So this time is:
Dungeon 4
Mini-Dungeon (God's Hill... is how I shall translate it)
The bosses of the previous mini-dungeon
A world map FOE
So first, I wanna go over God's Hill before everything else, because this dungeon is probably the first "EXP Grinding" spot in the game.
This is because the boss, Snowdrift, spawns an infinite amount of Snow Wolf (FOEs) in his room. As long as he notices you, then he will howl and summon a Snow Wolf until there are 4 in the boss room. On top of that, Snow Wolfs are considerably weak. So they make a good way to get both EXP and Money. I actually took this opportunity to level all of my characters up to Level 30 before fighting the bosses below.
Our good EXP-grind punching bag. Perfectly defeat-able while his aura is red or orange. Of course, you will want to be able to survive his attack, but that actually isn't as hard as his aura tricks you into expecting.
He is this way because one of the gimmicks of Snowdrift is that he constantly summons Snow Wolfs to intrude in your battle against him. So he has to be weak by himself, but annoying when in numbers.
The boss, Snowdrift. Yes, that first dungeon boss that had no unique design in the very first Etrian Odyssey game that finally eventually got a unique design.
To be honest, he isn't that strong himself. He's pretty much just a stronger Snow Wolf, with more power and more range. The only problem is when Snow Wolf joins the battle, as Snow Wolf will occasionally use a howling move that can stun your entire party. And it is hard to survive getting hit by both Snowdrift and his lackeys in one turn. However, if there are less than 4 Snow Wolfs in the boss room, he will use his turn in battle to howl and summon one. Also, binding him and stopping his howl can cause him to expend several turns doing nothing.
Next, now that I have leveled up, I revisited the previous mini-dungeon. The Giant's Ruin or whatever.
First up is the FOE. Apparently, he tries to use Instant Death on your entire party, but I kinda charged my attacks and didn't let him use any move after he entered the battle. And he's pretty much only weak and can only be damaged by Ice attacks.
Next is Golem. Now he is more annoying than strong because his damaging attacks aren't that scary. Sure, they are strong, but it is only a matter of healing each time you get hit, since none of his attacks hit more than once on a character.
The problem is that to do proper damage against him, you have to use elemental damage. But he randomly uses Reflection, which will kill anyone that hits him with elemental damage. And I think his use of Reflection is random.
And he also uses Regeneration to heal himself at the end of the turn.
And he heals half of his HP when you kill him once.
So it was just pretty grindy. Attack, get killed by reflection, revive the character that got killed by reflection, attack, get killed, revive. It was just a matter of if my characters were strong enough to kill Golem before I ran out of TP.
Next, I decided to take on the FOE that was roaming around on the World Map. One reason you want to take him out as soon as possible is because as long as he is alive, you pretty much can't use the World Map Gather Spots. The only problem is that he is pretty strong.
Aside from his sheer power, he also can hit your entire back row and take them out in one hit. To be honest, I think I was still a bit underleveled when I fought him, because some of my characters died in one hit several times. But through good luck and status ailments (he is weak to Paralysis and Blind, so that is the point), I was able to take him out.
FINALLY, I went and finished the 4th dungeon after getting rid of all of these side-bosses.
For this dungeon, you will also get involved in a short-story involving characters from Etrian Odyssey 3's, including a Hoplite girl. She joins your party to train herself and will eventually join you to fight the boss, but she honestly isn't that useful. Cute, but not that useful.
As for this dungeon, the gimmicks revolve around the two FOEs.
The Hippo takes two turns to change the direction he is facing, which you have to use to get passed him.
In battle, his attack pattern seems to be Charge -> Hits your entire party for massive damage -> Normal attack, repeat. In other words, you can defeat him as long as your party survives and can heal up before he hits your entire party again.
As for the poison lizard thing, he just moves in a certain path normally. However, there is muddy terrain nearby, which takes 2 turns to move onto, so you just need to be careful to not miscalculate and enter battle against him.
As for in-battle, as you can probably tell, he can cause Poison. It does around 50 damage and he has a chance of hitting an entire line. He also has another attack that hits random units and lowers their resistance to status ailments, but in the end, it is a matter of being able to survive an attack + poison or negating his poison in some way.
Also, his special drop, being killed by a Fire attack, gives the strongest Katana available at this point in the game. It is convenient that the Ronin, which would want this weapon, has an attack that does Fire damage. And although this FOE is resistant to Fire, Ronin's skill does Fire + Slash, so there is absolutely no problem.
Lastly, you have the boss of the 4th dungeon.
I think he is technically a different character than the one from Etrian Odyssey 3, but he is pretty much the same thing. A mud fish thing.
I didn't really have that much trouble myself, because I took some time to level up by hunting infinitely spawning wolfs,
His only noticeable attack is one where he dives underwater (water?) and a number of dark spots appear on the ground. The first time, there are two spots. Then 3. And it seems to increase as his health goes down. Only one of the spots contains the boss and hitting him will make him pop out at the end of the turn. If you do not hit him, he heals at the end of the turn.
The problem is that when he pops out of the ground, he 100% will do an earthquake attack that hits your entire party for huge damage. So you will have to use Defense on characters that cannot survive the attack while having at least one character hit the right spot. If you look carefully, the "right" spot acts slightly differently from the others (though I chose the wrong one once...), so you do not necessarily need to use an area-damaging attack.
Oh, and you can ask the Hoplite girl to join you in battle, but beware of ONE BIG THING.
Her Force Break, which negates all attacks for that turn, DOES NOT work against the earthquake attack. I guess this is because the Force Break negates all attacks for that turn while the attack happens at the end of the turn?
Either way, I went all out on that turn to defeat the boss and tried to use the Force Break to cover me, but it didn't work. Thanks to my level, all of my characters survived, but that was still a nasty surprise.
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