I said I would be back to report on Octopath Traveler once I’d finished chapter 3 for everyone, so here I am! Still having fun!

8 separate stories

I’ve really been saved by my laziness this time. Long time readers may have noticed that I almost never play games at launch. Even if I get them immediately, I don’t start for months and sometimes years after a game was released. There’s no special reason, I just don’t get round to things very quickly.

Apart from putting me at risk for spoilers, there’s no real downside to this practice. If anything, there’s a huge upside, which is that it lets other players be the guinea pigs for me. All the bugs have been identified, all the FAQs written and playthroughs filmed by the time I start playing. For example, I remember a lot of complaints about runey management from players of Rune Factory Frontier on the Wii. When I played it, someone had come up with a “runey farm” strategy that solved the issue while still being incredibly tedious. Imagine if I’d had to do all that work myself!

So it is with Octopath Traveler, where early players were the ones who kindly discovered that the interweaving story promised by Square-Enix was actually a pack of lies. There are a lot of places where it seems like the stories will intersect, and it would be plausible for them to do so. The organization behind the destruction of Hornburg could also be the one manipulating the bad guys in Cyrus’ route, and they could be related to the crows in Primrose’s route, and so on and so forth. But no, they remain completely separate until the end.

And you know, that’s okay with me because I know it in advance. I don’t think it’s even that strange to have stories that never come together. “Everyone’s a main character in their own story” and all that. But two years ago when I played the demo, that’s not the impression I got. I thought everything would come together someway somehow down the road, even if it was just little changes to the towns depending on whose route was played first.

So since I was forewarned, I’m not particularly disappointed by that development. It’s just that having 8 short stories without a single grand finale is probably going to make me go “Oh, okay” by the time it’s done. Because most of the stories are in the “Oh okay” category, nothing really mindblowing. Explorations of trust, betrayal, looking for hope in life again, finding pride in one’s job, those are all nice to read about and fun to play through. But in an “Oh, okay” kind of way.

Not as dark as I’d expected

Based on the demo which covered Primrose’s and Olberic’s routes, I thought Octopath Traveler would have grimmer and darker stories than most JRPGs, but that isn’t really the case. It’s not like Square-Enix didn’t try at all; they just failed to go the full gamut when it came to brutality. This leads to enemies making all kinds of mistakes a sensible bad guy just wouldn’t. Just for once I wanted to deal with competent enemies.

I’m going to give examples from a few routes, which is spoiler material, so you can look away now if you haven’t played the game yet.

Primrose’s chapter 3: She runs into the big bad boss of the three crows after killing the second henchman. Said boss manages to come close enough to her to stab her in the stomach… then flounces off without making sure she’s dead. This, after the same guy sensibly ensured her father was truly dead all those years ago. Granted, this guy is shown to have a flair for the dramatic and all that, but it’s still an extremely dumb mistake that destroys any previous threat he seemd to pose.

Cyrus chapter 3: Evil Boss 101: if a plucky scholar is on the verge of finding the truth of your scheme, and you manage to sneak attack and knock him out, KILL HIM IMMEDIATELY. Gloating over your clever plan and leaving him to starve to death is very suave and Bond villain-ish, but you know how those movies always end, right?

Aight, aight, let’s say you were careless and let his student rescue him. But you then took the student hostage. And the scholar showed up to save her. KEEP HOLDING HER HOSTAGE! That’s what hostages are for! You don’t ignore the hostage and engage the scholar in hand-to-hand combat. You grab the hostage, make your demands, and wait for an opportunity to kill your enemy. You hear?

Tressa chapter 2: Same goes for the bad guys here. If you’ve got Ali in custody and Tressa shows up to save him, do not engage! Get a knife, grab Ali by the throat and that pitiful idealistic sap of a Tressa will hand over everything to save him. It’s just that their situation is slightly understandable because Tressa doesn’t look like much of a threat. But still, it’s not that hard to have one guy hold the hostage while the other engages, juuuust in case.

Alfyn chapter 3: Miguel! *bonks him on the head* Have you read a single word I’ve written? When you take a little kid hostage so you can escape from town, you don’t put the kid down to fight your pursuers. I don’t care how heavy the little rotter is, you grab that sucker and hold on for dear life. That’s how it’s done.

Ophilia chapter 3: Gaaahh, are you guys even LISTENING?!! The bad guys kidnapped yet another kid and held her for ransom, wanting to exchange her for the ember Ophilia was carrying. Why oh why would you put the kid down and fight? Why kidnap her in the first place if you weren’t going to use her? Knife. Throat. Press. Demands. A softie priestess isn’t gonna watch you gut a kid, trust me on this one.

You might be seeing a pattern here with all the kidnappings and letting gos. I hadn’t noticed the repetition before I set out to write this but… yeah, the stories aren’t really that repetitive. It’s just a pattern of bad guys giving up obvious advantages so that the game doesn’t become too dark. Just like the Redeye on H’aanit’s route doesn’t kill anyone but just petrifies them. And Olberic doesn’t kill Erhardt once he finds him, instead they practically make up. This is a big spoiler for his route BTW, but I did warn you.

The TL;DR is that I was expecting darker, more mature stories based on the Octopath Traveler demo and art style, but it didn’t deliver. And it’s not just that it “didn’t deliver” but that lack of delivery was artificially manufactured by Square-Enix’s writers forcing the bad guys to do dumb things no normal bad guy would do. Not a dealbreaker, but still a letdown.

The gameplay isn’t completely tedious yet

I’ll wait to give my final verdict when I finish once and for all, but I’m still not sick of the Break system. I just wish there were more ways to deal damage to large group of enemies besides soulstones and a few select attacks. I’m running more and more from random enemies these days, which may end up screwing me over when I face the last bosses.

Another thing I really wish for: more sidequests. Especially more updating ones. As it is, you finish all the quests in S’warkii and that’s it. I wish they could have added maybe one or two with every new chapter, because I enjoy sidequests.

Nothing further to report. My save file reads 42 hours or so, about to face Redeye on H’aanit’s route, then will do Therion, Alfyn, etc. in the order that I got them in. I’m guessing I have another 10 hours or so to go to finish Octopath Traveler. But my next post will be about Picross S4 and S3 because those are the games that really matter 😀

See you soon!