Long-time readers of My RPG Blog may remember a brief period of time two years ago when I co-owned a Nintendo Switch. I managed to finish Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and even played the Octopath Traveler demo before the ownership partnership was dissolved due to scheduling conflicts. To be honest, Xenoblade 2 was the only thing I super wanted to play, so I haven’t really thought about the Switch in a while. But recently one thing led to another and I ended up borrowing the Switch for a while.
So if you’ve been wondering where I’ve been for the past two weeks or so, I’ve been playing Picross S4. Along with my usual casual fare like Atelier Online, of course. I’ve played all the normal puzzles, now I’m working on Mega Picross. After that S4 also has Color Picross, which I haven’t seen since the DS days. And once I’m done with all the S4 has to offer, naturally I will have to revisit S, then play S2, S3, and also Picross e8 and e9 on the 3DS…
But I felt like playing only Picross all the time might make me sick of it, so I decided to cut in with some “regular” video games as well. Apart from Picross and Octopath Traveler, my bro also owns fine games such as Tales of Vesperia, Ys VIII and Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition (I want to play it but I don’t want to play it). There might be other titles as well, dunno.
All that background to say, I’ve played about two hours of Octopath Traveler now and it’s pretty nice. I started with H’aanit and almost quit, though.
Firstly because of the weird accent they gave her which was just like WHAT IS THIS. I couldn’t imagine playing a whole game full of such garbled nonsense. Luckily it’s only H’aanit and her people who speak that way.
Second reason, her Chapter 1 was really boring. Talk talk talk, walk through forest, kill monster, back to town, more talk. Practically nothing happened. They could have just let her set out straight to look for her master and nothing would have been lost.
Third reason, the game’s battle system is very boring when your character is weak and alone. Every battle takes a long time and you’re just spamming the same moves. It’s interesting to see that this is a direct reversal of how I felt when I played the demo. Nowadays I don’t have the patience for any video game system that feels like unnecessary work. If it’ll take party members to make the battles move faster, bring ’em on!
Such puny numbers
Once I got out of S’warkii and met up with Therion in the next town, things got more interesting. The weird accents have gone away, Therion’s adventure was funnier (way to walk into a totally obvious trap, dude) and now that I have two party members, I feel invincible. Especially since I’m finally getting some use out of H’aanit’s Capture skill with more useful enemies. It’s pretty great. Tip: get as many Ice Sentinels as you can in the Ravus Manor. They make short work of the boss on Therion’s chapter 1.
This is why you should really give games at least one hour if possible. Now I’m about 2 hours into Octopath Traveler and starting to really enjoy it. Just arrived in Clearbrook and saw another story character. Once I recruit him and have three characters in my party, battles should become faster. I hope. It’s a bit of a pain having to target weakness and Break enemies all the time. Sometimes you just want to steamroll the easy field mobs, y’know? But that’s the only problem I still have with the game. Apart from that, Square-Enix fixed all the complaints I had about the demo, so I’m looking forward to exploring the rest of the Octopath world.
Before that, though, more Picross! And more One Hour Reviews of the rest of the Switch games, just as a formality. Though I do have some expectations from Ys VIII. What about the Tokyo Xanadu eX+ I was enthusiastically playing until recently? Picross happened. I was really enjoying it, though. I should post something about it sometime, but I keep feeling like I’m almost done. Also I don’t plan to hang on to the Switch for very long (I learned a bitter lesson about borrowing consoles some years ago) so I’ll go back to TX soon enough.
I really want to play more Octopath Traveler as well, though… I’ll try to finish at least one character’s full route before returning the Switch.
From what I remember of my 50-hours run, Break was a must even in the late stages — that is, if you wanted trash mob battles to be swift. As for boss battles, they pretty much required Break to be winnable at all, even with a healthy dose of preparatory grinding.
Reading your post makes me wanna play OT again… I rolled with Tressa as my main during my first run, and I’ll probably do that again — unless I go for Cyrus, which I loved just as much as Tressa. Are you going to explore all characters’ paths during a single run, or focus solely on your four active party members? I did the former during my run; but next time I play OT, maybe I’ll go for the latter and play two runs. I don’t think it would take much more time than a complete single run, and it would allow me to explore different party dynamics and enjoy characters to the fullest.
My initial plan was to do chapter 1 for everyone, then do each character’s route to completion. But now I’m planning to do everyone’s chapter 1, then everyone’s chapter 2, etc.