I’ve finally completed the game. It took me 150+ hours to defeat every boss, including all the optional dungeons. What a journey! I’m fairly new to mystery dungeon games but I am a huge fan of EOIV. This being my second EO game, I think it holds up well against EOIV but IV is still my favourite. The EO DNA is written all over it. The perfect balance, focus on gameplay, all classes being useful, ailments play a big role, items are life saving, beautiful music, fair challenge as long as you’re careful and you know what you’re doing, lots of post game content and a unique graphical style. The mystery dungeon elements work well with EO and gives it its own style. In terms of flaws, there are a few but they’re minor or easy to solve for the most part. The game can feel very repetitive since there are 20 big dungeons with largely the same structure. The forts are neat but a bit under-utilised once you know how DOE work. I either killed DOE early or they hardly make it to my forts. The AI can be pretty dumb but that can be solved by either disabling the skills you don’t want them to use or you can stop them from wondering off if you use a certain blast skill. Getting pop up messages to use skills or items can be very annoying but luckily you can turn off messages through the options menu. I’ve hardly mended my weapons but forging is super useful! Ultimately a game like EMD is an acquired taste. I can imagine not everyone will like what it has to offer. But the ones that do, they’re going to have a blast. The only reason I’m not giving it a higher score is because IV deserves a higher one and we need to make that distinction ;)