At its best, Octopath Traveler reminds me of my favorite 16-bit role-playing games. Strategic turn-based combat tests your skills, employment system provides you with the freedom to tinker and optimize, and a fantastic retro aesthetic brings the entire world and creatures to life. However, Octopath Traveler isn't always at its best. On the length of its 60-plus hours, the adventure has wild variations in pacing and narrative, and has trouble settling right into a groove. The effect is some tantalizing highs and brutal lows, with the highs ultimately winning out.
Octopath Traveler's problems take quite a while to surface. The early hours are amazing, with the dreamlike presentation and 2D/3D hybrid visuals drawing you in. After choosing certainly one of eight characters as your hero, you visit other towns to recruit the seven others. In every case, you play via a vignette (which lasts about an hour) that introduces the hero and their quest – a thief must steal jewels to salvage his pride, while a cleric embarks on a religious pilgrimage. This structure is unconventional and intriguing initially, but it doesn't stay like that for long.
In subsequent chapters, the narrative squanders its potential through dull repetition. Each character has four chapters (32 in total), and the vast majority of those follow exactly the same formula: Arrive in town, watch a scene, work with a character-specific ability to perform a minor task like stealing a letter, then get into a short dungeon and fight a boss. I was often enthusiastic about the stories being told on a conceptual level (especially Primrose's pursuit of revenge), nevertheless the predictable format and writing saps them of their surprises. Every character is exactly who they appear to be, and every betrayal and plot twist is immediately apparent. That doesn't necessarily make them bad stories, but it makes them feel unremarkable.
The eight main heroes rarely interact or acknowledge one another, and their tales never converge to unite the group in just about any common purpose. This method does an excellent job putting specific characters in the spotlight with vignettes tailored for their personalities and strengths, but results in a disappointing lack of comradery or cooperation among party members. They're just strangers who fight together sometimes.
Combat is Octopath Traveler's great redeeming force. The battles are fun and tactical, focused on coordinating your attacks to break an enemy's defense to generate the opening for an onslaught. This implies carefully planning your attacks using the action queue, exploiting weaknesses, and reserving boost points for critical moments. I like how each character has access to a unique suite of abilities, like how H'aanit the hunter tames animals, or how Alfyn the apothecary mixes concoctions. This largely avoids redundant skills and ensures every character has an appealing role to occupy. Your foes don't pull punches, so fights provide a satisfying challenge. This is particularly true of the boss fights, which often inject twists like disabling the attack command or draining your max HP every turn to apply เกมสล็อต 918kiss, forcing you to produce new strategies. In addition, these adversaries look uniformly fantastic; even a regular human boss becomes an elegant and imposing pixel-art masterpiece.
Behind the scenes, a compelling job system gives your characters the flexibility they have to succeed. Once you unlock them, you are able to assign and swap secondary jobs as needed. This provides your party use of additional weapons, helps them shore up stat weaknesses, and allows them to understand new passive skills they can equip regardless of the current job, like breaking the 9,999 damage limit or decreasing enemy-encounter rate. I loved experimenting with your possibilities (and trying to find the advanced secondary jobs), and the need to rotate party members prevents you from getting entrenched with a single configuration.
Around I enjoyed the battle system, it doesn't always feel fresh. After you finish one pair of vignettes, your party probably won't be strong enough to access the newest content. The sole solution is to spend hours fighting the same monsters until you have sufficient experience to survive the next story chapters. This concept is a historical relic of RPG design, and many fans have made peace with it, but that doesn't make it fun. The grinding bloats Octopath Traveler and wastes your time, but once you're past it, the frustration quickly abates as you renew your focus about what the overall game does well.