Octopath Traveler 2

Octopath Traveler 2 is a game that ended up being a surprising disappointment to me, particularly given the general reverence folks have for it. I played the first Octopath Traveler and loved it quite a bit; the art style, presentation, breadth of content, battle system, and novelty of the character story system all worked for me quite a bit, and I sunk a lot of time into it including preparing for and beating the optional true final boss. I was prepared to enjoy OT2 as well, but while there are some things that do work better here, I found it ultimately hard to enjoy and put it down after only completing my main character's personal story. Octopath Traveler 2 follows the basic setup of the first game; you've got 8 heroes to recruit, selecting one as your main character (locked to your party until you complete their personal story) and recruiting the others with a minor amount of world travel. Each character's story is divided into chapters and sub-chapters with unique events and content. The main characters also have a few unique traits/abilities independent of the relatively standard job system the game offers, such as Ochette being able to capture and use monsters in battle. They've expanded and tweaked this a bit from the first game, both in terms of mixing and matching the various out-of-combat abilities across the character pool in a more varied manner, while also doing some actual work to make the characters feel more like a party and less like coworkers who have no particular interest in each other. This manifests in a broader set of conversations that can crop up during various questlines, as well as a series of extra quests that pair two of the group up to go through a separate, shared story. It's not much, but it does make the whole thing feel less lonely. Also like the first game, Octopath Traveler 2 does excel in terms of presentation. The house HD-2D style that the series pioneered is back and still looks great. The voice acting is solid. The music is fantastic. It's a game that puts a good foot forward. Where Octopath Traveler 2 lost me, however, was in its balance and its gameplay. It so happens that I picked a particular main character (Throné) with an extremely strong buffing passive that triggers in nighttime battles. She also starts in a town a screen away from a new job unlock with a free and strong all-enemy attack, and also starts close to another character (Temenos) who has a complimentary nighttime enemy debuff passive. Without actually intending to do so, my choices at the start of the game meant that random battles were trivial - yet no less frequent - and gameplay was dull. The lack of engagement from the battle and combat systems meant that exploring areas was boring as well (continuing the trend of the first game largely having one path with 2-4 treasure chests located just off to the side in each screen). The fact that battle choices were effectively non-important also exposed a problem with the job system in OT2, which is that, much like the first game, jobs are boring. The interesting things the characters can do are largely tied to their personal unique abilities; jobs serve as a template to bolt a few weapons onto and have a handful of useful abilities and a larger handful that you only pick up to learn passive skills. While the character stories were interesting enough, the tedium associated with roaming the maps and actually progressing them wore me down; it was 30+ hours into the game before I pushed into late-story chapters and zones with enemies that actually could stand up to more than a turn and a half of attacks, and by that point the game had lost me. Ultimately the things that OT2 does better than the first game did not outweigh the tremendous tedium and balance issues that it has. I was looking forward to another long series of adventures with a new cast and would have been happy to spend the time doing sidequests and pushing towards another true game boss challenge, but by the time the game actually gave me any sort of gameplay resistance or friction I had already put it down several times for multi-month pauses and settled for just finishing Throné's story and calling it a day. It's a real shame.

I'm a fair chunk of the way through the game, and I've got two thoughts: Mechanically, this is a fine JRPG with some interesting ideas. Storywise, it's a dud. There's genuinely an order of magnitude too much dialog, and I still don't know where I'm going or why. I ask myself if I'm going to finish it, and then I wonder... what will that consist of? Just running out of disconnected stories? Will there be any culmination at all?