Quick Look: Octopath Traveler

Shit, this game looks cool. Its a shame there doesn't appear to be a central plot. . . . Odd choice

It's so fascinating/infuriating how Dan will get excited about something like this, and start to watch and appreciate anime and you think Dan is really more open minded than you think.

Then every time Persona 5 comes up he acts like it's still nerd shit for nerds. I gotta wonder. Does being a Nintendo exclusive buy this game a lot of bonus points for him or something?

I'm in love with the animation on the world map screen.

Feel like I'm in bizarro land, this game is one of the ugliest goddamn things I've seen out of squeenix since their mobile remakes. It's this desaturated blurry mess of pixel crawl and halos. Accepting those crawls into your final look is like the art direction equivalent of not knowing what bad kerning looks like, it's just hard to look at and displays a shocking lack of attention to detail for a style that is so dense. In what realm was subpixel scrolling for big sharp pixels through a fricking blur filter ever considered a good choice?

Remember how good Bravely Default looked? They can do this pseudo 3D style so good if they want to. Instead this happened.

I think this could actually be just fine.

Not every game needs that come together for the big finale kinda plot if these individual vignettes are all decent stories on their own. Which the ones I've seen have started really well so I guess I'll find out.

@ryudo: Definitely not the engine then , though I didnt say it was the same studio. I was talking about individuals having worked om both games. I could still be wrong but hey.

That's not what he said, he said this is where he thinks the PS1 pixel RPGs would have gotten if they kept making them, instead of favoring 3D ones.

@luchalma: I feel like there's a pretty simple delineation between something like this and Persona... Dan likes the idea of running around medieval settings and slaying monsters with swords and spells. He doesn't like the idea of going to a Japanese high school and balancing dungeon crawling with scholastic and extra-curricular pursuits.

@vinny: Yup, you were pretty clear about that.

This is one of the only games I've ever seen that actively chases a retro Playstation graphical style. Instead of smoothly scaling the sprites they emulate the PS1's 32-bit integer-math sprite scaling, resulting in that distinctive chunky warping effect.

@dprotp: In that game they completely match the backgrounds though.

Lol i wasnt addressing you ryudo. my point TLDR was to the other poster. I was saying people are really down on this game not just him if you read the comments even thou this game is fairly received. Even GB said it is being mixedly received. My point was it is rather highly reviewed for such responses. I was wondering if people are getting really critical to the point only 9/10 is rental material. Glad your getting it. And im happy your supporting a imo dieing genra otherwise.

No offense taken here too. Yeah i get your point. Nostalgia can take you so far. I think its creative kinda grandia 1 ish but i can see how in 2018 you need alot more then charming to pass. Can you mention the atlus games or falcom ones. Been trying to get back into a good rpg for a while after noticing my excuse that those games are too long doesnt hold up when i have 300 hours in battle royal and overwatch doing the same thing over and over. XD.

I don’t get how people are upset that this game focuses on eight individual, personal stories instead of some large, overarching plot concerning stopping an evil force from destroying the world.

In my opinion, what Octopath is doing with its storytelling is fresh, and is kind of a strength of the game rather than a weakness?

I don’t need another final fantasy/kingdom hearts

Personal, character-driven stories are where it’s at, and if you think the characters in this game are flat, what the hell old-school JRPGs are you playing where the character writing is monumentally better?

@secondpersonshooter: The eight stories thing I'm not minding.

What is very jarring however is that they all exist in a completely isolated void, despite the fact that you recruit each of these characters as you go to experience their stories.

@sasnake: That is what he said. When he says "if they kept making them", he's referring to the SNES JRPGs. He specifically mentions how there weren't many pixel/sprite based games on PSX when there were far more 2D JRPGs than 3D ones. The "biggest", most mainstream JRPGs were 3D, but the majority of developers actually favored 2D, and I think the critics did too.

@tary1966: The Atlus games are maybe a little more obvious (for this site), the Persona and Shin Megami Tensei series are fantastic games and more on the challenging side and Radiant Historia is a great handheld rpg with time travel mechanics they just re-released on 3DS.

For Falcom its basically their 2 big long running series, Ys which are action rpgs more in the style of Secret of Mana or Zelda but with the speed cranked up to 11 (I recommend The Oath In Felghana but you cant go wrong with any recent ones), and The Legend of Heroes games which are traditional turn based rpgs of which I would recommend the Trails in the Sky trilogy which you can get on PC relatively cheap as they are on sale often. The newer Trails of Cold Steel series (also legend of heroes) are also fantastic but the third and fourth games havent come out yet so its still incomplete.

You should check out the Saga series from Square because its clearly the influence here and all of them are non-linear pick a character's unique story type games.

This has a very interesting look but I'm not sure If I like it.

@danryckert R pulls up the mini map that lets you see where the objective is.

This looks great, but I Also have no reverence for classic JRPGs outside of Chrono Trigger.

I'm getting some Persona 5 vibes from the combat in this game, which is a good thing; I'm currently playing Persona 5, and I'm loving every minute of it!

Having to decide who should attack which enemy in the original final fantasy with educated guesses about the chance of hits, damage ranges based on the evolving combination of stats and gear, familiarity with new enemy types, and deciding when it was worth doing this calculation because you were running low on supplies or navigating less well known territory... that was all the fun of the genre that got removed cause most players just enjoyed cheating (grinding) while watching a story.

@orborborb: Or.. a coding limitation that they learned to overcome roughly one game later.

I don't mind the eight storyline idea, but it is a bit odd how it's designed. The recommended levels seem to suggest that you should go see every single character's opening story before going to the second chapter of any individual character's story. At 7/8 characters, even with my primary characters that I've kept in the party throughout, they are still barely at the recommended level for chapter 2. And for characters I recruited late or haven't used as much, they are well behind where they'd need to be to see chapter 2.

I imagine I can catch them up quickly, but it's still odd to see and suggests grinding, especially to see lesser-used characters stories, and given that you'll want to mix and match to bring different people in based on the chapter. And it makes it seem like you are pretty much only going to the next piece of a character's story after a dozen hours in other characters' stories at that stage, which makes it feel very disjointed.

The fact that I'm ten hours in and still haven't seen anything but characters' backstory and opening of their journey is weird. Since the characters stories are completely isolated, its basically like this all-important journey goes on hold while you go to seven different towns on unrelated adventures for other people.

I'm really into this art style, making it look like you're playing with pixelized action figures or something. But $60? Yeesh. Maybe I'll put a pin in it until it goes on sale.

I have been playing and loving this game to death. Just finished the same quest as Dan, but at a lower level with about the same playtime... I bet my running around for sub jobs explains the difference there.

Anyways, I might not have any significant complaints with this game. It looks freaking amazing, exactly the kind of pixel art I love. None of this McPixel (https://preview.tinyurl.com/y9xt5b5o) look. Music is hitting the story, battle, and environmental beats great. Character voices seem oddly high quality, and most are fitting with the sprites rather well. Battles play, look, and sound awesome, and the allure of better gear and skills to fight these battles with is flipping the endorphins in all the right ways. The pull to keep playing is strong with all of these factors firing on all cylinders.

My god I sound like such a shill, but I don't even care.

brooch¹

1. A cufflink for a front shirt.

Will this dethrone Xenoblade 2 as "a really good JRPG I like on the Switch"? Maybe not but I'll play it anyway.

Whole comment section talking brooches and debating jrpgs but nobody complaining at how bad Dan is at the game, disappointing!

For real tho, the combat system is super good and there are subjobs which add a ton of depth and there is fast travel so you don't have do go through the long hassle of walking across the world that he did at the beginning.