(It also didn’t help that I ran into a few UI bugs that prevented important text from telling me what certain abilities and items did.) This is especially a problem toward the end of the game, when difficulty spikes become more prevalent and the fights become even longer.
Balancing these elements throughout the fight is very satisfying when it works, although losing focus near the end of these long battles can quickly snowball into something devastating. Hikari, on the other hand, can do massive damage with a single swing, as long as he has a strong enough sword, and perhaps a buff from Castti. For example, Osvald’s mage powers deal different kinds of elemental damage, but bashing someone with his staff isn’t going to do much physical harm. Puzzling your way through these encounters starts well before you get into the fight itself: team composition, equipment, and skills are all crucial. Most last an hour or two and involve catching up with the multifarious cast of side characters, perhaps using some of the protagonists’ special skills to progress, and then tackling a grand boss fight. The main chapters’ recommended levels take a big jump in both the mid- and endgame, so that extra XP picked up through backtracking is still going to good use.Īlthough this interstitial grinding wears thin toward the end of the game - you stop unlocking interesting abilities at a certain point - the pacing of the chapters themselves is snappy. It also doesn’t matter if traveling takes a bit longer and runs you into more enemies, because you’re going to need to grind anyway. That world is also stunning to look at, and if it’s sometimes convoluted to navigate thanks to the winding paths, vague world map, and even vaguer radar, that’s not so much a problem as it is an excuse: to spend more time looking at the sun-dappled trees, marveling at the moonlit snow, or listening to the stellar soundtrack. Taken together, they have an anchoring thematic core about separating personal ambition from damaging greed, while their variety creates a world filled with historical, magical, societal, and religious detail. The eight tales range from passable (Partitio the merchant’s desire to bring friendly capitalism everywhere he goes is probably the most uneven) to cheesy but enjoyable (Ochette the beastling hunter might not have much of a character arc, but she’s cute and fun), to cleverly moving (there’s a boss fight in scholar Osvald’s route that uses mechanical storytelling to incredible effect). Octopath Traveler 2’s poignant moments remain muffled by the gulf between the group - their momentum halted by the silence between the principal actors Conversely, when someone threatens the apothecary Castti and tells her to go to a shady building alone, seeing three other protagonists suddenly appear alongside her undermines the tension. When, for example, characters from an earlier chapter appear to cheer on Agnea at her big dance, the absence of any of her traveling companions feels stark. The sprites are also worth highlighting here, with incredible expressivity packed into the tiny figures: mannerisms, gestures, even actions like smoking all add up quickly.īut while the liveliness of the side cast is fantastic, it only further exacerbates the isolation of the main crew from one another.
Unlike the travel banter, their short time on screen is put to good use building histories and personalities for the protagonists. Every one of the eight narratives weaves in side characters so skillfully that their relationships with the respective protagonists feel like the core of the game.
The same separation apparently existed in the original Octopath Traveler (which I haven’t played), and I wonder whether it, too, felt so at odds with the story the wider game was telling. In fact, these feel more jarring than having everybody disappear, because they neither develop nor showcase any believable connections. Neither do the occasional, shallow side stories that see characters’ paths cross. The occasional prompt to see “travel banter,” wherein two characters suddenly stand in a foggy nowhere world overlaid on their previous position and awkwardly chat as if they’ve just recently met, does nothing to alleviate this problem. Image: Acquire, Square Enix/Square Enix via Polygon
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