I absolutely loved my first exposure to Octopath 2 but when I completed it, and loved basically every minute of it. I thought that I would try other games for a bit rather than jumping straight into another game that is basically exactly the same.
Now, after trying and liking a few of about a dozen games I am back on Octopath. When I first started playing I found that I was really struggling very early on but that is because the game doesn't hold your hand and it isn't very clear what you are supposed to do. It gives you a path to choose at the very beginning and the impression that you get is that you must pursue that particular path and that path only. This is not the case and if you do try to go that route, you are going to have a bad time.
When presented with this decision early on it is asking you with what it is that you want the most. Looking at the benefits you can get it seems pretty fantastic to go for any of them. I don't yet know what rubies are for but I suppose that will become evident later on.
Anyhoo, when I chose Fame, I looked at the map for my objectives and the "Fame" ones were what appeared to be my desired destination although since this is kind of trying to pretend to be an open world game, you are capable of going in a bunch of other directions as well.
I decided to go thorough the Wealth categories one by one and wasn't paying much attention to the other destinations. This resulted in me eventually getting to a boss that absolutely wiped the floor with me and had me trying a few more times only to realize that "maybe I am not supposed to be here yet."
If you look at the map above there are some very important things that say "and encounter awaits" and while this was never pointed out to me by the game's design, these are things you need to prioritize, especially in early play. These are, well 100% of them have been so far, people that will join your crew.
You start the game out with 1 then 2 then 3 people in your crew, but you are allowed up to 8 active characters at a time. I was unaware of this and the game doesn't tell you this. So these battles that I was fighting and getting worked over pretty badly was because I had half as many people in my crew as I was allowed to have simply because I followed the "straight path" that I thought was what you were supposed to do.
I think that in this game, as was often the case in the other Octopath game that I played, that if you encounter something that absolutely whips your ass, there is a good chance that it isn't a bad strategy on your part, it is that you are not supposed to be there yet and you need to return to your map and look for "encounter" to add new members to your party, or go and take on a quest that has a lower level associated with it.
In my case with the first boss that I fought, it was around my current level, but I had half the amount of companions that I could have had with me.
Having more people = more firepower, this should be obvious but well, I guess Squenix decided to force us to think for ourselves a bit and I don't have a problem with that.
In this RPG, doing the same thing over and over and losing isn't going to make your experience any better, so when faced with a wall, walk around a bit and most importantly, look at your map and see if there is something else that you could maybe be doing.