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.