If you know me at all you know that I cannot get through a game, even a game that I absolutely adore, without finding something out about it that annoys me. Normally these are things that a lot of gamers would call "cheese" and well, I thought we were kind of past the days of "the computer is cheating."
I'm sure you all recall how in racing games in the 90's that if you got really far ahead of the other computer controlled cars on the track they would just go warp speed and end up right behind you. This was a more obvious thing to detect when gaming and well we had no other choice but to go with it in those days and just be damn careful that you don't screw up even a little bit on the last half of the last lap.
Octopath Traveler 2 is a little more balanced than just straight up cheating you out of certain things and there is even a massive glitch in the game that allows you to overpower one of your characters to such a high degree that it make later game bosses trivial. I have chosen not to employ this because I like the challenge, but not when it is completely unfair, which has been the case in a couple of boss fights that I have encountered towards the level 50 portion of the game which is near main story endgame.
There is a boss in the Hikari storyline called General Ritsu that you will face later on in the game. At first, you seem to be sort of blazing through him because he has a lot of vulnerabilities if you are overpowered from wandering around a lot like I have been in the game's progression.
But anytime that a boss indicates that it is getting really enraged or pumping up and starts to glow you know that they are about to throw some super powerful attack at you that is much more powerful than anything else that they have in their arsenal. These attacks will one-hit kill you and because of this I reloaded the battle and went back to my accessories to equip some items and abilities that protect you from one-hit kills and will instead either reduce you to 1hp, or they will auto resurrect you so that you have a chance to rez your friends and keep the battle going.
not in this battle though, and this is the biggest cheese that I have discovered in this game yet. The following skills or items are all meant to keep you alive in the event of an attack that would wipe your party.
- Vivifying Stone Item
- Seal of Immortality (arcanist job skill)
- Silent Bandana
- Calming stone (although in a roundabout sort of way)
I had 3 of my 4 characters equipped with one of these things on my second try and just as he did before, he conducted his super awesome meteor strike attack that wipes the group and 3 of them stayed at either 1hp or rezzed themselves to be around I think it was 250.
But the game apparently doesn't want to play that part of the game fair because even though it didn't appear on the turn-indicator up top, he was magically awarded some additional hits until everyone was indeed dead.
I know what I have to do in order to get past this, I have to alter my strategy and loadout of characters to ensure that once he does start to glow with "rage" that I break his attack, but it is still kind of irritating that we have these items in the game that are meant for specifically this sort of thing and then when you use them, the game is like "nah... you are supposed to die now so we are going to make that happen."
This is still an absolutely fantastic game that I am really happy that I picked up and played. It is very long though, you need to understand that. I don't know how many hours I have spent on it but I have only completed one of the 8 character's stories and I am at over 50 hours now. This little bullshit situation is not going to make me rage quit. I'll just go in there with everyone ready to use the right skills to easily break him once he gets to his rage bit.
It's just kind of dumb that they would program that in though. It's the first time I felt like the devs were being kind of lazy in the entire game.