Octopath Traveler: The Kotaku Review

Octopath Traveler released Friday for the Nintendo Switch, is designed to be a reminder of old-school role-playing games. With sprites inspired by Final Fantasy VI and a structure that recalls SaGa Frontier and Live-A-Live this game has been regarded as a holy grail for anyone who misses the golden age, the days when the developer Square Enix pumped classic after classic. Indeed, it has everything you could expect from a turn-based JRPG: levels, side quests, character classes, a variety of items and equipment, and so on.

The first thing you will notice is the production values, and there, Octopath Traveler continues to impress. The soundtrack is stellar, full of pianos, horns and pennywhistles, and everything is beautiful, as if Square artists of the 1990s had never stopped sharpening their pixels. Plastering two-dimensional sprites onto three-dimensional backgrounds, the game is filled with candy for the eyes, ranging from endless deserts to snow-covered fields to a very familiar opera.

Yet Octopath Traveler is little deep, disjointed and incredibly repetitive. The combat system is excellent, which keeps the game enjoyable even through its creakiest moments, but even that can not hide the many structural flaws of the game.

The game consists of eight independent stories out of eight different characters (from where: Traveler ") Each of these stories is four chapters long, for a total of 32 chapters Thirty-one of these chapters follow the same pattern.You are entering a city, watching cutscenes , talk to the people of the city using the action Path of your character (more details later), look at other cinematics, enter a dungeon and fight a boss.Then the chapter ends. 19659002] All these dungeons also follow a pattern: There are about 50 dungeons in the game, some optional, and each is identical: there is a main path, and then there are branches that lead to the treasure chests. sure, the aesthet It's going to change – maybe go down to the depths of a sewer, fight in a haunted forest or explore a mansion – but each dungeon of the game has the same structure. Once you have played in one of these dungeons, you have seen them all.

Even some of the bosses feel like clones. For example, each of the eight bosses in Chapter 2 stands by a pair of servants who must be destroyed before you can damage the weaknesses of the boss. It's less interesting the sixth time it happens.

What makes this structure even more tedious is the grind. Each chapter has a "recommended level", spoiling you until your party is strong enough, which essentially prevents you from feeding each story one at a time. You will probably need to grind a little, no matter what. The problem is, only your four active party members gain experience. Anyone you have recruited who is not in your group will just sit in the tavern, unknowingly, waiting for you to be ready to help them find treasure or save their loved ones or whatever or else. And they will not quickly gain levels to catch up with the rest of the game when you beat a hard enemy, as the characters could do in a game Suikoden . Leveling from the 20s to the 40s will always be a slow process. Thanks to these level doors, finishing all eight stories is a chore.

You also can not play each story in a linear order because of the level requirements, so you'll probably go out as you go, which means you'll go from story to story. # 39; other. It's not that the stories of Octopath Traveler are particularly difficult to follow, as they are full of clichés, but each chapter of the game presents a handful of new non-player characters. Many of these NPCs are alike, thanks to the wonderful work of elf, but indistinguishable. The game offers a reminder of the story at the beginning of each new chapter, which is helpful, but it's hard to remember everything that has happened in the eight stories, let alone to stay emotionally invested

. many reasons. The characters' stories are too superficial and trivial to have a lot of impact. They have their good and bad times. The story of Tressa's salesman is a delight, and the story of apothecary Alfyn poses interesting questions – do you have to heal a man you know is a murderer? Less attractive is the tale of the hunter Ha 'anit thanks to the incomprehensible word of English olde soup of his history. (Example of dialogue: "Comen now, my daughter, you are too young to half for such sighs tired of the world, do you make our separation so dark?")

NOTE: There was a lot of confusion The eight stories of Octopath Traveler overlap or lead to a kind of epilogue. After finishing the eight, we did not see anything like it. Nintendo says it's not clear if the game contains end-of-game bonus content, but the publisher could not tell us before publication what this content is or how to access it, saying only that it was "a question to complete the

During each of these stories, the game claims that no one else is present.You will only see the hero of a given story in cinematics, which is discordant when you know that they have a complete party with them.For example, the scene of a final chapter presents a dramatic turnaround where a villain escapes after having a serious Octopath Traveler Ignoring the other three characters – who follow this main character and take part in every battle – is hard to overcome.Why none of them could have been wounded. to stop the villain? The members of your group can int eragir during optional thumbnails Tales between cutscenes, but they are insignificant, just there for flavor. As you progress through each main story, the game will not speak.

Most JRPGs ask you to suspend your disbelief in one way or another – of course, you can fly around the world by raising chocobos even if a meteor is about to destroy the world – but Octopath Traveler . You must spend the whole game not only by buying that a noble cleric and an honorable swordsman would hang around with a nasty thief, but that they would participate in his burglaries. You have to buy a lot of narrative decisions that simply do not make sense.

It may seem at this point as if I hated Octopath Traveler but in fact, I enjoyed most of my time with that, for a simple reason: the moment-to-game gameplay moment is actually pretty awesome. It's all because of the strongest element of this game: the combat system.

Each combat in Octopath Traveler is set in a turn-based battlefield, with your party on the right and the enemies on the left. You will see the order of the turn at the top of the screen, while under each villain you will see a row of weaknesses, displayed first like question marks, next to them. a shield with a number on it. Whenever you attack the weakness of an enemy, whether it is a type of weapon (swords, sticks, bows) or an item (fire, water, darkness), you will hit that number. When it reaches 0, you will get a "Pause" and that enemy will be stunned, which will cost you one round in combat and make him vulnerable to all your attacks.

You can also use Bonus Points, much like the Brave Bravely Default to give each character several physical attacks or increase the strength of their skills. Each character will win BP each turn, except for the turn directly after using a boost. This leads to a constant stream of interesting decisions. Do you want to use your two bonus points this turn to finish an enemy or wait for the next turn, risking touching you, gaining three bonus points and using a special ultra-powerful attack?

The system gets complicated as the game continues, and in action, it feels fantastic, adding a strategy to the most insignificant battles. You can not just crush A and call it a day; Enemies with their shields are strong for most of your attacks. You have to guess their weaknesses and act accordingly.

The many bosses of Octopath Traveler add more wrinkles to this system, sometimes blocking their own weaknesses, increasing their shields, and making them worse. Other fun things that I've won do not waste. The key to beating the game is to find optimal strategies for each one of them, taking advantage of the skills, bonuses, buffs and debuffs of your characters to do as much damage as possible. When you reach the fourth and last boss in the history of each character, you must know the cold system. If you lose a turn or make a bad move, you will probably lose.

There is also a lightweight work system that allows you to equip each character with any of the 12 jobs (eight based on the main characters, and four optional super jobs guarded by ultra bosses). -durs). These dozens of jobs allow your characters to equip additional weapons and skills. So, if you leave Therion the thief on the bench, you can stick the thief job on the Olberic warrior so that he can use these powerful debuffs. Or you can turn apothecary Alfyn into a better healer by giving him the clerical work of Ophilia. Experiencing with these combos is fun and rewarding.

The other systems of Octopath Traveler are also fun, if they are superficial. There are loads of side activities, even though most of them are tedious, but they offer few rewards. (Unexplainably, these side quests do not offer any experience, only gold and objects, which is a shame – they could have been a good way to mitigate the grind .) Nearly all require the use of one of the eight Actions characters, which are abilities that they can use outside of the fight. For example, Therion the thief can steal items from NPCs. Ophilia the priest can use "Guide" to recruit an NPC to the party, allowing you to call for temporary help during the fight. Olberic the Knight can challenge NPCs to one-on-one duels, knocking them out when he wins.

Despite the boredom of the side quests and the lack of reward, it is amusing to determine what actions the characters can solve. Most of the side quests do not tell you the direction – they just give you a problem and expect you to find the answer. To save a helpless woman from a harassing scoundrel, you could challenge him to a duel. To appease the fears of a worrier who worries about rising water levels, you could go find a scholar and then use Alfyn's "Inquire" ability to learn that the Water rises simply because of the melting snow. (Hmm.)

The developers of Octopath Traveler clearly watched the role plays of the 1990s to find inspiration. I would have liked them to look more closely SaGa Frontier the game that seems to have inspired them most. While this game also told a compilation of unrelated stories (seven instead of eight), it did a much better job, largely because everyone felt different. You play one at a time rather than zipping around, and they were diverse enough to avoid too much repetition. Lute's open-world quest to avenge his parents was radically different from Red's linear superhero journey, even if you visited many of the same places, because SaGa Frontier was constantly changing its structure. In Octopath Traveler the eight stories are so repetitive that they mix, forming a big, bland stew.

Octopath Traveler is a magnificent game with one of the best soundtracks I've ever seen. I heard it. The fighting system is rocking and we hope that it will be used in other upcoming Square Enix games. There are many good ideas here. But the game is too squeaky, too repetitive, too full of structural problems to be considered much more than another sloppy JRPG experiment.