Octopath Traveler

great music. fun gameplay and class system. mediocre story

2023-01-05
Jesus what a short review for a game I spent like 60 hours with on Switch.

Let me add a little more thoughts in anticipation of the sequel coming out.

First of all the music is phenomenal. The Alfyn and H'aanit themes alone are some of the best songs in any game ever. It's all over the place too. The composer, Yasunori Nishiki, mixes up the instrumentation and style a bunch to suit the different environments and characters which is really nice as explore the different areas and chapters of the story.

The story is...fine. The structure of it being split between 8 different characters with their own stories means it's both fragmented because you're constantly jumping around between different stories which can be hard to keep track of but also because some are much better than others.

Gameplay I actually really enjoyed. I'm going off memory here but I think you basically set up combos to stun enemies and deal large amounts of damage. And even with a fair amount of grinding required I was fairly well engaged for the full ~60 hours. I remember figuring out ways to farm the super rare enemies that dropped tons of experience and money. That was fun. You'd get real excited to see those money goblins or whatever they were.

Where it falls off is post game. The bosses can be reasonably challenging throughout the game sometimes forcing you to grind up to beat them. But the fucking post game is a boss rush BACK TO BACK with every boss with no heals. AND THEN you have to fight the superboss. And the superboss is just fucked. It's gotta be like 30 mns to fight them and if you make a mistake you lose. And if you die you have to do the whole fucking boss rush again. FUCK YOU. That shit made me so mad and even here 4 years later I remember it being a fucking terrible ending to a game.

So yeah maybe I leave this at a 72 because while it was phenomenal in many ways it also had some serious issues. If they fix them all in the sequel I see this being an all-timer of a series.