Granted I'm outing myself as someone that Read Too Much wrt the story but I agree w/ what @poyfuh is puttin down about the writing and 'je ne sais quoi' so to speak w/ the atmosphere. Some the quests are... not worth it in a conventional sense, but formulating a plot reason as to why your group of ne'er-do-wells spend like a week in a particular floor of the 2nd Stratum is oddly compelling enough to push forward.

Kazuya Niinou, Shigeo Komori, and Daisuke Kanada have all expressed this as being one of the core foundations within EO: a lot of evocation and lite appeal to give berth to crafting a personal narrative and imaginative beats.

i hate math and doing it which does sometimes completely fuck me when i’m playing like the third wizardry scenario but usually is okay in modern games lmao i simply am here to vibe. but yeah i definitely think that like putting a more explicit story and characters into this game would completely ruin it and you would have to actually pay me to play the story mode in the 3ds one lmao

@poyfuh
I really liked those too. my only issue there was that they seem to really thin out the further in you get. I could totally be wrong here but I feel like the first stratum has the most? but yeah, I really hope they get expanded on (or not expanded, cos like you said I like them being what they currently are) cos they're delightful for sure. I poked around on the first floor of EO2 today and there was a bunch and I could read them literally forever

& agree on that story beat, especially how matter of fact it is. very dry Jobs-a-Job stuff, which makes a lot of sense considering everything that you did leading up to that point. always felt the default mode of blobber parties was especially sinister so it's real interesting to see some strong reactions from people who really thought they were swinging a sword and having good clean fun UNTIL.... (also enjoyed seeing the classic blobber twist show up near the end cos it rules every time)

maybe I really fucked up not doing more of the quests tho. will remedy that in future games cos I like what I'm hearing from you and blazingwaters. sometimes I get too mathbrained and it's a shameful quality

i think i forgot to log it here but i did play this a bit ago and i think we are mostly aligned on this one except i felt very charmed by the storytelling elements at play here. stuff like the little tiles where it’s just like “hey idiot do you want to stick your hand in this bush” or “do you want to take a nap under this tree” are nothing really but i don’t want them to be SOMETHING, they’re just a cute formalization of a lot of the already present environmental storytelling in older blobbers in a way that i think is cute. i think the general aesthetics and little tiny bits and bobs of dialogue you get when you do quests even though they’re rarely very material rewarding kept me interested in doing them and made me feel like there was a full world of history and politic here that i was happy to imagine in my head until the game’s imo actually very cool move of suddenly and cruelly slapping you with the reality of the violence of your cohort. i think i might like to see some of the attitude behind that stuff expanded in future EOs but like you say i am mostly very amused by how breezy the game is compared to its reputation. the direction you come at a genre from really really informs everything lmao