Octopath Traveler (Nintendo Switch 2018)

https://s.aolcdn.com/hss/storage/midas/feb860da9e2aacfd852aeb769f01365/205667504/C2ub2coWIAAdU5a-ed.jpg

Octopath Traveler is a turn-based role-playing video game developed by Square Enix, in collaboration with Acquire, and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch. The game was released worldwide on July 13, 2018.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopath_Traveler

-Explore multiple, distinct RPG adventures in a world created by Square Enix
-Choose from eight characters, each with their own distinct story
-Deep, strategic turn-based combat with a layered battle system
-Visuals inspired by retro RPGs, brought to life with modern touches and a rousing, dynamic musical score

https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/octopath-traveler-switch

this game is pretty wonderful. the combat is a lot of fun and the level design and pathfinding, especially in the fields and dungeons, is a whole lot of fun and a cool new twist.

it is rare to have a game that does the retro thing but also does so much new stuff with it. the added depth and 3D solution to the pixel art is wonderful. the music is so good as well. the arrangements are very much classic SNES era RPGs but recorded with live musicians.

really love the game. im only like 3 hours in? the dungeons are jaw dropping, like living dioramas, like shadow puppets or something. i love the manga style art for the speech bubbles and emotional indicators.

great game! 20 years in the making and worth it.

It’s good

I'm enjoying it. the characters I like playing with so far are the opposite of the ones I was interested in going in

i started off w the thief and then got Cyrus and after that i was wanting to get the hunter, who i used in the demo. it was a little unclear when chapter 2 started or whatever but i wanted to add new party members. opened up the map and found where she was and made my way over there. i thought the new character thing was all going to be done through menus so it was cool to actually be able to huff it across these maps rather than just fast travel.

this was underprinted and is sold out everywhere apparently, lol at squenix continuing to be perplexed that people actually want to play games made in the style of their most famous/classic games.

about a dozen hours in, this is damn good

15 hours in, 1 more character to discover. i am traveling counter-clockwise and just did Alfyn, Primrose, & Olberic's storylines so am wrapping up the first Chapter 1's with Tressa. just 8 of these missions took me 16 hours, and there are 3 more sets of these, meaning this is a big epic game for real.

my main character is Therion the thief. it is nice to be able to try to steal from pretty much anyone in the game, and open all the treasure chests. you get a lot of equipment picking off random townspeople.

i am loving all the environments in this game. the music is solidly amazing too, this is easily one of the better Square RPG soundtracks of the century.

I did not like olberic's voice acting in the demo

i subclassed tressa as a scholar and now she has a black mage robe and is blasting enemies for thousands of damage with her stupidly named 'trade tempest' spell and then saying pun one liners like 'you got more than you bargained for'. very good

tressa no

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DigGl5YVMAEBEPM.jpg

tristressa

ive been using Japanese voices/English text

I play all games with english voices unless the dub is really really bad or doesn't exist. Xenoblade 2's dub was heavily criticized but was still well above the line for me

if I'm only gonna get one of Xenoblade or Octopath, which one right now?

do you like big immersive weirdo anime RPGs or cozy retro rpgs? Xenoblade will take you for a ride, Octopath is more about just having a tight RPG system and nice aesthetics. theyre both good and bad in their own ways though Xenoblade is way more unique imo, there's not really anything else like it for better or for worse

nice, I should probably go for xenoblade for now then

be warned, it's extremely anime

well I'm gonna alternate this & persona 5 this fall so

ah yeah get both the cool and the uncool sides of the shonen anime rpg experience

i need to check out Xenoblade someday, it sounds up my alley. it is alongside Ni No Kuni and Beyond Oasis as games i need to play next.

OT is something special tho. i have been playing Final Fantasy XV and at around Chapter 9 just gave up. the level design, while gorgeous, became a nightmare to navigate, the quest system was just a menu of enemies to fight in an alleyway, combat was just holding down a button and moving the camera (it did look amazing, tho, certainly impressive for the first dozen or so hours).

this is easily the better Final Fantasy than that game. it really is like FF3 to me. in that game the character backstories were always a highlight, and it is neat to see those back, aggressively so. after so much confusing multi-syllabic cosmic bullshit, story is back on track, back to being about characters and their relationships.

these aren't incomprehensible CGI cutscenes, they are the classic pixel puppet plays of characters delivering lines of dialog and stage direction. even before FF6 this style of storytelling was in danger of becoming extinct, you had the anime comic book cutscenes of Phantasy Star IV, the animated cutscenes of Lunard and CD-ROM RPGs. especially alongside the Unreal Engine 4 graphical post production, it is almost frustrating how simple the story bits are delivered. but for that reason it must be a considered design choice.

ditching the cinematic realism of modern games, it allows the player to participate in the creative fiction that much more. imo a low resolution rendering of a mountain conjures an imaginative (idealized) image of the mountain in the mind of the gamer, since they are aware of "real" mountains and want to have an idea of how they would look if "real"y existed. this kind of interaction plays across all the low resolution elements of these games, from character models to background tiles to the low-production theatrical-style story bits. RPGs, ROLE playing games, are a particularly effective form of this immersive/interactive storytelling. maybe not as abstract and arcane of a ZORK or a text based but just on the edge of text + still image, putting it alongside books, rather than movies, in that realm of imaginative storytelling.

appy polly loggies for all the typos

this is Great

i'm planning on playing this after i finish Hollow Knight

one thing though - i heard that after each character's unique prologue, you're really only playing one character for the rest of the game, other than in battle? is that kind of weird to get way into a character in a prologue and then never hear back from them again afterward except in a generic way? or did i totally hear wrong about all of this?

15 hours in, 1 more character to discover. i am traveling counter-clockwise and just did Alfyn, Primrose, & Olberic's storylines so am wrapping up the first Chapter 1's with Tressa. just 8 of these missions took me 16 hours, and there are 3 more sets of these, meaning this is a big epic game for real.

hmm, actually from reading adam's post above i guess the character-specific structure continues throughout? sorry, i'm probably just asking about something that doesn't even exist, in a very confusing way

Each character has their own four chapter storyline to follow, in which only they appear in cutscenes etc. You can switch between following each character’s story whenever you want, more or less. The first character you pick can’t be removed from your party (until after you beat their last chapter, i have heard?).

The stories are told as solo character stories despite you having a party with you for combat, maybe that's what you saw. The characters weigh in on each others stories via Tales style optional conversations that pop up, that's the only real party interaction outside of combat.

i am just doing my first chapter 2 (Therion's) right now. each character has 4 of these narrative story sequences, each with a dungeon/town. this means 32 story sequences in the game, cutscenes along with towns, NPCs, dungeons, bosses, etc. to go along with them.

storytelling doesn't bother me in the least. every game does not need to have the exact same structure, it is refreshing. and tbh a lot of the older games highlights were just centered around one character and their NPC relationships - think Celes's post-World of Ruin personal drama, Gau's flashback to his relationship w his father, etc.

it is just now this is modularly implemented into an Open World like game where you can customize it to your liking. if you want you can just follow one character's story through to the end, rather than having them come at you in a linear order. the content of the games is more or less the same as it always has been. fwiw i have already seen 2 FFIX-style Active Time Event scenes where you can check in on other party members chatting it up. this is a nontroversy.

gotta say i like how story is tied to the geography of the game. you pull up the map and can see where all the story chapters take place. there is fast travel but it's a convenience and you still have to walk to get anywhere - exploring the map is key to uncovering the story.

cool, thanks for the explanations!

I started out with Ophilia the Cleric, recruited the blond guy from the tavern with the wind spell, and then got my ass kicked by the first boss who apparently has infinite HP. For the number of encounters and interactive elements involved, was it really necessary for all that to take longer than a fucking Marvel Cinematic Universe entry?

Maybe I’ve just been away from “real” JRPGs for too long and I forgot all the tedium. I’m willing to dive back in a few more times but I need someone to tell me that Ophilia has the worst starting story, because if she isn’t, ⌛️

ophilia's story is the least interesting through 2 chapters yeah, though none of them are grand world-saving plots. olberic and primrose's stories feel like they were written by a different person, they're more dramatic than the others.

oh Cyrus's is more dramatic too

I’m finally enjoying this but the rest of family is still making fun of me for it. “Do they ever stop talking? When is the game?”

Some people just don’t like doing the same thing over and over and they are entitled to their preferences I suppose.

Octopath Traveler’s battle system is like a cross between Magic the Gathering and TurboTax.

I mean Quicken.

if you think this game has a lot of text/dialogue, you should avoid every other jrpg made since about 2003

I am aware of all jrpg traditions, but it’s been a long time since I played one on a big screen where other people (namely, my 7yo) can watch

dunkey rates this

Played first 10 hours of this, good stuff. One of the kids just said "crivvens" which made me lol. Would play a FF5/6 remake in this engine.

dunkey hates jrpgs in general

I'm at like 35 hours and running out of steam now, haven't finished any of the stories yet but am about to attempt Alfyn's finale with a slightly underlevelled party. this game has not changed my theory that 6 is the ideal jrpg crew size, 8 is pretty common but always feels like it's stretching it.

have you been trying to level everyone equally or mostly sticking with a core 4 and just switching in and out for stories?

I've been using a core 2 and rotating the other 2 slots such that I have good coverage of weapon types and buffs/debuffs. the core 2 are level 45 now which is the recommended level for the last chapters, most everyone else is in the 30s and then poor Cyrus is still at 22

Cyrus is my first character and tbh getting that free weakness every fight is pretty great. I walked up to my first chapter 2 boss yesterday with a party at levels 14-20 or so and got my face melted off.

yeah I built Tressa as a scholar early on and liked it enough to stick with her which made Cyrus redundant. merchant has some good defensive abilities for glass cannon casters and the 4th merchant passive is halved SP costs so you can just spam the double hit spells once you have that.

I like how guessable a lot of the weaknesses are once you've seen enough of them - bow or lightning against flying enemies, fire against plant enemies, holy against undead, lance against armored stuff, etc. it's pretty consistent at meeting my expectations, and then they always are sorted in the same order so the remaining ones get progressively easier to guess

don't quote me on these but I think the sort orders are:
sword lance axe dagger bow staff
fire ice lightning wind light dark

more confident on the elements than the weapons

I've been using a core 2 and rotating the other 2 slots such that I have good coverage of weapon types and buffs/debuffs

yeah this is me too. Theroin/Cyrus are my mains. Cyrus elemental magic just too powerful, at this point he can one-shot many random battles in the areas surrounding Chapter 2s. did Cyrus's Ch2 last night, thought it was pretty great (levels in 30-35). the evil sorcerer capturing people & making blood crystals makes a great villain.

Ophelia's is next. i would have done that last night too but i stumbled on a random dungeon and spent some time in there. i like how this game has so much optional explorable territory. almost feels closer to Secret of Mana or Zelda w its explorable open world.

finished Alfyn's story last night. it was fine. so far there's still only been one truly unexpected story beat in the game.

I now find all the complaining people did about how the stories supposedly don't link up at the end pretty funny, given that the first 2 that I finished kind of did

cool! thats nice to hear. tbh i am enjoying the smaller scope.

the game really does things in a cool unique way. it is like going to one of the towns in one of the older JRPGs and playing as all of the different townspeople. you have the thief, the shopkeeper, the mage, the apothecary, etc.

you can follow the storyline of the hunter, someone who would probably introduce a dungeon to the main hero of a Final Fantasy game or something. you can follow the storyline and fight 4 bosses for the shopkeeper who sells the main hero his newest shiniest sword. this is a more democratic approach to storytelling.

it's not like the stories explicitly connect but the game makes it pretty clear there's something mysterious going on behind the scenes that relates to all of them in various ways

perhaps all the characters sense that they were all created by the same "company", and everything they choose to say seems like it was already chosen for them, somehow

which is kind of more interesting honestly since it lets each one still play out in its own way rather than swerving into the same lane suddenly at the end

would play a jrpg written by Larry David

You level up but nothing actually happens to your character?

Oh wait that’s Crashlands

So Primrose has this skill called Bewildering Grace that is essentially random, something good might happen like health restored, or something bad like losing SP. I was fighting this boss that was a few levels higher than me, slowly whittling away at its health. It was taking a long time. So occasionally I cast Bewildering Grace just to break up the tedium of the fight, and I was usually getting something good (JP x 2! EXP x 2! Fully restore party SP!). Finally the boss description turned red, I was on the verge of beating him. Let's do Bewildering Grace once more for luck I thought. Primrose summoned a giant mushroom thing that fully healed the boss and buffed his attack and defence, knocked all members of my party's HP down to 1 each and cast a mist that poisoned everyone. Served me right, really.

lol. yeah BG is alot of fun. i have gotten JP X 5 and full restore, i have also gotten the full restore for the enemies. take me back to the Cait Sith gambling wheel

had to take a break from Olberic's chapter 2 (thank u backstage at the Colosseum save spot). it is very cool! i love the Colosseum stuff, the bit where they introduce all the people you will be fighting, and the crowd is yelling for their favorites. didn't realize there were going to be so many battles but this is really cool.

that's the only chapter in the game that breaks the standard structure. i liked it. the promoter girl is my favorite side character

lol I gotta grind so bad apparently

Holding out longer against my first chapter 2 boss but still falling to AoE eventually. Might swap out Alfyn for Ophilia for this boss because she can heal the whole party without me having to find ingredients for Concoct but she’s not even close to my MC’s level since I picked her up last. What to do.

can always make someone in your party a cleric, i can't imagine getting through most of the later bosses without Heal More

i've finished 5 of the 8 stories now, will finish up tomorrow and then probably bail on the postgame stuff because 50 hours is enough for now

I haven’t gone around poking at all the chapter 2 areas, just this one, so I have only gotten the thief shrine so far. I may need to go shrine hunting.

ciderpress is one of my favorite posters right up until he gets way ahead of me at every video game ever

whoops sorry

its only rpgs that i get obsessive about really

I’m just jealous of your spare time. Grass is green and brown everywhere

I have made a terrible mistake and chosen H’aanit as my second party member. Would you have guessed the only people more pretentious than the frostbound flame-worshipping priests were the hunters who live in the woods and keep leopards as pets? I would not have made such a guess.

I do like that my two options when meeting people are 1. force them to fight for me 2. sic my animals on them

i liked h'aanit fine but she's probably the weakest link in the cast yeah

you should backtrack and go in the other direction, cyrus and tressa are the best

Too late, I am committen to followeth a counter-clockwise octopath

you're the ohtapotc traveller

arrow rain is always nice to have around. it can help you break enemies quick

yeah i meant weakest link character wise, the 8 base classes are really well balanced imo

dunkey hated this and he is right what a generic boring jrpg

dunkey hates all jrpgs so thats not surprising

your excellency

i warned you guys it's a game with random encounters, grinding, and a terrible story/characters. maybe you've all found some value in the combat but i couldn't figure out why it was worth my while.

also dunkey liked persona 5 iirc so dude isn't just a hater

everyone likes persona 5 though. its like the rock critic with a kendrick lamar album in their eoy list. if you're only engaging with the most acclaimed thing in the genre then you're not really engaging with the genre

it's a very well designed game, particularly the map and locations and the ways of interacting with people, and that alone puts it beyond generic/boring. the characters and story are for the most part fine (outside of the cleric), above average for the genre ime anyway. the combat system is the most generic thing on the surface but they really hit a sweet spot, i'm still thinking about just why it does work so well. but there's something about jrpgs where, for all that they cleave to formula, personal experience varies wildly from game to game and if someone doesn't get a good feeling off the bat it's a fool's errand to try to talk them round.

fwiw i thought the dunkey video was uncharacteristically low on substance and lols and definitely came over as someone wanting to pull out an old axe for a fresh grind

dunkey is funny but his inclinations are basically the opposite of mine.

it's a game with random encounters, grinding, and a terrible story/characters

That is what I paid for. You may also know me as the guy who paid for Cat Quest, Lowlander and Lowlander 2: Lowerlander for the iPhone and enjoyed all of them.

i guess my final review of this game would go something like this:

excellent RPG system (both combat and the npc interactions)
excellent music
good presentation
characters and stories are a mixed bag, i thought tressa's was the best overall despite (because of?) having the smallest scope, h'aanit and therion were the worst, the rest were fine but only had a few great moments
i didn't burn out on the repetitive structure but i was playing in short sessions of 1-2 chapters at a time, i suspect this falls apart more if you marathon it. it lays its bones barer than most RPGs
i say this about most RPGs but overall the game is a bit too long for its scope, i think 6 characters would have been better for the structure/length though the combat system gets a lot of mileage out of those extra 2 jobs

the combat system succeeds because:
- it moves exactly as fast as you want it to, without any ATB shenanigans
- putting vulnerabilities on the HUD lets “System 1” thinking handle almost all the work instead of making you apply “System 2” mnemonics and deliberation in a fight
- as Silby noted, a successful boss battle with properly sequenced breaks and some fortunate RNG can be just as satisfying as maximizing your tax refund
- the sound design is top notch

breaking enemies and boosting abilities are both really satisfying mechanics and become exponentially so when you combine them. the presentation for them is great too, the HD rumble when you break a bunch of enemies at once...

fyi most of the ATB games let you turn real time off which i always do. which just turns it into a delay system where you can't see the turn bar, which is better than nothing

you're the ohtapotc traveller

- it moves exactly as fast as you want it to

yes i love how fast it is. i remember FFIX taking so long to just have the camera pan up to your character in battle. here you can instantly cue/commit to actions, it remembers where your last cursor was, and if you have to go answer a phone call or something you can just walk away and come back w no problem.

i really like the vulnerabilities & the break system, there is so much strategy to every fight: when to spend your BP, when to break (who to break/what order), on top of maintenance/buffing and discovering the vulnerabilities for new encounters. sometimes i fight a tough new enemy and think i may be under powered, but give it another shot w what i have learned, inevitably winning with the more strategic approach.

Octopath Traveler’s battle system is like a cross between Magic the Gathering and TurboTax.

I know you corrected this to Quicken but this is hilarious, and a perfect description of why I don't have the patience for games like this anymore.

In retrospect, either works.

(it's more that I've never used Quicken but am intimately familiar with Turbo Tax hell, also sounds funnier)

closing out everyone's Chapter 2 with Alfyn, who is kinda my clean up hitter. during battles he tends to hang back and mix SP/HP curatives for the others while they do elemental damage, then when BP is built up and all is broke, Amputation comes in for the home run.

Having added the thief, I am not sure my party could get much more morally compromised. If you are a townsperson on this continent, you should run as soon as you see us coming, because you are about to be:
* attacked by beasts
* robbed in broad daylight
* press ganged into God's army, or
* all of the above
This is easily the worst batch of murderhobos I have ever led on any journey. If you don't see the fun in that, I'm sorry.

The actions that let you beat people up are great, everyone’s very upset about it.

Now I'm finally up to four characters and I can add
* asked for your short biography

the npc biographies are the best part of the game

the old woman in the graveyard looks like a motherfucker with some dark secrets

so many of the old people turn out to be godlike if you fight or recruit them

Only stands to reason they’d be higher level

most of the old people are just your PCs from 30 years ago

circle of rpg

this game doesn't seem to ever end. i finished the storylines and i figured i would clean a few things up but new npc encounters keep happening everywhere. i'm unlocking a new cycle of advanced secondary jobs that i don't even want to use. also, i just got absolutely annihilated by an optional boss and the dudes in my party were 2x level 60 and 2x level 50.

was it the wolf? that plus the secret final boss are the ones I never finished

yep

secret final boss???

it's kind of hard to explain without spoilers but if you've finished all the stories you may have noticed certain names popping up in more than one of them

there's a certain side quest chain that's worth pursuing though the game doesn't make it too clear that it's related to that at first

ok cool, thank you. i have a good idea what you mean. onwards!

luckily they put all of the lore dumps before the final fight so you don't really miss out on anything if you're not up for minmaxing all your chars to beat it. it is still technically a side quest, after all.

I’m still octopoking my way along. I’m a little worried none of the other bosses are going to be as fun to murder as pimp helgenish

OK I’m like three paragraphs into Olberic’s hammy ronin backstory and I officially love how gay he is

Now that I’m over the long-windedness of the backstories, there’s so many hilarious (to me) choices they made with the voice acting; in addition to the badass ronin being camp af, the coastal merchant family sound like they eat hot dish weekly and really look forward to the butter sculptures every year

wow this end end boss is really something. i feel like i wasn't far away and could definitely do it with a little luck but the whole process is too time consuming to go through the 3 or 4 times it might take. think i probably call it a day at this point.

trying to not be too spoilery here - but i will say, i did a final circuit of basically the whole map after i finished the chapters, just wanting to mop up all the optional areas, side quest stuff etc, and i cleared every area and got every side quest done except maybe 3 or 4, including the preconditions for the end chapter, and i would just have stopped there and missed the trigger for the end chapter if cider hadn't mentioned the secret end boss itt. and it's a really important capstone to the game imo! even if the tying together of the stories isn't done in the most satisfying or profound way, it is done, and if i had missed that then the games's failure to do more to connect the "paths" would've been my biggest knock against it. it sucks that a lot of ppl will probably miss that.

anyway, really terrific game, a pleasure to play, all the way through.

which story was your favorite? with a couple weeks of distance now i still think Tressa's was the best on the strength of her character and it making the best use of the condensed structure by telling a smaller scope story.

well, it's funny, despite the first chapter being the absolute worst thing in the entire game, i really liked the last part of ophelia's story. other than that, yes tressa and maybe cyrus too.

alfyn's story had a very interesting philosophical core that the game fudged at best, butchered at worst

i wasn't into cyrus until his finale when he out-final-boss-monologued his final boss in a satisfying way

wait ... there's a hidden final boss? dammit thought I was finished with the game. oh well guess I have some time before MH drops.

OK I am going to get this game!

I am tired of trying to teach myself how to play bridge

my final roster was:

cyrus-cleric
alfyn-warmaster
ophelia-sorcerer

therion-hunter
h'aanit-runelord

tressa-scholar
olberic-starseer
primrose-thief

i always wanted the first 3 active in the late stages because they can each do a ton of damage, have lots of shield-breaking flexibility, and they can each heal the whole party, and imo having redundancy for the latter is a huge advantage. i then had one of the hunters as my 4th, because leghold trap is the best skill in the game (altho also made sure to give my main 3 spellcasters sp saver). therion-hunter gave the best tactical options, whereas the runelord job feels busted when you get it going. starseer was the only one of the advanced jobs that was underwhelming, the other 3 are all OP used correctly.

i only really used sorcerer of the advanced jobs since that's a pretty straight upgrade to scholar. the others i got too late to bother with since i didn't have the JP handy

runelord Tressa kind of breaks the game because you can transfer sidesteps to your whole team and become immune to physical damage

the runelord skills are very strong. make sure everyone in your party has one elemental+ weapon and then suddenly everyone is doing 9999 with a single hit, ~6000 through shield even. the warmaster skills give a lot of options but the main thing is the divine skill, expensive but was hitting for around 40k each time for me.

So much to look forward to!

"Pray tell me more about From the Far Reaches of Hell."

most of the old people are just your PCs from 30 years ago

https://kotaku.com/octopath-travelers-best-npc-is-this-reclusive-old-man-1827803634

I can't wait to recruit this creaky sob. sadly it appears my octopants have to go back in the closet for another week or more since there's a shitload of homework due next week

OK, is there any more unstoppable party comp than OOPC? because holy fuck

more like OP AF

thats a good party i always specced ophilia as a dancer and vice versa though so i never had both at once

I'm just getting into the secondary jobs and am glad you suggested that option. So how stupid was it for me to make H'aanit into an apothecary? Doesn't even gain a weapon type. Facepalm. Tell me I can fix this.

Yeah you can swap at will. Only one person can have a given secondary job at a time, so I always strip jobs from people when I deposit them to Bill’s PC leave them at the tavern.

yeah you can freely swap, the only limiting factor is you don't get your job points back so if you waste those on a job you end up not using you might have to go grind some up

i think i used thief on haanit mostly. nothing's particularly synergistic with her

I think since Ophilia is my protagonist I’ll go ahead and make her the apothecary, that way she can also deal with status ailments & it doesn’t matter much that she sucks at physical attacks.

H’aanit’s going to end up with warrior secondary, I think.

If I make Olberic a dancer will he announce THE PEACOCK STRUT with the same sultry, yet stentorian assertiveness as Primrose?

Not positive but his outfit is the same as Primrose’s

His fate is sealed

anybody else sing "Rufus, the Left-hand Man" to the tune of "Roland the Thompson Gunner" or just me

I feel like I already won the game when I introduced the textiles guy to the idea of making pants. The rest is adventure saga gravy for historians to ponder, while they wear variations on the theme of durable, yet fashionable pants.

ciderpress otm (as usual) that the miniature biographies of NPCs is the best part, but the travel banter between party members is all but tied for first, and I don't want to make a choice

There's so much nuance in these stories that got overlooked. Well, and there's a lot of stuff that's not nuanced at all!

As far as I can tell, this entire continent is a collection of failed states where hacks and charlatans and bandits do as they please, while the working folk die in poverty and the rich sit idle. Let's also put a nail on it - everyone who is rich got their via inheritance or theft. On top of that, you have a network of disgusting sexual abusers and pimps, highly politically connected, some Big Pharma, and I swear I had to fight one of the Koch brothers last night over the land rights to some shithole mine.

Who wrote this game? How is there not a MAGA chud outbreak of death threats against the people behind it? I'm only 42 hours in. Please tell me there's 100 hours more.

(violently incapacitating the Theranos-wannabe was almost as fun as stabbing Primrose's pimp to death, but, as above, nothing is going to match the latter tbf)

I should probably point out that I got on the computer to revive this thread for none of the reasons mentioned above. I just wanted to share that I LOL'D IRL at:
1. Cyrus apparently has the brains AND the looks - he should make some money
2. Ophilia, per travel banter, is not interested in either, and wow Cyrus sucks at talking to girls
3. omg how many "Cyrus is murderously awkward" story segments can there be? Can it be in the hundreds?

Cyrus should just go all in on terrible hair and cargo pants, like his new pal Alfyn. Then the girls will just go "ugh" and he can focus on his puzzles.

OK well it turns out that whole story was soaked in so much blood only an academic could come out the other side with even a modicum of sanity. Forget pimps and snake oil pushers, we're on to ritual killers with deliberately fucked up modus operandi.

Also, I think I figured out how the apothecary class is useful, sort of?

Alfyn’s concoct unique can be super clutch with the right ingredients at the right time. My partner loves poisoning people

it's good for getting breaks - though I haven't mixed every combination yet, it seems like he's the only character able to hit any given elemental vulnerability, on top of inflicting status debuffs

yeah concoct basically does anything, in small amounts and if you have the right ingredients. the actual apothecary skill package is not that great though Amputate is the highest damage single target attack in any of the base classes iirc

I feel like I already won the game when I introduced the textiles guy to the idea of making pants.

I met that guy today in the dance hall, en route to finding the dancer shrine and knocking out some side quests. I’m getting all the secondary jobs and finishing off the last of the Chapter 2s today.

I like where H’aanit’s story is going.

I have no idea what secondary job to give to Therion. Hunter?

Hunter’s pretty good to get the weapon diversity for Therion, and leghold trap is something to do with him on a dead turn

he will be lego trapping so much

OK here's the final roster before I get those extra special jobs I'm not supposed to know about yet:

Ophelia, the Holy Apothecary, batman
Cyrus, the Scholar of Trading
Tressa, the Merchant of Thievery
Olberic, the Warrior of the Dance
Primrose, the Twerking Cleric
Alfyn, a Pharmacist and a Scholar
Therion, the Thief of Hunting
H'aanit, the Huntress Of Fighting

I would be interested to know what other folks ended up with (MINUS THE SECRET JOBS THAT COME LATER)

scholar tressa was my favorite one, the merchant passive that halves magic costs is a big deal there and the merchant defensive / regen skills are good on casters

i had alfyn as a warrior since the apothecary class is statted as more of a tank healer than a caster healer

also tressa's black mage outfit is stylish was another factor

was gonna say Alfyn looks rather striking in his cosplay

given that Ophelia is my protagonist, I'm comfortable with my not-entirely-optimal support skills arrangement - there's a ton of fun in this game that's buried in all the different ways you can min/max the PCs.

I also like the cognitive dissonance involved in Thief Tressa and Scholar Alfyn

yeah there arent really any bad combos other than mixing the pure physical and pure caster ones

Even with that, it's a grinder, and there are some equipment sets that I can see making those actually viable, albeit not so convenient

I’ve made Olberic a cleric and I’m gonna keep trying to make that work

just as long as you understand that as soon as you're out of the picture he's going to move to Central America and become a bartender and barely even talk to his family anymore

Dancin' Olberic with Eye for an Eye equipped is lots of fun when a foe uses a multiple strike technique on him. The first time it happened I thought the game had hiccuped

obv any character with that skill does the same thing but when it's Olberic it def feels like cheating, e.g. they shoot him with 4 arrows for like 120 damage tops and then it's just murder time

I dunno 'bout you fellas but if I were the king of the lizardmen I'd feel pretty fucking embarrassed gettin' cut to shreds by a nun, two dancers, a druggist and some rando amateur travelin' pastry chef

It's rare, in my experience, that RPG level-up events coincide in cinematic fashion with RPG narrative events, so it seems necessary to memorialize what just happened:

- Olberic got enough JP in his 3rd chapter dungeon to get the Warrior's Divine Skill
- I decided to let him build BP while stacking physical attack buffs (if you played this game without providing Olberic the opportunity to pursue his dreams as a dancer, you missed out)
- thanks to Eye for an Eye, he got the Break right on time
- Brand's Thunder, Erhardt eats it

I love this game.

I finished all the chapters 2 and I have Cyrus at 35, a couple people at 30, the rest 24-27 or so. Probably just going to do miscellaneous grinding and shopping for another session or two. Most of the sidequests are too enigmatic to really be able to just sit down and try to solve some so that’s not really gonna help much.

My partner managed to kill a Cait in one lucky fight where she had a surprise round a while ago, some of her dudes leveled up like twice.

i played this game for almost 60 hours and never managed to kill one of those

might grab this in the EU e-shop sale

can you turn off random encounters?

no

sounds like it’s not that much of an issue because the battle system is so good

Yeah this is a game primarily about hanging out with the battle system. I've found that you don't necessarily have to spend extra time leveling up your guys to beat bosses, as long as you don't have a mental block around burning through recovery items. (I did before I started playing this game lol)

reading this thread has given me much relief as i am about 11 hours in, have 7/8 characters through chapter 1, and was genuinely concerned that none of these 8 people were going to ever interact with each other/would just endlessly travel from solo plot to solo plot, never speaking, never explaining why they're together, just an archipelago of every-man's-an-islands forever taking a knee while anything significant happens in their walkmates' lives

there's some tales skit style conversations in chapter 2 onwards but outside of those it's as you describe

ah nuts. well at least there's the little skits, better than nothing

this is out on steam in june, surprising since i figured nintendo had partially funded it but i guess not

I'm finally playing this, have finished all the first chapters & just Therion's chapter 2. Do I need to grind all my characters to the same level more or less? It seems like it because Therion, at only level 15, sucked in the chapter 2 battles. And the other ones not in my primary party thus far suck too. I don't really just want to grind the underleveled characters in non story parts if I don't have to, but do I have to?

and if I do have to grind random encounters, is there some reliable place to do so? I was in the desert yesterday boringly grindingly away, but I can't keep doing that, it will drive me batty.

you do have to grind a bit because it doesn't have bench exp yeah. definitely the worst part of the game. you can kind of circumvent it by having 3 'main' party members carry a rotating 4th underleveled one through their stories. the postgame superboss is the only thing where you need to grind all 8 chars up to high level and that's totally optional if you're not a completionist, i checked out before it.

I did the rotating 4th under leveled one on therion chapter 2 & I beat the boss but it took an hour!

did you find the secondary job shrines yet? chapter 2 bosses and onward are tuned expecting your chars to have those

I just found the mage one! near the therion town. I haven't been looking for the others yet, sounds like I should.

Ophilia is my main & I gave her the mage second & with 200 spell points she's now a capable master

also equips, especially weapons, are more powerful than levels in this game, so seeking out good ones from npcs in the chapter 2 towns may be worth the time. iirc you can hand a strong weapon to an underleveled char and they'll contribute decently as long as they're not so low level that they're getting one-shot.

I tried to steal all I could in nobleville but therion's percentage for the good stuff was only 8% :(

or you can always just give one of the supportive secondaries to an underleveled char e.g. dancer or cleric and have them contribute that way

it still sucks that the game doesn't have bench exp when almost all other JRPGs have moved to having it in the past 10 years but there's enough of these ways to mitigate it that it's not as bad as it could have been

Going around the chapter two cities tonight w an under level party was good, grinding without feeling pointless as I open up map and find new cities and shrines. I found the starseer one though and holy fuck

oh yeah don't bother with the ones in the outer ring yet, those are for the endgame. i think my party was level 40ish when i beat them

I made it to the final boss last night, and it sucked. I haven't lost yet, maybe I can win it, but it's so tedious that I don't think I want to. I just put the machine to sleep after about half an hour, realizing that I have to somehow coordinate killing the dumb nodes it grows. Ah well, the game was pretty good until here! My party ended up in the 58-65 range, with Ophelia, my main, pushing 75 I think.

its more of a postgame challenge boss than a final boss. there's no dramatic conclusion or anything after it.

Cool

Any suggestions on another rpg on switch or ps4 if I dug this?

which elements of this are you looking for? turn-based? 'retro'?

turn based, retro not a pro or con really

I should add that I haven't played a Final Fantasy since II. I played Dragon Quest IV and V on DS a while back, but I don't know that series otherwise.

dragon quest XI is pretty good, its on ps4 and has a switch version coming out in a couple months

the FF games on switch are all from the PSX/PS2 era and i don't know those ones very well

FFX is turn based but very linear, FFXII is not turn based but really interesting imo
most of the modern turn based JRPGS that I liked were on 3DS, going to take a while for them to turn up on Switch

i am playing this in quarantine. the bad Middle English for the hunters is doing my head in.

is this ‘badly written’ by video game standards or is it just a long time since i played this type of video game

just went through the dancer’s prologue and oh lord everything about that was a bad idea, executed poorly. (i did actually download the demo and start with that one, two years ago? and i deleted the demo before i even made it to a battle)

(battles are tite tho. i went and did a level two quest and some random dungeons once i had a team of four because i couldn’t deal with any more inept first chapters)

i wouldn't call it a well written jrpg but a few of the stories have their moments

strength of the game is mostly the combat especially the boss fights. also the music

Imo if you’re playing a JRPG for the writing read a book

unless that book is the novelization of octopath traveler in which case play the game

Imo if you’re playing a JRPG for the writing read a book

lol i thought this was 'lamo' but i see it is 'imo' -- idk, i'm playing it for the battle system but i do wish the writing was less bad, one doesn't go to action movies for 'the writing' but the first couple terminator movies are a lot better written than suicide squad

Fair enough

the book version of the game of the novelization, though. Best in class

yeah i don't think a novelization of, say, ff7 would be very good but as a rpg scenario it lands its story beats strongly

octopath is mostly doomed from the start because the 8 short stories thing doesn't really work

idk it worked fine in dragon quest iv

i've never played any of the SaGa games w/ this gimmick or Live A Live, and i am curious now to see if they tick me off any less. the tonal inconsistency is what does it, the gross slippage from 'what if the merchant was the protagonist of the rpg?' (n.b. this is the fifth time i have seen this question answered) to the revenge thriller ft. human trafficking

I have 70 hours in this but I am doomed to never finish it

dear lord, does it get slower? i'm 18 hours in with 12 quests done

No I just “took a break” after getting crushed in a boss fight and then our daughter took over the Switch for Minecraft and Splatoon purposes. I got another Switch for the adults and moved my game over, but have been anxious about diving in again. I feel like at this point I’ve forgotten how to win and it’s not going to be like a bicycle and the boss fight isn’t going to be any easier even this I’m intellectually 100% sure of what I got wrong. And so forth. Ugh.

live a live is cool

all the other games that do this thing have you play each story separately rather than putting all the protags in the same party (or else they do that much later in the game)

And 70 hours seems like such a sunk cost I don’t want to start over. Double ugh.

My ex played this, sunk ~100 hours into it and didn't bother for full completion because... ~boring~

Me I'm gonna finally play Secret Of Mana and then Seiken Densetsu 3

most things are boring after 100 hours!

i hit full completion in 55 hours, and its not like you can rush in this game since its got random encounters..

Yeah but you’re, like, actually good at video games I think

only the ones that don't require dodge rolling

thirty hours in, about to finish my lead character's level 4 so i can swap her out. is this about when i ought to go looking for the other job shrines or are those really just a post-game thing?

you can beat the bosses for those when your party is around level 40 iirc. or maybe a bit less even but they're tough

thx. i did one of them that seemed fairly straightforward and now the game seems to have some more interesting tactical decisions available. i do feel like if i focus on clearing the rest the remaining lv 3 and lv 4 quests are going to be entirely trivial, tho

this game is super chill. i picked it up again and have been enjoying it

also, i didn't have to fight any bosses in the job shrines?? i've only just finished chapter 2 and i've found 5 of them

still slowly working my way through this every few months. an enemy just used a move called "These Nuts" on me

top 5 Switch game

before i argue, what are your other 4

and why!

I am planning to say why. However i've been playing more, and Tressa's story has turned into Karate Kid but where the karate is replaced with "selling geodes". well, i'm not so confident anymore.

hahaha