Do you Travel the Octopath?

Why does anyone tolerate Olberic

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even the font is hideous

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Reminds me of Papyrus, or what my mind’s eye projects Papyrus to be

This game is the mediocrist. It doesn’t even have the decency to be really bad. All the characters are weird and tedious. I hate the join-up quest regularity. Its not an exciting enough formula to be a strict formula.

The enemy knock-out meta is cool, ok, but it just takes over and the fact that the designers/balancers do not know who all is in your party means that party skills kinda have to overlap and all the dungeon/enemy design kind has to aim for the middle and really
 “Aim For The Middle” should be the subtitle of the game. I do like towns person interactions like steal and recruit however.

Everything is sort of stream-lined and it feels like its holding my hand. Especially the whole “danger level” aspect to entering a new area.

Speaking of which the only real thrill I’ve had so far was bodging and dodging my way through a high level path to get to a high level town to find and steal a high level weapon and then escape. Id did it! Now I can sort of survive going into an area under leveled.
Buuut being under level seems to increase tedium at a rate much higher than danger.

As a side note I hate the short depth-of-field focus style because sometimes I don’t want to stare into the middle of the screen only. (aim for the middle!) I want to look at all the sprites. Let me do that, plz, just give me a toggle. The lack of rotation to the 3D aspect is just blah.

In sort everything feels compromised and sort of good but not really interesting.

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The best thing about the game is the optional jobs that let you mess with the battle mechanics but you can’t even really start trying to get till like 40 hours into the game.

That hour number should tell you everything you need to know.

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Goddamn it, of course it gets good at 40 hours.

No, it doesn’t get good then, don’t worry. Just slightly more interesting in combat. The core game remains exactly what it was for the rest of the game.

I think I won’t ever travel the Octopath

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Octopath and every other game this team has made makes me feel like such a rube, because i kept falling for what they’re selling. the games start fairly strongly and suddenly, hours later, you realize you’ve been had.

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I find gameplay way more enjoyable now that (I skip every cutscene and) I’ve got Evasive Maneuvers on Cyrus. It halves random encounters, so 1) dungeons are less annoying, and everyone is always underlevelled which 2) makes battles more interesting and 3) makes bothering with the character’s unique cool actions in town more rewarding.

Anyway the thief town is this RPG Inequality City with the rich enjoying giant mansions while the rags wearing poor live down in the slums.

Here there’s a sidequest that starts with a guard telling you that the poor are planning an insurrection. You complete the sidequest by stealing their weapons and handing them to the guard. The guard congratulates you, hands you money, then tells you it’s all for the best because the poor are unreasonable and the rich are Pretty Nice

This game is SaGa for centrists

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been playing this since I got game pass and it’s actually a little better than I expected after finding bravely default pretty leaden.

they’re biting yoshida’s style hard and the game makes you spend way too much time solo going through the motions, but the menus etc are great and it comes close enough to dragon quest type charm at times (with like, marginally-better-than-baseline jRPG quest design) that I’m not finding it too unrewarding. cautiously credible imo.

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Yeah, its biggest problem is just being never ending, and none of the characters’ stories ever connecting. Oh and the most fun fights are optional, and then turn you into ridiculous murder machines, iirc.

« Exactly the same Octopath with a different story
 and a boat » isn’t exactly setting my world on fire

Downright criminal how they’re reusing the same unique character abilities from the first game

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The absolute best idea Final Fantasy had was starting over with new characters every game. I guess you can’t really do that anymore in this era of IP Maximization, though.

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