Just finished Octopath Traveler! I really enjoyed the most parts of the game; The OST and sound effects, the pixel-style art and overall aesthetic and the slight deviations they make from the norm of a turn-based JRPG. The BP system, unique in-combat class abilities, the break/weakness system were all enjoyable.
I do have a couple negatives though. Primarily - it felt like every chapter for every character followed the exact same formula: 1. Arrive at a new town and watch a mini-cutscene take place for the character to witness. 2. Go around town and use that character's out-of-combat special skill as well as do some talking to people in town. 3. Go to an exclusive wilderness section attached to the town that is a path that leads to the primary wilderness section out of town. 4. Explore this wilderness area, fight wild monsters, loot chests and then find a save point right before the final encounter. 5. Rinse and repeat for each chapter for each character. Sadly this makes the experience overall pretty predictable and unenjoyable. That being said, the overall plot for some character's stories were nice and neat and at least the themes of each character's stories were varied.
Secondly: even though this game is a JRPG, and your characters do mechanically travel and fight as a party, they don't act like it and their personal stories don't ever address it either. As an example, in chapter 3 for Therion (the Thief), the boss exclaims "You came here alone! That was foolish of you!", or something along those lines. However, I had the standard party of 4 right there to fight. :/ In addition to this point, because the game treats each character's story as a solo experience narratively, the party quite literally never talks to each other outside of the "banter" mechanic. This mechanic only lets two of the characters that are actively in your party to have a very brief exchange after a specific story beat that only happens once per character pairing per chapter. This truely makes for a very... bizarre narrative experience within the JRPG genre. Since Devalue played Golden Sun this month, it also makes me contrast these two games in how wildly they choice of dialogue usage.
I know I talked a lot more about the negatives than I had the positives - but that's just how my mind works. I feel like I can nitpick the negatives of my experiences and explain them better, whereas I tend to generalize and quickly mention the positives of my experiences. This doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the game - I absolutely liked it. Hell, I still want to play more and finish the main stories of some of the other characters as well! I even plan to pick up the sequel shortly (or get it for christmas, who knows :p ). :D
