Etrian Odyssey IV: The Impression

I've been wanting to play an Etrian Odyssey (EO) game for a while. I've tried the 2 demos of it, seen footage of many of the titles, played the spin-off Persona Q and saw all the trailer for EOV. It's gotten me quite excited and I wanted to play one of the main titles in the series before V comes out which I will most probably pick up. This led me to choosing either EOIV, EO Untold or EOU2. I've spent a lot of time Googling and the suggestions were either EOIV or EOU2. Considering I didn't want to have to play through two modes and I wanted to try the whole 'decide your own adventure gameplay', I chose the older 2013 title, EOIV.

I've been playing the demo for the game for a few days and recently picked it up and played a couple more hours on it. So far, it's great! I'm enjoying the skill-based progression system, I love the music, I like the idea of simply exploring and discovering, and I really just wanna open up the game more. The only thing I can say is that I wish it didn't have too much of a grindy and backtracky feel to it.

In any game that has an archer or sniper that looks

like she won't take your shit, I will always name

her Marina.

It's grindy in the sense that I think I need to level up my characters a tad bit more but the enemies I have available don't provide much EXP. Maybe it's because I'm still in the early portion of the game. And it's backtracky because I've only found one fast travel point and it's on the first floor of the dungeon. I'm currently on the 3rd floor and I haven't found anything yet. Considering the game's idea of exploring, returning to heal/sell, repeating, this won't be too fun if I have to constantly walk through the floors to get to where I want.

Now, since I've played PQ, there are a few things I noticed that are missing in this older title. The faster dungeon travel, the lack of better map tools and the floor travel system is not present. I believe they are present in the new EOU2 title but of course, that's a much newer title in the series. Can't really blame myself since I knew what I was getting into when I picked up an older title. Who knows, I might actually pick up EOU and EOU2 after this game.