If you follow me you know that I am a fussy gamer and it, at times, probably seems as though I am deliberately trying to find fault with anything that I play and that nothing is going to satisfy me. I wouldn't argue with that if I was ever to be accused of it, because it is pretty darn accurate. There are very few games in my entire life that I would consider to be absolutely perfect, and even a few of my favorite games of all time have sections of it that I am so familiar with that I actually loathe them and prefer to play them on PC so I can intentionally skip those parts.
In no genre of game am I more picky than in RPGs though, and this is where I probably have the most experience of any other type.
There's a lot of things that they do wonderfully correct in this game and one of the main things is that it isn't just a continuation of the previous releases. It, as the name would suggest, takes place before the other 2 and even though I have only ever played one of them, I think that this is probably for the best. There isn't some sort of huge lore behind this series anyway and as far as I can tell the thing that links them all together is just the style, not characters.
In Octopath 0 the game appears to be exactly the same as previous titles but then they also introduce you to city building as a major part of your gameplay. This is something I really enjoy and it isn't massively complicated and that made me really happy that they did it this way because often, games that have building in them that must be done with a controller irritate the crap out of me.
I have not yet seen any of the advanced things that you do in building your city but I did find out that a great deal of it is totally optional, and I like that part of it already.
Where they screw up pretty badly though, is something that I find a bit unforgivable in RPG's regardless of who makes them, or what sort of graphical style they are using: easy and clear early game progression.
The start of the game is very story heavy, I would say a bit too much. So when you are faced with the choice of pursuing "wealth, power, or fame" I didn't really put that much thought into it. However, on the other side of this it doesn't seem to really impact the story a great deal because it looks like all 3 paths are actually available to you anyway - I could be reading this wrong but herein lies the problem: It is not very clear WTH you are actually supposed to be doing or where you are supposed to be going.
I spent a lot of time just warping from one city to the other, which isn't saying much because I only had 3 locations unlocked, but then I would get there and I couldn't make heads or tails of where I am actually supposed to be going. So I ended up choosing what I presumed was the main story, going after the wealthy and oppressive Lady Herminia and things were going great until I was mid dungeon and all of a sudden the "danger level" - the indicator of what level you should be in order to progress without massive difficulty - jumped from 4 to 12.
Shortly thereafter I found myself in a minor boss battle and just get the absolute crap kicked out of me.
After getting "waxed" 4 times in a row - which is annoying because there is a lead in to the battle and the loading time on this game makes no sense since it is a SNES looking game and I see this clip where someone else has completed it on YouTube and they have 7 characters in their party.... I only have 5. Having 2 more people in my crew would certainly level the playing field so I must have done something terribly wrong to get to this point with 35% fewer people doing attacking for my team.
The problem here is that the game never indicated how it is that I am meant to get more people in my party, or if they did it was buried between the tomes upon tomes of information they throw at you in the opening 2 hours of gameplay.
So just be forewarned when you go into this: This isn't really a "pick up and play" sort of game. You are going to get confused frequently even if you are quite familiar with how the games worked in the past.
I suppose some of this is appreciate by the people that thought they did a bit too much "hand-holding" in Octopath Traveler 2 but I would have appreciated a little bit of a heads up about this since I am clearly not equipped to even be capable of winning this battle. With only 5 characters (only 4 of which can be used concurrently) I am not going to be able to effectively burn down 13 units of shield to "Break" Sonia's stance, which is a critical aspect of defeating all enemies in all the Octopath games.
I'm still standing by this game and recommending it to people, especially people who were alive and gaming in the mid 90s when this was really all they could make as far as turn-based RPG's were concerned.
Just know that this game is very story oriented. It is a good story, but there is a LOT of it.
I suppose you should just plan on grinding levels early on, which is not what I wanted to do and I would imagine that it happens quite a lot later as well. That's fine, I guess that just means I am going to be doing a lot of exploring!