In spite of its thirty-floor labyrinth and lack of overworld dross, Beyond the Myth's level design feels much closer to Legends of the Titan's than any of its older antecedents. Floors and strata are as long as those in the DS Etrians, but feel more like a simple sequence of puzzle rooms with adjoining treasure rooms than anything complex or interconnected: even the final floor of the main game felt like a straightforward gauntlet. The encounter rate's far too low to really strain the party's resources, and yet several mechanics exist to mitigate this strain: the game offers more out-of-battle recovery items than the party can carry, and the ability to warp to specific floors means that outings need never be more than a floor long.

The game, in other words, refocuses on the dungeon exploration it'd been moving away from over the previous two entries, while treating that exploration even more perfunctorily than them. Despite my preference for the structure and priorities of the earlier Etrian games, it's clear that the game could've benefited by doubling-down rather than backtracking. There's an enormous variety of viable parties and the boss design's complex and memorable, but without an appropriate restructuring of the series formula, this amounts to a forty-hour game with about four hours of substance.

The introduction of voice acting was also painful and misconceived: the characters had little enough going for them already. The core actors in this game have never been within a mile of a union and actively made me dread returning to town. Loved the class portraits and the free recoloring, though!