Your Opinion so Far on the Demo?

[YangKoete]

The demo to me is a little...lackluster.

There's quite good Pros, for example;
Your customization of characters for hair/skin/eye/hair colour is quite nice (Something I wanted to do since I started with EOIV).
There dungeon mapping's a bit better where you can customize what you have to use most of in a little area but then you can drag the top out to see all of it.

Buuuut my qualms lie with some issues I feel are a bit nitpicky but are aspects that are large to me.
Firstly, voices for the NPC's. . .Most are just. . .Eh. Lilli and the Guild Master have amazing voices, while our innkeeper, shopkeep, bartender and even our "Leader" of the town are VERY lacking. Even the normal GUARDS have better voices!
Next, the actual voices you can pick from for characters...I wanted to have the amazing old woman bunny, but the "old lady" voice sounded like it was done by someone who's a young adult. I'm a bit miffed there.
Also...the enemies just seem out of place. Rabid Acorns? Really? The squirrels and roper are pretty alright, but that's just...eh. The Wild Dog also looks like something that'd be 3rd or 4th Startum with how it looks too...
Not to mention the menus for battle, inventory and the town are just plain off. I miss the older ones.

It feels like it's not Etrian Odyssey even though it does, oddly.

[PLA]

The status-screen is kind of vestigial, now.

[Maxine MagicFox]

Meanwhile I enjoyed it.

The difficulty is back to being fairly punishing with a lot of risk-reward. The skill tree system is simplistic but I love the skills that are present and fit within my play style. The maps have so far been very entertaining and mysterious. I love the Adventurer's Log concept and I love that there feels like there's more events as you are crawling through the dungeons.

I love the feeling of the different "cultures" in the game. I feel like there's a vast world outside of the dungeon. EOIV provided a bit of the same feel, but the majority of it was easy to forget in your explorations of the maze and the towns.

I know this might not be a fan favorite and I'm probably a minority: but I love that there's no subclassing (at least so far... and i pray it remains that way).

I do agree with the voice acting having issues. I agree. There's no reason for it to be this bad. ... No, it's not even that the voice acting is bad. Rather that it's mis-casted.

And the damn left-right menu rather than up and down. >< I just CAN'T.

I also love that I feel like they took it back a few steps towards the nostalgia of old-school. EOIV felt too modern and forced to me. This game feels more like it belongs with EO1 and 2. 3 and 4 felt like their own entities.

^_^ I'm impressed and very eager for the main game!!

[Kimiko]

Likes:
- Better character customization than before. It's a step up again from EO4, which was already better than before.
- One point skills.
- Lots of labyrinth events. Although they'll probably taper off from the second stratum on, they make the labyrinth feel more alive and populated.
- No multi-classing. Like Maxine, I'm not a fan of mixing up classes. Having just one class gives characters more personality, and there's still specialization later on.
- Several slots for summons, so you can have two summoning classes without them getting in each other's way. Summoning is fun, so the more the better.
- Food doesn't take up precious inventory space, and is pretty easy to come by as well. It saves on TP and healing items.
- Petrification wears off after a few turns, is removed at the end of the battle. Though now I'm wondering how that'll work for monsters..

Dislikes:
- Earthlains are too prominent. They get four classes vs. only two each for the other races, some important skills (like Resuscitate) are Earthlain-only, reclassing wouldn't make up for the frailty of Celestrians and Brouni.
- Unnecessarily limited choices of skin color.
- Voices are bad. It sounds like they had only two VAs do all of them (no idea if that's true, but I feel that way in general about English anime dubs too). I guess it's a good point then that we can just select 'no voice' and don't have to listen to them like in the EOUs.
- Food can't be used in battle. All this HP or TP restoring goodness and you can't touch it until after the battle..
- I often wonder what I'm missing by choosing in the labyrinth events. Would the other option have resulted in more story?
- Fishing skill doesn't stack, unlike other gathering skills.
- There are some good useful skills that have become union skills instead of regular ones. While that let's you use them without wasting a turn, it also means you have to be very careful about when to use them because it'll take a few battles to recover, and you can't use them out of battle.

[PLA]

I think if you could use food in battle, it would have been made much weaker and/or taking up inventory-space.

Yeah, they were never going to pay more than twenty actors.

[Snowdome]

Like:
Character customization (though I desperately hope that the outfit color theme can be changed)
Not all new characters come with dagger and tweed, but class related equipment
Race and class skill separated
Editable and movable map drawing board
Food - perhaps there can a stamina bar?
Adventurer's log (though it would be much better if there is a way to check which one you have completed)
No more floor wrap, and instead can only choose to enter which floor while in town

Dislike:
Left to right menu (am I the only one who still press up and down to select "Custom" tab?)
Need the old purple icon back for FOE!
Need more generic race portrait, especially since there is a reclass option
Food cannot be sold
Need to press many A buttons for eating many low-rank food

[Kimiko]

I suppose having a more monster-like icon for FOEs makes sense for newbies who haven't played any of the earlier games. It still looks like an Autobots logo to me

I don't press up/down for tabs, but I always press the worng button first to select from dialogue choices. Like "grill fish"/"quit"; I want to pick 'fish', but somehow I always press the arrow that selects 'cancel' first.

I don't expect we'll see the golem/wall thing again after the first stratum, so I can live with it not updating automatically. Hmm, do you think the first boss will be a big, moving golem? They're said to be guardians of Yggdrasil, so it'd be fitting to have one like that.

Am I the only one who doesn't find the rearrangable icons all that interesting? Moving the part you don't need all the time out of the way is enough. More annoying is having to select the color for painting floor/water all the time. Just two presets would be quite handy there.

[Snowdome]

Just come to my mind, if they keep adding classic MIDI music as an option, why don't they also add an option to make all FOEs look like the classic orange-ball-of-death in the field? XD

Regarding the 1st stratum boss, I have stopped thinking about it already since I think I will look for Japanese spoiler if I think more about it.

Rearrangeable icons are good in the sense that you can make the most common 6 appears in the board while adding more screen asset. Or for me, I just put everything in 2 rows instead of limited icons in like 6x3? table.

I guess you have disabled auto floor mapping? For me, since the normal floor is added normally, I can paint the secondary color easily (trap, ice, etc). Personally I don't find the auto-floor-mapping abusing since I got to walk on each and every single possible floor anyway and it makes me easier to identify which one I haven't walked. As for water, I am still not sure how I want to deal with it yet - somehow I think I will only map it after the postgame or NG+

[Kimiko]

Oh, I have auto-mapping enabled (and make sure to walk on every tile to fill the map), but I want there to be green underneath boxes and golems, not empty map. So that's open palette, select green, paint tile, select blue again, close palette, select pen again for a green tile, and select brush, paint tile, select pen again for a blue tile. Hey, mapping is serious business you know. At least I'm not so obsessive as to guess at water tiles far away to fill every corner of the map.

[Sigma]

[Wolkenritter]

[Kimiko]

But does petrification still kill monsters, or do they just sit there stoned for a few turns, then come back to life?

[PLA]

I want an Adventurer's Log next to Item Compendium and Monster Codex.

Petrifying enemies only disables them temporarily. Better bring some magic damage to hurt them.

[Wolkenritter]

[zamisk]

I'm liking the demo, it makes me excited for the full thing. It's just nice to have a new experience in the EO world. I don't mind the voice acting, I found enough good voices for my party at least. To fix the map I dragged all the icons besides the numbers into the top two rows of the icon tray and have it along the bottom where it isn't in my way. I can't wait to see the other stratums!