With Etrian 2 leaving a somewhat bitter taste in my mouth, I decided to move on to Etrian 3, hoping that it would be better than the last, and it was.

Etrian 3 added a lot of new stuff, such as seafaring, subclasses for even more customization, and new classes that replace the old ones.

Gameplay is still the usual, with some new tweaks, such as campsites on each floor as a healing spot (provided you bring a tent), Limit attacks that your team can use when their limit bars are full (Boost, Force, and now Limit, they really don't know what they want to do with that thing) and Stratums being four floors instead of 5.

I honestly had a blast with this game, subclasses were fun to use and the soundtrack is as good as ever. Material gathering still sucks, but it's not as obnoxious as it was in 2.

This one is my new favorite entry of the Etrian series, so I would give it five stars, right?

However...

The third Stratum in this game is by far the WORST dungeon I have ever experienced. It was so bad, I almost shelved this game, in fact, when I finally beat it, I didn't touch the game for a month because it was so awful. It's infested with damage tiles, the puzzles make the floors feel longer then they already are, and it has enemies that can kill you even if you're prepared.

Even though the third Stratum is complete dogshit, that's really the only bad thing this game has. Honestly, I'd say this game is a better entry point for the EO series than 1 is. I'd recommend this game and would ask you to just please push through the third Stratum.

This was my second attempt at getting into the series, after Etrian Odyssey 5, which I dropped very early on.

I've had a decently good time with EO3 for a while, but the game started to slowly erode my enjoyment of it somewhere at the middle of the second stratum. Little and not so little annoyances piled up, and by the time I've finished the third stratum I realised I'm no longer having fun with the game. I still might finish it at some point, so I'm leaving it as shelved, but the chances are slim.

I will outline my biggest points of contention:

- the inventory is way too tiny.
You only get 60 slots for everything, be it consumables, equipment or drops. It fills to the brim in about 20 minutes and the constant trips to the hub break up the flow of the game and since you can't set up a two-way portal or anything like that, the time you spend just running back to where you were in your exploration efforts adds up quickly.

- the game can't decide whether it wants to be the kind of game that's obscure about its mechanics like Noita, the kind of game where the player isn't supposed to sweat too much over the details like Stardew Valley, or a grindy optimization-focused kind of game like what Etrian Odyssey was advertised to be by some of my friends.
For the obscure mechanics game it explains its mechanics too much. For the game where you're not supposed to optimize too much it has too many hard counter encounters you need specific teams for. For the grindy optimization kind of game it doesn't explain the mechanics enough, the player doesn't get to make informed team building decisions without either having a guide open or wasting enormous amount of time savescumming to figure out how scalings work (which by the way is incredibly inconsistent between different skills, my favourite example is that monk's healing skills actually get worse as you level them because the healing power scaling isn't worth the TP costs scaling).
The game tries to be all three of those types of games at the same time, and it hurts the experience a lot. When I'm trying to play it like the obscure mechanics game, it has no real moments of discovery because everything gets explained to some degree. When I'm trying to play it like a chill game, I stumble upon an encounter that my team is woefully unprepared for. When I'm trying to play it like an optimization game, I get frustrated at the lack of hard numbers to base theorycrafting on.

- the game can't decide whether it wants to be a gameplay-focused game, or a story-focused game.
It starts like a gameplay-focused game - you make a guild, you recruit a team, you clear the map drawing tutorial, you're free to go. It continues like that until the middle of the second stratum, with all the cute attempts at story staying out of your way. But after that, the game starts interrupting players exploration with mandatory trips back to hub to listen to another portion of inane lore dumping and nonsensical attempts to outline a conflict between two factions who literally want the same thing and that the player has no reason to care about whatsoever. It culminates when the game presents the player a choice that doesn't really mean anything except that you're only getting one out of two unlockable classes. I don't understand this at all. I wish the game either committed to being gameplay-focused and ditched the disruptive story elements, or committed to being story-focused and built up a story from the start with actual characters to care about and a narrative that's more than "go down and kill superevil ultragods".

- the map drawing aspect is pure tedium and adds nothing of value to gameplay.
The game has the auto-mapping option, but it's not good enough. I still had to manually place the chests I've opened, doors and gimmick mechanics like streams or moving platforms. This is the kind of annoyance that really adds up over tens of hours of playthrough.
Somewhat related to this, shortcuts are really annoying to find. The exploration of the dungeon turns into constantly hugging walls with your face pressed against them because the only tells there might be a shortcut are visual - the interact prompt, and a slightly different pattern on the wall.

Almost everything positive I can say about this game (barring the incredible soundtrack) has a "but" that still comes back to those four points.
I like the combat, but it doesn't give enough information - for example, every time I cast an enchantment with a sovereign on my arbalist so that he attacks the enemy weak to ice with the appropriate element, I have to pray sov acts first and arb acts second, because the game just doesn't tell you the turn order at all.
I like the conditional drops system, but the game only tells you how to get them for some of the monsters that have them, and doesn't mark down the method anywhere, so you have to remember it individually for what has to be like a hundred monsters or, more realistically, play with a guide.
I like the exploration, but having to draw the map only distracts from it, and having to sniff every wall just in case there's a shortcut is annoying.

Can I recommend this game to someone? Yeah, definitely. For a lot of people the annoyances I've described won't be a big deal at all. I can see someone enjoying the constant trips back to the hub and seeing them as a way to facilitate smalled play sessions, or something like that. I know a lot of people who don't mind playing with a guide. Some people will probably not mind the story interruptions at all, and see map drawing as a cute dungeon crawling tradition. If you're the cross section of all those people, you'll probably have a great time with the game.

Mmm, now this is good eating. In that, I sold my original DS copy, CIB, for like $300 bucks half a decade ago. Bought my now-wife a Switch with that money for our six month anniversary, way back when. Thanks, Atlus, for making your games rare - probably sealed my romantic fate. Anyways, I legit missed this one, and never fiddled with emulating it - so it sat, rent free, in my mind, being like "Hey, wasn't I your favorite of the series?" and it was. And it is.

To that point, EO3 throws out all the previous classes, and thank God - now we can get weird with it. Princesses! A robot! A strong lady! A pirate! Each having their own unique mechanics MAKES this game.

I remember the nautical part of this being so cool, but I found it bland this go round, over a decade later, but I think EO4 does it better.

And that's the story of this series - always evolving, and adding little improvements, QOL stuff - like, you can now run from an FOE even if your back is to the wall. Or, you can buy Warp Wires pretty much instantly. Or, while the maps are funky and fun, you can always count on a hidden wall to shortcut back to the stairs (since there's no geo node to save your progress).

Some may say that makes the game easier. Me? I say that I have a button on my Hori Split Pad Compact, that will press a button forever. So I left my guys running in a circle, slamming A, while I was at work or watching TV. My party, running in a circle, that princess healing em constantly, as they grind it out. I retired so many dudes, and raked in the skill points, so that on the final boss (of main campaign), I never had a character lose more than 200HP.

I still wiped lots over the 70 hours (inflated for sure by my idle grinding), but God, it felt good to obliterate EO3. I'll be leaving this one installed until they announce the next batch of HD remasters - if they do.

And onto Undernauts, I guess!