so a patch for etrian odyssey 3 is out and i decided to gave it a spin and so far it has been.... good?
battle goes a lot faster than 2 and in fact it makes me wonder why it took them 2 sequels to reach this speed in the first place,force skills now charge a lot quicker but at the same time they are also weaker as opposed to 2 where they take forever and can turn a battle around,in etrian odyssey 2 force skills depends on your job (so a warrior and a wizard have different force skills) but here you equip them trough a special menu and find new one as you proceed,most force skills also require more than a single partecipant and using one will drain the force bar of every partecipant
quest still gives mostly lame reward but this time you at least get some bonus experience in what i thinks is a desperate effort to justify them,the place that gives quest also now gives you hint about how to get conditional drops
there is now a minigame where you navigate the sea,trying to find new location,it's actualy really fun and in fact i think i spent more time playing this than the actual game,everytime you find a new location you unlock special quests... these special quests involve teaming up with a team of CPU controled members to beat some monsters and here are the shocking part
1) the CPU is actualy smart,i teamed up with a healer and he did his job right
2) these special team are cool designed,1 of them was a team made of a princess,a defender and a warrior,the princess would buff,the defender would take the damage and the warrior would deal it,the end results is that all i had to do was adding a medic to the mix and the battle played with me actualy playing a role support
3) the reward are actualy worth the effort,i got a weapon which was actualy decently strong and had ice element added on top of it and one limit manual
there is also a new system where you can add effect to weapons,tough which effect you can add depends on items you find as you play (one of them i got as a normal quest reward)
the game just seems to be better designed,floor 2 has a really strong monster that shows in random encounter but he doesn't have any attack which instant murder all your party and he actualy shows his mugs only on day which mean you can dodge him simply by wandering around the night,and none of the class seems to have any game breaker skill or useless skills
so basicaly so far so good tough it wouldn't surprise me if it's going to quickly turn sour
