[i]Land of the Bland[/i]
Octopath Traveler starts with a very ambitious premise.
We have eight characters and unlike other RPGs where the members of your party can have their own substories but do share the main one, here we're really talking about a story for each of them. These all occurs in the same world and yes, these members do form a party of eight along the way. This "party building" is done rather unnaturally, each member gets added just because of "You look strong" and "I could use an hand" reasons, although it's literally the first time they meet each other. Each character doesn't play a part in other characters stories, they will comment on the situation from time to time with some small event talk but that's it, they only participate in the battles.
Setting this forced party thing aside, the main problem resides more in the quality of the stories. I noticed players having a very divisive opinion about this, because usually they argue that some of the stories are actually salvageable, but to me they all were incredibly [i]bland[/i]. The themes are rather common but the real culprit of this blandness is the execution. Most of the chapters go like this: reach new town → go to the tavern for info → find a lead → use the special ability of your character to progress → mini-dungeon until you meet the boss. The content of the stories themselves did have potential in some cases but the dialogues are not developed nearly enough to start feeling emotionally invested or even just slightly interesting in them. I'm not a player who drops games midway but I was really tempted to after the first batch of chapters, it was just incredibly tedious to go through and the combat and exploration as well were also rather... well, [i]bland[/i].
When this game came out I believe it was praised a lot for its new HD-2D graphics. These can be good at times but honestly I don't think they were for some small models, which felt like lacking detail and almost blurred. Maps in general felt really unoriginal and not fun to explore at all because they feel like a messy copy-pasted environment. Finding chests around wasn't fun either, most of the time it was a matter of sticking to a wall until you go through a passage you can't even see because the game doesn't even hint at it except for its position.
The cherry on top, and I'm being sarcastic here, is the tremendous enemy encounter rate (which you can lower thanks to a passive skill, but then it's too low), which stops you every 6-7 seconds.
Octopath Traveler is not all bad things. My playthrough was in fact kept alive by a couple of neat elements.
First the subclass system, which adds a nice layer of depth to the character builds enabling for lot of synergies.
Second, the game being actually challenging without grinding, which kept me going during a story chapter or dull dungeon because at least I knew a boss/challenge was waiting for me.
Third, the special abilities each character can use on NPCs. These made going around towns fun. You can [i]Inquire[/i] them for info (you'll get lore, location for hidden items, quest hints, etc.), [i]Challenge[/i] them for drops and exp (and for getting into their houses while they're knocked out cold), [i]Steal[/i] tons and tons of items and equipment (there's a set % for successful stealing, don't savescum this because it makes the game easy) and lastly [i]Guide[/i] them with you in battle or to other places.
These abilities are more often that not the solution to many mini-quests and are used in a quite clever way for that (although get ready to write down some NPCs info because you're never going to remember that one old man who lost his memory and which needs to be guided to the other part of the continent much later in the game).
A bit of a spoiler-ish (not going to say what or who it is) info now to close out the review and if you want you can skip it, but the final boss of the game needs to be talked about. It feels more like a secret boss at first but then you find out [spoiler]it basically ties together all of the travelers stories and adds tons of lore info on each character story.[/spoiler]
It's probably the best battle in the game and something I'd imagine the devs would want the player to find out at all costs but it's incredibly easy to miss. Luckily (or not) we live in the internet era so you'll probably forcibly hear about it even after putting the game down.
Overall I don't feel like recommending this game but I'm not regretting my 90 or so hours on it either. I regret not skipping the story dialogues a bit though.
