Board 8 > Octopath Traveler beated *Spoilers

(+) Yeah! (+)

The Secret Final Boss battle was truly one of the most epic fights I've had in a JRPG. It wasn't nearly as difficult as some people on the Octopath message board made it seem but it was in every sense of the word, epic.

That build-up and having to use all 8 Travelers to go up against Galdera, with all that foreshadowing in each of the Traveler's tale made the battle all the more exciting. I liked how the two forms mixed it up so that strategy was vital to survival and gave you a sense of going truly all-out without holding absolutely anything back. And also, that OST, holy **** it was awesome and befitting of a Final Battle.

I'm throughly impressed by what the game has put up throughout and really look forward to games of similar nature in the future.

Easily the 2nd best game of the year behind only God of War and a must play for every fan of the genre.

It's basically the only reason I even want a switch at this point
---

I wanted to love this game but each of the traveler's path was so boring and repetitive I burned out of it after starting chapter 4s.
---

TotallyNotMI posted...

I wanted to love this game but each of the traveler's path was so boring and repetitive I burned out of it after starting chapter 4s.

It is repetitive in the sense that it follows the same formula of story-dungeon-boss but I thought Primrose's was amazing. Ophelia, Olberic and Alfyn was great. Cyrus, H'aanit, Tressa was good and the only one remotely bland was Therion's and even his story picks up immensely in the later chapters.

But the best part about OT is not its writing or its story. It is its ****ing magical Open 2D World, the immensely addicting gameplay and just the overall feeling of playing something grand and epic. I honestly thought it wouldn't resonate as well as it did with me since I'm a 3D > 2D any day guy.

I recently 100%'d this game! I liked it a lot but to be honest I think the game has a ton of flaws.

A big one for me is how isolated every story felt. Like yeah I get that format-wise it kind of had to be this way but it feels so weird to see every character move through the world completely on their own even though they're in this big band of companions who they almost never speak with. (This probably wouldn't be as bad if all the meaningful party interaction that IS in the game unlocked earlier than post-game... not really sure what the reasoning was behind that decision.)

Folks already pointed out the repetitive formula, and while I think it works super well as a bite-sized portable-friendly game, it makes playing the game feel like a bit of a drag when you're binging it on the couch.

Lastly for how much the game feels like it encourages choice and experimentation with jobs, I feel like it drops the ball pretty hard in the gameplay department as you approach endgame. Particularly if you want to fight the final boss most characters have 3 or even 4 support skills you'd be actively crippling yourself if you didn't include, so you have very little room or even zero room on most characters for actually having fun unless you want to knowingly make things way harder on yourself.

I was super impressed with the design of the towns, but the rest of the world basically boiled down to fancy hallways between those towns with the occasional dungeon sprinkled about. With the exception of a few of the Chapter 4 towns, you also don't really feel any impact from anything happening in the plot. Folks just stand around in the same spot saying the same one line for the whole game.

Oh yeah and sidequests here are more cryptic than anything I've ever seen in my life, and I've played some cryptic shit. Most of them boil down to Person A telling you they have a problem, and the solution is to find Person B literally anywhere in the world and identify them as a solution by a clue in their NPC text, then either guiding them back to Person A, beating the shit out of them or stealing from them. I used a guide for 90% of these and I can't imagine how tedious it would be to finish them all without one.

That's all the negative stuff, but there's a lot of positives here too that are pretty much instantly apparent to anyone who plays. The world is beautiful, the characters are mostly memorable, the gameplay is very satisfying, the music is GODLY and the tone is charming. Most of the stuff I've rambled about here is super obvious and very easily fixable so I'm legitimately thrilled that this team is going to continue making games in this vein. I can't wait to see how their next offering improves on this.
---