Thoughts on Games Played

[A Black Falcon]

Octopath Traveler Demo (Switch) - So a demo of Square-Enix's upcoming Switch RPG has a demo, and I tried it. I of course have never exactly loved Square RPGs, but I wanted to give this a try anyway and I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, the visual look of this game is amazing! The sprite art in 3d worlds graphical style this game has looks fantastic, and just wandering around and looking at stuff is cool because it's such a stylish and nice-looking game. The story, writing, and gameplay are far less impressive, however. The game has eight characters, and you can choose to have any of them as your main character. Each origin story is maybe an hour long, and after that you merge into the main game, which goes on some quest you mostly can't do in the demo. Your main character choice matters a lot though, because while you can get the other 7 characters as party members, only four can be in your active party at a time and the main character you chose must always be in the active party. Oh, and you get only ONE save slot, at least in the demo version, so if you want to play as the other characters... sorry, you can't? What? How could they actually ship it like that? Yes, you can play all of the origin stories in one file, as when you find a character you get the option to play their origin, but that's not the same as actually having them as your main, for the reasons I described above.

So that's one issue. Additionally, the writing and combat are pretty generic. The 8-characters thing made me think of the SaGa franchise, which has weird plots and bizarre, never-explained-without-a-lengthy-guide game mechanics, but Octopath Traveller is, for better or ill, not anything like that at all. The stories, at least in the three origin stories I played, are very generic and forgettable. While I was playing this game for the first time I felt like I'd played the game before, and that wasn't because I had, but because it's so much like almost every other game or anime thing that it all blends in. NPC and party interactions sound limited too. And apparently from people who got farther into the game in the demo when you get the other characters in your party they have minimal interactions together, which doesn't sound great. I saw some of this in the demo, too; if you play as the merchant girl, when you go into your family's shop and talk to your parents they... just say the same couple of generic NPC lines they'd say to any character. Blah.

And as for the battle system, battles are random and take way too long, at least at this early point in the game. Battles feel like they drag on and on most of the time. The encounter rate isn't too high, but it's still kind of tedious. It's mostly a very standard menu-based JRPG combat system. The one unique-ish element is that every turn you get some meter building up, and then you can use those meter points to do stronger attacks. Unlike the Bravely Default series you get meter every turn that you don't use it, so you don't need to waste turns to build meter; this is good. Also, each character has some kind of unique ability, and it's not just all the usual stuff. Of the ones I tried the best is probably H'aanit's, which is so good it's kind of broken against regular monsters -- she can capture monsters, and the capture chance is very high after just a couple of rounds of hits and when captured you get full experience and item rewards for the match. You can then use captured monsters as limited-use supports from a special menu, and each type has a different ability. That makes battles quicker. And maybe the game gets better as you go along, as you get more characters and such.

So far though, Octopath Traveler seems fine, but unexciting outside of its graphics. I definitely won't get it for full price, but might pick it up eventually. (I still don't own either of the Bravely Default games, which are this studio's previous games...)