>>16095348
The Dark Spire is great. Flawed, but great. The music is top notch but only a handful of fights use the boss theme which is a crying shame. The story was pretty much a Wizardry tier excuse plot but that's okay. Sometimes the quest could be pretty damn obtuse and unintuitive. For example, the things you need to do at the North-west corner on the 4th floor or getting the post-game ending among others. The humor was great. I loved the PTSD ridden trainer. The difficulty really spikes when most enemies start using breath attacks. No matter how good your party becomes, if a group of dragon ambushes you it's instant game over. Trying to get good gear is pretty much a grind but not an absolute necessity. I really liked it for what it was.
I beat Etrian Odyssey 1 and 2 but haven't played the rest of the series. I honestly found them underwhelming. They're easy games trying to masquerade as hard games for hardcore old school gamers. Much like the Souls series. Sure, it's difficult at the very beginning because your party consists of 5 guys, practically naked, armed with sticks without any skills or passives but once you get a dozen level ups it becomes pretty easy. The only time the difficulty of those games spiked again was for the post game and it was handled pretty poorly in both cases. Post game bosses need very specific setups to beat instead of just being difficult. Also, the grind for completition feels like a complete chore in them.
If you want to play a short 1-man party turn based Dungeon Crawler I suggest Orcs and Elves for the NDS.
If you want to play Wizardry clones there's Elminage. Or any Starfish dungeon crawler. They allow you to really wreck the game with invincible parties if you work a summoner in your ranks.
Grimoire's also pretty interesting but familiarizing yourself with the system and forming a decent party might take you a few tries. The manual is out now but it's still sort of incomplete. The wiki is pretty good though.
The PS2 Wizardry has a really nice atmosphere and story but has a glaring pacing issue. Combat and movements are awfully slow. Like really, really slow. Unskippable long animations for every attack, for every transition and spells do not mix well with dungeon crawlers.
Grimrock has a nice aesthetic but the combat is a fundamentally broken and repetitive dance. It is still fun for the exploration factor. There's another game in the same vein called Vaporum. I haven't really tried it past the first 20 minutes but it seemed alright. It seemed to focus more on combat whereas Grimrock focuses more on puzzles.