4/5 ★ – Jim_Howdy's review of Octopath Traveler.

Octopath Traveler is a special game that somehow took me 2 years to finally “beat” Octopath Traveler is the first game in a very long time that I’d say I truly abandoned. I beat the story with my main characters but I did not get the true ending which I would consider as beating the game. I have nothing against the game, if anything I really love it, there are just a few glaring issues that I personally had that kept me from playing it for so long. To start off, I must reiterate that I really do like this game and I believe that the main gimmick, combat system, and overall elements are pretty great. However, those main issues that I encountered slowed my progress and motivation to play to an absolute halt multiple times within 2 years. I was almost immediately hooked by the combat and systems of Octopath Traveler, the idea of choosing between 8 distinct characters and making that party was exciting and showed so much potential for creative team compositions and strategizing. The combat system was also really fun with the flow between enemy weaknesses and the boost mechanic. This was great until a bit later, the combat was fun but at a certain point battles began to feel like they were taking way too long, especially for how common you fall into random encounters. Then there is the class system, a lot of interesting strategies and most of the fun come from that and the busted combos you can make Next there is the story and world, the artstyle is gorgeous and if I’m remembering correctly was one of the first of this generation to do the “HD-2D” type of style which makes for some really pretty environments. I’ll get it out of the way now, as expected, the music is also amazing and that’s about all I have there. But now the story. It’s not very good. Maybe the whole overarching story is good but since they had to write 8 individual stories for 8 characters, those all felt very shallow and I completely admit that in the later parts of my playthrough I just stopped caring entirely. This made it incredibly difficult to care and progress. Some of the characters stories were promising but even then I was never entirely hooked and wanted to know more. This mixed with the fact that each new character started at level 1 and needed to be grinded all the way up really pushed me away for a long time. I just didn’t want to sit in battles and do that early game grinding all over again multiple times. I got about halfway through my main characters story and did at least 2 of each other characters chapters then took about a year and a half long leave from the game. I picked it up again and decided that I just wanted to see through the end of at least my main party’s stories and so I completed four of them. After that though I simply couldn’t find the motivation to continue since I already felt like I had done enough. If you want a game you’ll be with for a long time then this is the perfect one to play. Overall, I believe that Octopath Travelers is an amazing game. It does so much but also expects a lot from the player and I simply didn’t want to do it. Despite all my complaints I still put a good 40 hours into the game and if I went through with it would probably be putting in another 40. Despite everything bad I talked about, I do believe that the positives of the game outweigh the negatives and it’s still very possible to have good time with the game. Even though I abandoned it, I look forward to getting to Octopath 2 and seeing what improvements they made to the game. Completion was never considered, but looking through the achievements it looks like quite a bit. There’s the obvious one’s for rpg’s like this then one that is essentially speedrun the game I think? Personally I wouldn’t do it but I couldn’t even get through the main game so what can I really say :^)