Octopath Traveler Review
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Developers: Square Enix Co., Ltd., Acquire
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Publishers: Nintendo
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Genres: (J)RPG, Adventure
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Platforms: Nintendo Switch
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Release date:
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July 13th, 2018
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Playtime:
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Over 80 hours (completed all eight stories and unlocked the end-game dungeon)
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Reviewed on Nintendo Switch
Octopath Traveler is a truly special game. While visually it emulates a 16-bit 2.5D game, the game’s art direction is one of the most unique in past years. Beyond its looks, Octopath tells up to eight amazing and distinct adventures across a continent that, besides looking like it’s from a pop-up book, is full of interesting things, from the NPCs’ detailed descriptions to the well-written side-quests, without forgetting the mysterious and enticing dungeons you come across.
Let’s start off with the art direction. Visually, the game emulates the 16-bit era style but adds a modern touch with lighting, post-processing effects and, in general, more detailed animations. This combination brings forth two major results: the characters having a classic visual style and the environments landing a perfect mix of classic and modern. For example, even if everything around you looks a bit static because of the pixelated art style, elements like water or even grass and leaves are well animated and make the world feel a bit more dynamic. There are also the excellent weather effects to mention: just to name a few stand-out examples, both deserts and snowy areas feel harder to traverse as your view is impaired by the sand and the snow, respectively, and areas like canyons make you feel the scorching heat. Last but definitely not least, if we add to the technical mix depth of field and take the game as being 2.5D rather than just 2D, the game ends up looking like a pop-up book. With this extra half dimension, the environments feel even more vibrant along with a back and foreground aspect to it. This makes exploring each area even more interesting as characters move away or towards the camera while running around and opens up possibilities for small environmental puzzles where you can explore behind buildings or natural elements to perhaps find a path to a treasure chest. This effect turned out to be so well implemented that, at certain times, it almost felt like I could reach out to the screen and pick up certain parts of the “book”.
Going back to the topic of character sprites, that’s another aspect that I particularly enjoyed in this game. While your playable characters (and we’ll get to them in a moment) remain in their small sprites during battle, monsters, bosses, enemies in general use bigger and more detailed sprites. The enemies you come across in the random battles have bigger sprites, but they are proportional to their actual size. However, bosses use sprites four or five times bigger than the ones used for the playable characters, which makes them feel even more menacing and actually exciting to fight. More often than not I hoped characters introduced would turn out to be the boss at the end of the chapter just so I could see their design in more detail.
With the art direction out of the way let’s move on to the characters and the game structure. As the name implies, in Octopath Traveler there are a total of eight playable characters or, to be more precise, eight travelers. The first time you start the game you are shown the map with the initial locations of each character. You can read a brief introduction to each character’s story and description but right now your objective is to pick a single character and start their story. There’s plenty of variety here and to show you so, there’s Ophilia the cleric, Cyrus the scholar, Therion the thief, Olberic the knight, Primrose the dancer, Alfyn the apothecary, Tressa the merchant and H’aanit the huntress. After making your choice, you then play through that character’s first chapter which results in setting the plot for his/her story and opening the entire map for exploration. If you now open your map, well, you can’t really tell much about the landscape since the game doesn’t show you the topography for areas you haven’t been to yet. However, you can see something very important: markers for the other seven character’s locations along with the location of the next story chapter of the character you chose. You might feel tempted to go straight to the next story chapter, but two major things stand in your way: it’s on the other side of the map and the recommended level will be fifteen to twenty levels above your current level. What to do then? It’s time to go find the other travelers and add them to your party. After reaching their location on the map, you play through that character’s first story chapter and from now on you can take them with you on your adventure!
Before moving on to the next part, I need to mention the importance of finding more characters to add to your party besides the obvious battle advantages of having an extra pair of hands. Each character has their own Path Action, which is a specific way for the characters to interact with NPCs in the world. For example, H’aanit has Provoke, which allows her to challenge NPCs to fights and in turn can, for example, take out characters that were standing in front of doors or even be needed to solve some side-quests. Another example is Cyrus’ Path Action, Scrutinize, which allows you to read NPC’s descriptions/backgrounds and in some cases learn useful pieces of information such as hidden items in the area or, again, information needed to finish side-quests (I will get to these in a moment, along with those NPC’s descriptions). In total, there are four types of unique Path Actions, but for each one there’s sort of a distinction between the good and bad versions of an Action. Just one more example, there’s another Action that allows you to bring an NPC with you, which can be achieved in two ways: with Ophilia’s Guide, which is always successful, or using the “bad” way, that is, Primrose’s Allure which has a probability of successfully making the NPC follow.
Maybe you are now asking yourself about those story chapters and how the game deals with having eight different stories all in one game. Each character’s story is divided into four story chapters, but the gimmick is that each time you complete a character’s story chapter his/her next chapter will be in the opposite side of the map or at least quite far, not to mention there’s always a difference of at least ten levels between chapters. Then, you’re more than encouraged to go and complete story chapters of other characters in your party or, if you haven’t completed all chapter 1s yet, go complete another one to recruit another character. This effectively means that you can’t watch a single story develop from start to finish in one sitting, rather, what actually happens is that you watch chapters from different stories as you’re progressing in your party’s stories. While this might be a turn-off for some people, this is one of the many ways in which this game builds its core adventure and travel aspect. As you make your way to that next chapter, you’ll come across deserts, (snowy) mountains, forests, villages, not to mention the huge variety of stories you can hear from NPCs that, while contained to a single paragraph, are still quite detailed, help make these characters feel more fleshed out and, ultimately, make the world feel populated by actual characters instead of disposable NPCs. So, even if you can’t jump straight to the next chapter to see the next step in Primrose’s revenge or see if Olberic finds out to what purpose he swings his blade, there is so much to keep you entertained and I promise that you will find something interesting in every nook and cranny of your way until you finally start that next story chapter.
Before wrapping up the story aspect, I want to go back to the side-quests, the NPCs’ descriptions mentioned and the storytelling in general. The stories of the travelers themselves are quite well told, with rich casts of secondary characters that make the stories more dynamic and at the same time more interactive since the game takes these stories so personally that during cutscenes only the protagonist of that story appears and is referred to during those moments. You still have your party during the chapter, it’s just that during cutscenes specifically the game ignores completely who and how many people you have brought with, making up for some awkward moments in stories. Still, for me personally, it’s nothing major but it ends up creating some disconnection in the relationships between the travelers. Thankfully, there’s a banter system, based in small conversations that happen during story chapters between the protagonist of the story unfolding and the party members, allowing the main character to vent their feelings or maybe getting a second opinion about what’s going on. This system is what creates the interactions between the travelers, but it is still limited to the characters in your party, unless you have the chance to see a banter when you visit a tavern and one of the characters not in your party happens to be there. However, if the stories of our eight protagonists are so personal that they don’t even have the others come up in story-focused moments, side-quests and the aforementioned NPCs’ descriptions on the other hand fill the gap between the travelers and the continent they are traveling in. Side-quests, no matter how short, always have a piece of storytelling to show you, be it a simple grandfather that wants to go back to the village to see his granddaughter or more elaborate quests that actually need multiple quests to finish telling a story, such as the girl who takes on the responsibility of hatching a dragon egg. The NPC’s descriptions, while limited to a short paragraph, manage to create many interesting or even just funny characters that make the world feel more populated with “real” characters and, most importantly, can leave a smile in your face upon reading their description.
With art direction and storytelling out of the way, there’s one remaining element of what I call the Octopath Trinity: the battle system. If the art direction is what attracts you when you first see the game and the storytelling is what keeps you playing, the battle system is what makes those twenty, thirty, forty or even sixty-minute-long battles enjoyable and engrossing. Starting with the basics, Octopath uses the traditional turn-based RPG combat, where characters can use both melee weapons and elemental attacks, as well as supporting skills, with some twists added. However, as you’d expect, the knight doesn’t have access to all weapons and neither does the scholar have access to all types of elemental attacks. Thus, you need to make sure the party you’re taking into battle can, together, cover all types of attacks and elements so that you’re prepared to attack whatever weaknesses your opponent has. Why did I detail something that’s standard in this type of battle system? Because of the enemy shields mechanic. You see, each enemy has a shield which, when attacked enough times, breaks for a couple of turns, allowing you to deal twice or even more of the damage you were outputting while the enemy wasn’t vulnerable. Now, here comes the genius touch of Octopath: to break the shields, the enemies have a set number of weaknesses to, for example, wind, lances and staff attacks. These weaknesses are displayed on the screen for each enemy but, at first, you only see question marks instead of the attack types. This makes you try all sorts of attacks when you first come up against a new enemy, but you can still make smart choices about what to try first: enemies in areas close to the “hometowns” of the travelers are usually weak to the attacks they can use and the “evolution lines” of enemies often have common weaknesses, just to name a few points (please note I use the term evolution lines because you can clearly see some enemies are pretty much stronger, evolved designs of weaker enemies, not that there’s any objective evolution mechanics in the game). However, there’s another crucial element to the battle system: the boost points. Each turn, characters gain one boost point which can then be used to add extra attacks in the case of melee attacks or akin to a (damage) multiplier in the case of elemental attacks and support skills. While it’s a straightforward system, it more than makes a difference in the heat of battle, be it to extend the duration of a debuff on a boss, deal double or triple damage with an elemental attack or simply attack twice with a bow to finally break down the enemy’s shield.
Before advancing further, maybe you were left wondering if there’s ever a time where you end up in a sixty-minute-long boss battle with static attack weaknesses for the boss. Well, I’m more than glad to say the game handles those battles, rather, boss battles in general, quite well. While this tends to happen more towards the bosses in the second half of the stories, bosses can shuffle or even block (some of) their weaknesses almost every turn of the battle, so you have to be double sure that you can handle any set of boss weaknesses otherwise, if you can’t break its shield quickly enough, you’ll just end up in a cycle of healing and reviving party members. Still, even if the battle is going perfectly according to your plan and you’re dealing massive amounts of damage, these battles will be long by nature since the bosses have a lot of health points, not to mention they can start using new attacks at certain points of the battle. This creates a constant pressure of adapting to a new situation every turn and keeps the battle tense without room for relief until you finally deal the finishing blow.
Still, before tying the elements of the Trinity together, I want to tackle a couple of the RPG elements of the game, namely, the job system, since it completely changes battles, and grinding. Each character has its own starting job (class): hunter, merchant, dancer, cleric, etc. As you explore the world, you come across shrines that unlock these classes to be equipped as a secondary class. For example, the apothecary Alfyn could equip the knight class, allowing him to use the weapons, attacks and skills from both classes. Though, for balance’s sake, each class you unlock can only be equipped by a single character as a secondary class, so, in this case, no other character could equip the knight class as a secondary class. Thankfully, you can swap equipped secondary classes on the fly and the characters can even keep the passive skills from the class they had equipped, so you can use this system to give some overpowered passive skills to all characters but also to experiment as much as you want. There are also four advanced jobs which, like the others, are unlocked by finding its shrine, with just one caveat: you have to beat a fairly challenging boss in order to unlock the class. Thus, even if these advanced jobs are overpowered and make it feel like you can destroy any enemy that appears, you have to beat quite a challenge to equip them as your favorite characters’ secondary class. Of course, given that it’s an RPG, you might be worried about grinding. In my eighty plus hours of playing the game, I’ve only stopped once to grind, and it was just for around 15 minutes, to put all the characters in my party at the same level, after recruiting everyone. Besides that, I’ve never had to stop specifically to grind. I did do a lot of exploring, namely the short dungeons found across the world, which definitely helped me to stay on par with the recommended levels for each story chapter. I split the eight travelers evenly into two teams and played through all stories of the first team until playing with the second party and not even then I had to stop to grind for my second group characters, mostly because I made them use the equipment from my first party. For the end-game dungeon that you can unlock after completing all eight stories, that’s a completely different story. That more than requires grinding since you’ll need to use all the characters and the minimum level is somewhere around level 70 which, for me, it meant some characters would have to grind at least fifteen levels.
Speaking of the end-game dungeon, that deserves its own paragraph. Unfortunately, I ended up not completing that dungeon because I couldn’t beat its final boss due to some of my characters being way under leveled. However, since this dungeon brings together all the little plot points you’ve seen come up across in multiple stories and those explanations are given in the first part of the dungeon, I was able to learn about those and the motivations of some major supporting characters anyway, which ended up making some specific scenes way more meaningful. I just couldn’t beat the “final boss of the game”. I do intend to go back to the game someday and level up all my characters to beat that boss, I just don’t think it’s worth doing it right now.
Now, with each element of what I call the Octopath Trinity explained in detail, along with some additional elements, I can finally bring it all together and express my thoughts on the overall experience. Visually, the game got my attention from the first moments of footage. The storytelling kept me going to see how Ophilia’s journey would end, if H’aanit could find her master or even just to read more NPC descriptions once I arrived at a new village. Finally, the battle system was the final nail in the coffin to make this a truly spectacular experience, a definite stand out in the genre. Even battles that could span an hour were made memorable and satisfying as I brought down enemy shields as quickly as possible and tried to maximize my damage output every turn. Even if you don’t see all eight stories through because, let’s be honest, to dedicate more than eighty hours to a single game is a huge commitment, you can still get a lot of good content from Octopath Traveler. Still, doing this is completely optional, you can complete a single story and that’s that, you’ll get forty hours out of the game nonetheless. However, the stories kept me engaged and the battle system, as fun as it was, made me keep going to see what would happen in the next story chapter or how could I create some synergy during battle between new skills I had just unlocked for the travelers. All in all, this is a truly remarkable game for fans of turn-based RPGs that, while not adding that many new ideas to the genre as a whole, implements the ones it uses in a brilliant way that doesn’t allow you to stop thinking about the game even when not playing.