I'm still really enjoying Octopath 2 and am really happy that a friend of mine recommended it to me since I likely wouldn't know it existed otherwise. It is a game that is really easy to get into, there are a lot of ways to progress forward, grinding is mostly optional and the game starts out quite simple but the skills and job system gets more complicated as the game goes along.
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I find it to be wonderfully casual and fun, which is exactly the kind of gamer that I am right now at this point in my life. I am not interested in something that is super hard and you need to be hyper alert and concerned about precision button strikes in order to succeed.
While a strategy does become increasingly necessary to accomplish victory in this game, I, at around level 20, am still breezing through most encounters that are not bosses at this point.
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I do have a few gripes though that could be viewed from a couple of perspectives. I had previously said that I was really enjoying the story in this game because we have so far for me 6 different stories that all revolve around the various team members that you pick up. I am going to go ahead and presume that these stories all coincide at some point but the connections don't seem all that evident up to now anyway.
I like the story overall, but parts of it are extremely drawn out to the point where I am considering just hitting the B button to skip it to get things moving.
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The first part of the game where I started to get tired of the ongoing and ongoing dialogue was part to of Partito's quest where you arrive in a new town to try to figure out how to spread business and economic prosperity to the world, which is Partito's main motivation in the game.
This is all great and up to this point the backstory about why he is so motivated has been really interesting. But when we get to the 2nd city that he wants to do this in, this is the first time that I felt like some of the Final Fantasy "fetch quest" experts got involved.
The city that you are in is called Clockbank and it isn't a grid style city at all.
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I get it, they are going for a "this is what a real city would maybe look like" sort of thing but it isn't great for navigation. The quest that Partito is on called "Scent of Commerce" involves going around and gathering information from various places in the city and they force you to manually walk to all of these places and it is just straight up annoying. The city is also divided into two sections so now you have to contend with a completely senseless loading between the two probably a dozen times while you run her, run there, talk to this person, then talk to another, then run back to where you started, then run back to another person you already talked to, then run back to the factory, then meet up at the pub to celebrate, then run back to the factory.
All of this takes about 30 minutes and during all of it you engage in zero battles or decisions that have any choice or consequence as far as the game is concerned. This doesn't need to be this way and I can't help but feel like they throw this in there intentionally so that they can say that this is a 100 hour game or something.
Thankfully, this doesn't happen very often and with about 20 hours under my belt it is the first and only time that I have noticed it happening.
My second gripe might seem petty but I'm going to say it anyway.
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There is a screen in the game that you are going to be accessing VERY frequently and that is the equipment screen. You want your characters to have the best gear possible equipped right? Well, what if you changed characters and sent off someone that has some of the best gear? Can you swap gear with them even though they are technically not in your group right now? Of course not, that would streamline the process entirely too much.
Instead, if you want the armor, blade, shield or multitude of available accessories in the game and someone not currently in your party has it, you have to go add them to your group and manually unequip it from them.
This really shouldn't be this way. If they were going for realism then I suppose we shouldn't be able to magically add and remove members of the party at any pub in the world then, should we?
It would have been super easy for them to simply allow you to swap out equipment from people that are not currently in your group and then later, if you return to using that character later and they suddenly don't have a weapon/shield/armor, you can do the same thing in reverse? I mean why not? It's just annoying because unlike a lot of other RPG's i have played, money is actually facing a scarcity problem in this game and you cannot afford to simply buy everything at every shop that you get to. Rounding up all your best gear from between 8 characters of whom only 4 can be in your group at one time, is pretty annoying and again, simply a waste of time.
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I had shite gear equipped because of this problem when I faced this little cutie, and therefore got my butt handed to me
Do I sound petty and difficult to please yet? Well, that's just because I am.
Don't let any of this criticism scare you off though dear reader because I still think this is an absolutely excellent game, it just has a few flaws and since it is a Square Enix game, I am honestly surprised that I have only found a few thus far. Normally Square games just piss me off in recent years so just a few gripes is well below par for them IMO.
If you can get this game for $10-$20 and enjoy turn-based RPG's, I think it is a winner - the $60 they are charging on Steam is absolutely absurd and only encourages piracy.... just be prepared for the odd moments of annoyance that are definitely going to happen.