This was less fun. They took a bunch of lessons from EO1, and they were wrong. I fully did not like this when it came out, but with the smoother difficulty (and a turbo button), I was able to grind it out and make it through the base game. But wow, the Strata 3 really hurts! It's a brick wall! And the early game is perhaps the most vicious of the series.

Worthless quests, adding monsters to gathering spots, removing any XP from FOEs - just dumb choices that make it more masochistic. But I did it, and it's done. BYE