Which would you recommend?

[What do you think?]

I've played a few of the EO games, and while i quite like them overall, I haven't been able to finish them because of a few features that really grind my gears and I was wondering if any of the EO games lack them.
--I'm not fond of the retirement system where you get +1 to your level cap by resetting your character to level 1. The grinding this creates is a huge turnoff.
--And I don't care for conditional drops (get a special drop if you beat them while binding the head, while poisoned, etc). I personally don't like playing with guides and if it weren't for this feature I wouldn't need one for EO.
Are these 2 features common to all EO games? Or just the ones I've played?

As you can imagine, this has proved difficult to try and google up, so thanks for the help and feedback

[Kimiko]

Why is this in the Debate subforum and not one of the EO ones?
And welcome to ItL, Wdyt

Retiring isn't really necessary anyway. I'm not sure if it'll even get you past the lv99 cap after the dragons. It's a little bonus if you're going to replace a character anyway, but you can ignore it otherwise.

The conditional drops are also more of a bonus. It makes completing the bestiary more interesting but isn't necessary in a normal game. Some conditionals are pretty hard to get. There are formaldehydes for that, but those can be iffy to time too.

I think these features are in all the games. Maybe the first one didn't have retiring? I don't remember. Formaldehydes were introduced in the second or third game or so I think, but conditionals have always been there.

For the main (story) part of the game you can ignore any of the special or hard things. Even party composition doesn't matter that much if it's at least somewhat balanced.

[Archaic Sage]

I've shifted this topic, not sure if this one is the best place for it but let's see how it goes and we can always move it again .

[What do you think?]

Cool cool
I posted it here because I wasn't entirely sure where this thread belonged.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear that those two sticking points are pretty peripheral. I'll give 'em another shot.
Thanks guys

[Wolkenritter]

The retiring to boost level cap thing is exclusive to EO2. In EO1 the level cap will always be 70 no matter what you do. In every other game in the series, the level cap will increase by 10 whenever you defeat specific post-game bosses.

Also in EO2, you DO NOT need to be level 99 to beat anything. I'd just retire once for the stat bonus and never do it again. Character skills and equipment are far more important than levels. This is true for every game in the series.

Conditional drops are in every game in the series. Starting from EO3 though they introduced a new item, Formaldehyde. When you use this and kill an enemy on the same turn its used, you will get ALL drops from that enemy killed, including conditional drops. The items to make it though are usually from a 6th strata FOE however, so its rare to come by until post-game.