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.

From what I recall, some of the skills got tuned to be more usable such as the aforementioned Healing Touch, but nothing too extraordinary outside of that. There's a SomethingAwful megathread where diehard fans go over the changes in posts, but I think the consensus is that you're still effectively playing the same game as it was on DS, and its changes/alterations aren't anywhere near as drastic and immense as the Untold remake. Which for me, is more than enough of a seal of approval to continue my session with it and the following two games in that collection.

granted there's some streamlining done w/ the hd collection (healing touch is super busted now as one example) but i think the hurdle of Stratum 2's initial adversity becomes largely de-emphasized the moment you engage with the rest of the kit and side paths leading to Stratum 1's tucked away enemies and components, which means all the hazard titles on the next flooring are more so as hindrances you walk across than a deliberate obstacle meant to dissuade headstrong rushes. some of the quests can be real SOBs though like the one about the flower and dealing with an onslaught of enemies one after another, so that's cool!

i should get back to that at some point finally....