I show my age when I commonly complain about modern gaming and how it requires so much precise combinations of buttons, parrying, knowing exactly where to stand and for how long and other such things that are very common in today's gaming.
So when the chance came along and a friend recommended Octopath Traveler 2 and told me that it is very similar to turn-based RPG's of the early 90's, I thought that this would be a fun and casual thing for me to try out.
The opening segments can be a bit confusing because I have never played a game where there are a lot of different characters but it is up to you which one you start out with. Depending on who you choose, the way in which you make your way around the map is going to vary a great deal. I do not believe that choosing one over the other makes a great deal of difference in the overall storyline though. It is impossible for me to say because I have only played the game for about 3 hours.
I DO know that once you get rolling though that once you enter combat the way in which this game functions does seem extremely familiar. As is the case in nearly all turn-based RPGs you simply have to wait your turn and then make some choices as far as your attack is concerned based on what you learn certain enemy types are vulnerable to and your main concern isn't just to deal as much damage as possible, but also to hit them in a certain way that forces something called a "break" that makes that enemy lose it's next upcoming turn in the turn-based sequence. This is something that will be very familiar to anyone that has played popular RPG's of the 90's such as Final Fantasy before they became obsessed with graphics instead of gameplay.
As far as graphics are concerned these are not the sort of visuals that are going to blow anyone's mind because it seems as though they intentionally went for a perhaps space-saving sense of "classic graphics" to the point of pixelation. This pixelation likely wasn't necessary but I don't really have any idea.
The good thing for me up to this point anyway is that the story, from what I have seen up to this point, is actually extremely good and every time the figurative pages get turned in the story, I am genuinely very interested in what is going to happen next. The dialogue seems as though it was carefully planned, and the story isn't just your usual run of the mill evil corporation running the world that must be overthrown by you and your ragtag group of pals. This is the story that is in every single Final Fantasy game and it gets really old when you play another one and yet again, here is the same tired story with a beginning and an end and the writers seem as though they hired 4th graders to fill in the middle.
The dialogue here is fantastic and almost all of it has a purpose. There isn't silly stupid conversations just for the sake of filling up space so that they can say that it is a 100 hour game or something friggin stupid like that.
When you are faced with who it is that you are going to start the game with, a lot of the potential choices don't make a lot of sense such as Agnea the dancer, and a merchant cowboy whose name I don't recall. I think that most people probably selected the warrior Hikari because he has the word "warrior" in his name.
I, like many people who are likely experiencing this game for the first time and didn't actually play part 1, didn't realize that it doesn't really matter which one of them you select first because you will end up encountering all of them in your playthrough. I suppose it does change things to some degree when this happens but I think that I actually made the game more difficult for myself by selecting the warrior. I nearly stopped playing because each story has a "boss" of sorts that you must defeat before moving on and the one that Hikari faces in his little story is by far the most difficult that I have faced yet. It was so difficult that I started thinking that this was one of those fights that you are supposed to lose in order for the story to progress but no, that is not the case.
Of course we also have to take into account the fact that I was still learning the game at this point and that might be the reason why I found it difficult.
One thing that I really like is that the voice acting, for the most part, is extremely well done and also - and this is a huge "selling point" for me - you have the ability to have the cinematics with voiceover to autoplay, to pause between sentences awaiting a button press for it to advance, and also a fast-forward option where you just read the words instead of waiting for the voice acting which at times, can be really long.
I am an impatient gamer at times, and a slow-burn gamer at others, so the fact that we have the choice of which one we are going to do at any point in time in the game was absolutely perfect for me.
some bad aspects
I'm not going to kiss this game's butt too much because it does have some aspects of old-school gaming that annoyed us then, and continues to do so to this day. The main aspect being that battles in the field are randomly encountered, and you have zero control over how often you are attacked.
This random encountering of enemies kind of discourages full exploration because in one minute you are walking 400 steps without getting attacked by anything and then for reasons only the RNG gods understand, you'll get attacked after 10 steps on the next encounter. It gets to be a bit frustrating especially when you outlevel the enemies in a certain area where since you are so much of a higher level than the area, that the fights are just you doing the default attack with zero strategy and you are going to win every single fight.
This isn't such a bad thing when your level is near the danger level of where you happen to be because at least there is an XP reason to be in a lot of fights. When you are many levels above the area you are in, it is just a waste of time because the xp is meaningless amounts and the items are worthless to you at that point as well. In my mind it would have been nice to make it so that you are attacked very infrequently once you are say, 5-10 levels above the monsters in the area that you are in.
Another aspect that I don't really dig is the extreme level of equipment that you have access to as you progress. Money, early on in the game, is scarce, and buying an upgraded sword for just one character can chew up all of your savings. More than once I have bit the bullet and ponied up for the new sword, only to find a better weapon in the field half an hour later.
I don't know how this could have been improved and I am all about having a ton of options, but for a lot of this it just seems like a frustrating timesink of running around and buying new equipment in every new city you encounter. Maybe you enjoy that sort of thing but I certainly don't.
Fret not dear viewer though because for old-school RPG fans the good very much outweighs the bad in this one.
The story and music is absolutely divine in this game to the point where I am genuinely surprised and even "touched" with certain tragic twists the game has thrown at me even at just the 3 hour mark.
I'm actually excited when I get off of work so that I can play for a bit longer and while the game does offer some challenge and I have died plenty of times, it isn't overly difficult.
This might be a downside for a lot of people but for me it is a huge plus. I don't enjoy ultra difficult games anymore because even though I write a lot about games, I don't actually have enough free time to hone my skills at them.
So for me, this game is perfect and if you are an old-school RPG fan, it very well could be for you as well.
This game is available for very little money on basically all platforms. I am playing it on a Nintendo Switch.