An interesting change of pace from the other two Octopath Traveler games, since it's a departure from what the other games did in several respects.
Instead of eight specific named characters with their own main quest to pursue, you have an original character you get to create, who then goes on to rebuild their destroyed hometown and recruit allies in a sort of simplified Suikoden-esque gameplay loop while on their quest for revenge against those who destroyed the village, which in turn leads to the character and their companions getting involved in the usual kingdom-threatening wars and plots and, as you'd expect, with the followers of the evil god Galdera's attempts to take over the world and usurp the gods' powers.
You still get to create an eight-character party and go adventuring, but this time you build the party from some of the characters you recruit for your village, which are many more than just an extra seven characters to create your eight-character team. By the end of the game I had more almost 30 characters on stand-by that I could add to my party, not counting the seven that were already adventuring with me.
I enjoyed the game a lot, but I think it's important to note that it does feel somewhat different from the two previous games, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
I especially appreciated how they structured the story so that you have three main story-lines to follow that ultimately converge in the endgame, along with a parallel fourth story-line focused rebuilding your town, and a fair amount of the usual side-quests focused on random NPC's you meet or on one of our recruited companions. The game's story does get kind of dark at some points, which I was not expecting but I appreciated because it made the story felt like it had actual stakes, and I think they did a good job of making all the different sub-plots and groups of characters associated to each one ultimately converge in the final quest-line.
The common complaint about how the characters don't really interact in Octopath Traveler games is still valid here because for the most part it's just your MC interacting with the NPC's relevant to the story you're currently playing and your selected companions don't really appear except during combat, but you do have interactions with them in town in a manner similar to the tavern cut-scenes from the earlier games, and like I already mentioned you do get to do some side quests focused on each one specifically.
My only complaint, and it's a really minor one, is that in the previous games you could assign an extra job to each character on top of their base job, while in this game all companions have an assigned job and only your main character can freely change between the jobs you have available after you unlock the first job that isn't your starting choice, but instead of being able to "multi-class" you can only have one job active and the only thing you can add from other jobs are a limited amount of battle and support skills. But since you can have eight active members in your party and you can mix any characters you have recruited regardless of which jobs they have, it's not really much of an issue to not be able to multi-class them.
I actually played the whole game with the same seven character party that included my warrior MC, another warrior, two hunters, a dancer, a scholar and the MC's best friend who has the unique job of engineer and encountered no issues at all, and the eight spot in my party was taken by another warrior-type that tended to change because the story gives you some temporary companions like El the Swordsman or Sazantos the Flameguard for some long stretches of some story-lines, which I rotated with Olberic or Reime depending on what part of the game I was in.
All in all, an excellent entry in the franchise, which I enjoyed as much as the other two. Hopefully they keep it up and they make a fourth Octopath Traveler game that's as good as the ones they've made so far, if not better. I've gotten the exact same feeling of satisfaction and enjoyment playing all the Octopath Traveler games, regardless of their differences. Not all franchises can deliver with such consistency.
