drastically slow down over the course of the game; the entire 4th stratum is almost completely irrelevant to the plot as anything other than a stepping stone to the 5th stratum. I will say the 30 floors ended up really gassing me out - I started tiring of the game after just reaching the Heavenly Keep, so I'm hoping that the lack of extra content in 3, 4, and 5 might make the future games a little bit smoother. That's a personal gripe though.

The main new combat mechanic of this game is the Force mechanic, which is essentially a limited-time power boost that each class can trigger like a limit break based on a persistent meter (across multiple fights). The effects of this are based on each character's class, giving them relevant boosts that make their abilities far more potent than normal. Theoretically, it's a pretty cool mechanic, giving everyone access to an additional surge of power when needed. In practical use, it doesn't work too well with this gameplay flow - the force meter is far too committal to use for random trash fights as it regenerates slowly and is also somewhat unnecessary for most FOEs, which are challenging but can typically be countered by solid play. On the other hand, as bosses are completely designed around this mechanic, fights end up being incredibly tanky, in my opinion having close to twice the HP they need to have. Honestly, I generally did not enjoy bosses at all in this game, both due to the dependency on Forces, but also because of their heavy resistances against the story party. The Flavio/Chloe synergy ends up being very unreliable in many fights because bosses are pretty much all resistant or immune to the major ailments that Flavio can inflict, accordingly tanking Chloe's DPS and front-row healing abilities. The frustrating randomness that resulted from this is the main cause of basically all of my picnic kills; I didn't feel like going back through everything again and again just because my DPS was randomly cut in half. Definitely cheap & dirty, and somewhat devaluing, but I care for progress more than integrity here (this is the salt talking).

A couple of other mechanics are modified from EOU. The Grimoire system is no longer so needlessly complex - now, each grimoire improves just a single skill, and you can equip multiple of them, starting with one at LVL1 and unlocking one new slot for every 10 character levels (10, 20, 30, etc.). And instead of the complex fusion system, you can simply exchange them for other grimoires that randomly pop up from roaming guilds & NPCs, which is so much better. The other one is for foods, which provide selectable party-wide passive buffs. Cooking recipes in this game can grant you many different effects, but they are now persistent over time, instead of requiring a preparation for each trip. That in itself is very nice, as I hated forgetting to micromanage that before going out to explore in EOU. However, the second addition to it is an annoying city management & advertising campaign minigame, where you advertise the recipes you've made to the general public. The problem here is that all dishes purchased during an ad campaign come out of your ingredient stock, so you either have to run back to farm more or just advertise food with ingredients you don't care about. But since players generally won't go back to earlier stratums to farm materials randomly, this ends up being extremely tedious - so I dropped it very early on. It's just poorly implemented.

Overall, I really enjoyed this game too. Although I personally didn't really care for the boss fights and ended up essentially cheating to just delete them and avoid their mechanics entirely, the rest of the exploration and questing was great, as expected after my positive experience in EOU. I don't think it really reinvents any wheels, but makes meaningful improvements from the first Untold game without any glaring "objective" faults. At this point, I'm looking forward to trying out EO3 - the first time in this series that I'll be able to properly try building my full party from scratch instead of using prebuilt compositions.