1.5/5 ★ – truewalrus's review of OCTOPATH TRAVELER II.

For much of the game, combat in Octopath Traveller 2 feels pretty good. It's deep enough and there is an ok variation between skills to allow for some thoughtful, tactical play. I wish gear and equipment was slightly more interesting aside from numbers go up and it does feel like some of the characters are just significantly better than others, but I can chalk this up to just not really exploring the mechanics that deeply. I like playing the characters I like and so I play them. Unfortunately, not leveling your benched characters and forcing you to use them through their own sidequests with no catchup mechanic is a pretty annoying decision. Bosses have way too much HP and take too long though, and by the end of the game, combat starts to feel more like a grind than enjoyment. With every single aspect of the rest of the game being awful, dragging combat is the last thing that Octopath Traveller 2 needed. The pacing is horrendous. There is tons and tons of pointless, stilted, and long winded dialogue through every character's trope-filled, standard JRPG story. Each town plays exactly the same. Talk forever, press x to interact with whatever 4 quest markers you have, spend 2 maps exploring the same repetitive dungeon, talk forever again, end the cutscene, walk 4 steps, restart the cutscene, next chapter. You don't find interesting locales, you don't find interesting NPCs. There are so few genuinely interesting occurrences that the entire game blends together as just a long set of random encounters and bosses. All of the focus is put on the 8 characters and their stories, but since there is almost no interaction between characters, it's like playing 8 unrelated sidequests in tiny, broken up pieces. Without any main story tying it all together (or at least there wasn't one by the time I stopped playing), my interest in these individual characters plummeted into nonexistence. The open world doesn't really add anything since you're forced to basically explore the map in order to play the intro 8 times and you'll spend the rest of the time just teleporting to your party's next story progression area based on whatever level it recommends. There is very little in the way of real exploration so there isn't really any reason for it to be an open world other than to add bloat and filler to playing the intro 8 times. The 16 press X to interact options you get add absolutely nothing to the game. This is by far the worst mechanic in Octopath Traveller 2. Entering every town and going up to every person just to confirm that you've stolen all their goods, taken all their hints, and hired them if they're unusually powerful for whatever reason, is awful. It's boring, there's no actual gameplay here, and learning about each of these random NPCs that don't have any relevant dialogue is an incredible waste of time. The story events also force you to walk around the town and press X to interact on NPCs to trigger the next dialogue in the quest line. It's very inorganic and uninspiring gameplay. There's no thought involved, it's simply mindless running around and interacting. What Octopath Traveller 2 should have done was expand Hikari's story into a main story and treat the other 7 characters as side characters. As side quests, their stories are fine. As the main meat of the game, 8 sidequests is not deep enough to carry interest. Especially in the way it is presented.