Quick thoughts on Octopath Traveler

This was originally a response to a question on Tumblr.

I played about ten hours of Octopath Traveler - everyone’s first chapters and one character’s second chapter - and it was a game that drove me a little insane.

First and foremost was the writing, which is maybe the most boring writing I’ve ever experienced in a JRPG. There are other, older games with dry writing, sure, but Octopath just has so much of it. Despite all those words the characters have no soul, the world has no intrigue, and the conflicts feel stock. It’s completely paint by numbers. It’s almost impressive how completely and utterly dry and charmless it is. I’d say it feels like the contents of a stock tabletop game adventure book, but that would be doing those a disservice.

The thing that could have potentially helped, which EVERYONE (even the game’s fans) pointed out as its main flaw, would have been to let the characters interact with each other outside of the rare and easily missable skits. Characters in a game like Dragon Quest XI are mostly building off of familiar fantasy archetypes too, but the fun comes in how those archetypes play off of each other. How does the gruff knight get along with the dashing rogue? Instead there’s zero interplay between the stories, because the structure of the game means that they can’t assume you have any party members other than the one whose story you’re currently doing… even though, like, the level requirements for the second chapters implicitly force the average player to either do all eight chapter 1’s first, or grind a ton? It’s baffling.

The stories not intersecting is just one aspect of the larger structural problems, though. Live A Live (which I need to play soon) embraces the variety its separate stories enable - not just aesthetically, but structurally as well. It’ll throw in a stealth chapter, or a chapter with minimal combat. Octopath, on the other hand, makes every chapter feel like every other chapter with a different coat of paint. Reach a new town, get some cutscenes for a party member’s story, get sent off to another area to fight a boss, rinse and repeat. At the time I even made a diagram to complain about how every single area I encountered in Octopath was designed the same.

RPGs NEED variety in their pacing and structure! It can’t just be the same thing at the same rate over and over for 40-60 hours. I got through the mindnumbingly boring eight opening chapters hoping that it would improve after that - and no, it can’t be understated how stupid it is that this is a game where you’re basically forced to play through eight slow and boring JRPG opening towns in a row for the first ten hours - and when I finally got to the second chapters my heart sank upon realizing that no, this really is the whole game.

Even the combat, which I found really fresh and interesting at first, got stale and repetitive to me. At first the break system was really cool. Wow, there’s a reason for my healers to attack even though they do low damage! How smart! But in what I played it just kind of made every boss feel the same. Figure out their weakness, hit them with that until their defenses break, and then spam your strongest attacks.

But, again, like with Bravely Default, its soundtrack is its main saving grace. I adore the Octopath OST. I have it my iTunes library and everything. Yasunori Nishiki is one to keep an eye on at Square, and I’m glad he’s a part of the FF7 Remake team. That, and the ensuing “HD-2D” remakes of better games like Live A Live and Dragon Quest III, are the silver lining with Octopath.