GAME REVIEW: Octopath Traveler II (2023)
It’s been a while since I’ve picked up a JRPG, since, if Final Fantasy isn’t impressing me much lately, who else will? You can imagine my curiosity then, when we read that Octopath Traveler II (release by Square-Enix no less) has been described as a modern classic—consider our interests piqued! Naturally, some story spoilers will be in here, but I’ll try to keep them minimal. The word going about the internet said that the original Octopath Traveler was a total miss, largely due to the lack of interaction between PCs, which was also said to have been remedied in Octopath Traveler II, and I can attest that it indeed was (to a degree). But was the game indeed the modern classic that it has been claimed to be? Well… let’s get into it.
The game is open-world, which is unusual but appreciated, and designed very well, with a fantastic combination of pixel-art and polygon-art, creating a very cool 2D/3D effect. For having utilized two classic gaming art styles, the game is indeed gorgeous and comes fitted with an equally fantastic score, though admittedly, there could have been a few more original tracks overall, as some of the themes do get a tad repetitive when you hear them endlessly.
So first up, you get to choose your main character from the eight paths (oh-ho, that’s where the name comes from!): Castti (the apothecary), Ochette (the beastling hunter), Partitio (the merchant), Throné (the thief/assassin), Hikari (the warrior), Agnea (the dancer), Temenos (the cleric), and Osvald (the scholar). Each of them comes with a base set of movies that the other characters can learn once you join guilds, including four extra secret classes (the inventor, the armsmaster, the arcanist, and the conjurer). They also have a set of moves for daytime and nighttime that allow for four options: knock someone out, gain someone’s items, gain information, or lead someone (this person will also join as a battle summon). Alongside obtaining information and items, this allows you access to places that NPCs block, and to have extra help in fights, as well as to finish side-quests (which often require bringing someone somewhere).
We started our game with Castti, which we agreed was the best choice, with Ochette being a close second (Ochette starts in a more remote part of the world and uses the “blue mage/pokemon” technique of gathering moves from defeated enemies, so it’s useful to get her going early on, to hunt stronger monsters with better move-sets; that said, she was the last one we picked up and ended up still being one of our best characters despite starting about 20 levels below the others). Having both a cleric healer who hits like a mofo (Castti’s axe and ice attacks have been very effective throughout the game), as well as someone who gains information from people in town for free, really make her a perfect choice to start with.
What we loved about the characters immediately was their sympathetic natures (character spoilers):
Castti has temporary amnesia, but seems to be from a clan of apothecaries that have a bad reputation for killing their patients, which goes against her beliefs that apothecaries are meant to heal
Partitio is a capitalist, but believes that wealth should be shared and everyone should have access to all technology and amenities to make life easier, after having experienced severe poverty himself
Hikari is the son of a ruthless conqueror who never found any joy in his imperialism; Hikari has always been a man of the people and cares about them far more than power and was chosen as heir for these reasons, but was usurped by his imperialist half-brother
Osvald is the cold researching scholar, seeking the One True Magic, but lost his family to his maniacal jealous colleague and seeks revenge for his unjust incarceration
Temenos is the religious cleric who defines his job as “doubt is what I do” (as a former religious slave, this one really appealed to me); a nod as well to Temenos being portrayed as likely on the autism spectrum
Ochette is a hunter who only kills for food and safety, never for sport
Agnea is the artist looking for superstardom so she can bring joy to people
Throné is the assassin/thief who hates the smell of blood and is looking for freedom from the guild that raised her to be a killer
So, all of these characters follow some pretty obvious/cheesy tropes, but most of them have a very specific mindset towards what they do that makes them considerably better people than the average capitalist or entertainer IRL. It makes for very likeable characters, whose stories you really want to follow. However, having these characters join your party is rather annoying: you walk into a new town, some small amount of action happens, and then this character or someone they know will say something like, “you’re a traveler? Awesome, I’m coming with you!” … really, stranger? Okay? [insert raised eyebrow here] Then, you have the option to play through that character’s backstory before they join you officially, which I do recommend doing first-thing.
However, herein lies one of the biggest issues with the game: the storytelling is so painfully one-dimensional that it actively hurts at times. The dialog is so basic that we literally predicted some of it, word-for-word, before it was spoken in-game. PCs always befriend their enemies after doing something impressive and thus giving them a change of heart… in no way, shape, or form is this realistic storytelling, or even reasonable storytelling. It leads to really bland story arcs and when they’re over, as was the case with Throné, we felt ourselves left wondering… what the hell? So what next?
Now, this may be related to the fact that there was an overarching enemy, the Shadow, that seemed to have snuck into almost everyone’s story arc: Shadow affected Castti’s apprentice and made him crazy; Harvey mistook it for the One True Magic; it caused the Night of the Scarlet Moon for Ochette’s village; it relates to Throné’s true heritage; it is associated with a dark god in Temenos’ search for religious truth; and it has been known to have possessed Hikari’s entire family for generations. Admittedly, I can’t recall it being involved directly in Agnea or Partitio’s stories, though it did seem like Dolchinea and Mr. Roque were possessed by it in the same way as many other enemies.
And even though there was an overarching final boss to deal with, I still can’t say that a lot of the characters were given the endings their stories deserved (Throné having an extremely unsatisfying ending to her story, in particular) and the epilogue scenes don’t actually have any form of discussion about what they went through or dealt with… it’s just a bunch of, frankly, wishy-washy “why can’t we all stay together, we’re such good friends, let’s never forget one another” crap, which is nice, but I would have preferred to hear all of those amazing morals they were pitching put up against the actual enemy that they faced in some way.
But let’s briefly address the aforementioned major complaint from Octopath Traveler I: lack of character interaction. While this is definitely improved in Octopath II, the character interaction is still tacked onto the surface of the game and can be completely ignored if you so choose, as it only occurs during “travel banter” scenes and side quests, which the player must manually activate. This sort of makes sense, because you might have any of your eight characters mixed together in a group at any time, so having the character interaction happen in moments that occur outside of the main story arcs works, in the sense that you can have different interactions based on who is in your party at any point, and if you haven’t gotten someone into your party yet, it makes sense that these scenes don’t happen. The flipside of that, is that games like Final Fantasy IX (my personal favorite)—which were admittedly much more linear and not so open-world—didn’t need asides to have a lot of deep and meaningful character moments. They were infused into the game’s actual story. So yes, Octopath II did indeed fix this issue, but in a way that felt a little bit added-on instead of made-part-of-the-game, though again, this makes sense for the open-world, non-linear style of the game. It’s just unfortunate that it’s so limited—for example, Throné and Temenos share all of their side quests with one another, which means we don’t see as many meaningful interactions between them and the other characters.
Now, the story issues really are my biggest problem with Octopath Traveler II. Regarding gameplay, it really shines mechanically. Side quests in town are learned and accomplished by using those aforementioned four skills during the day or night. They are often a bit convoluted to learn, but if you pay attention to small details when you talk to NPCs, many of them should be easy enough to figure out (though there are surely a few you’d likely end up looking up, like the one Beneath the Wall, which seems like a weird dead end unless you have Ochette, Partitio, Temenos, and Agnea in your party, all with followers, making your travel party a full eight characters). The battle system is one of the best I’ve seen in JRPGs in a long time: every enemy has shields, to which they have a minimum of two weaknesses (to physical or magical damage), and you can mix and match your characters’ jobs in order to optimize your team. The main way to defeat enemies is to knock down their shields and then do as much damage as possible, with additional damage from boosting and latent powers. This has led to some really intense battles where I have both kicked ass and had the ass kicked right off me. The enemies are a bit more difficult at night, though not obscenely so, and bosses are surprisingly tough at times. It took me 3-4 tries to defeat the final boss, which is uncommon for me in these types of games!
Small notes as well: you can’t save anywhere, but there should be a save point in almost every screen (if you’re in town and go into a building, you likely won’t find a save unless there are enemies and you’re about to find a boss) and one before every boss, which is fantastic. For people who tend to pick up and put down games a lot, it’s really easy to do that with this game, because you can generally play through one arc of someone’s story in one sitting, and refreshing yourself on the game mechanics doesn’t take long because they’re quite simple. Finding a JRPG that you can put 100+ hours into while picking it up and putting it down casually is really something incredible, I can’t deny it.
Ultimately, there are really awesome story points, even if they play out in really unrealistic or disappointing ways at times. Otherwise, this game is indeed spectacular visually, aurally, and gameplay-wise. If story isn’t your main fix, definitely try it out for everything else, because the rest of the game is wonderful! Just… brace yourselves for a lot of Mary Sue-ing and unrealistic villain responses on your way!
