Octopath Traveler

Take this with a grain of salt, because I'm really not thinking that hard about it, but it's possible that Octopath Traveler is the longest game I've ever played, with the end credits rolling for me after 70 hours and change. I don't mean that it's the game I've dumped the most hours into - plenty of multiplayer games and oft-revisited classics trump it easily on that front. And I don't mean that I've never spent more than 70 hours exploring the nooks and crannies of plenty of other games - RPGs in particular - what with all the optional sidequests and endgame content out there. What I'm saying is, insofar as any video game presents a "story" - a single-player campaign of some sort, whose completion is ostensibly the purpose of playing the game - I cannot currently remember ever spending more than 70 hours merely completing the story.

(Again, some caveats - this is an old-school JRPG with turn-based combat, so it's very likely that my playtime was padded immensely by repeated instances where I'd just sort of put the controller down for a minute or five without pressing pause in order to, I dunno, go to the bathroom, grab another drink, look up something on the Internet, what have you. But then, counter-caveat, by the midpoint of the game I was skipping cutscenes left and right, easily shaving off dozens more minutes of story. So.)

At any rate, it was a long-ass game! And frankly, a bit repetitive and a bit of a grind. I hated it sometimes! But also, I played it for more than 70 hours and generally felt the experience to be pleasant, relaxing, calming. It was a very easy game to play while watching low-stakes television or listening to podcasts

There's a lot I want to say about it, so let's jump in.

Characters

There are eight characters in the game - four men, four women - each with their own job class and skillset. The characterization was, all in all, very good. I got a very specific sense of their personalities and motivations for the most part, even if a few were pretty generic. The lone character I would describe as all-around shitty was H'aanit, a beastmaster of sorts who inexplicably spoke in Middle English (thou, finishedst, payen). Is this some weird-ass translation idea from a distinct old dialect of Japanese that works much better for a character covered in furs and living in the woods? I've got nothing! Beyond that, I mean, the thief was a thief - cocky, smug, prickish - the healer was a priestess with a heart of gold (obviously), and the honorable old knight was noble and courageous and all that jazz. Arguably the most interesting character was Primrose the dancer - and she was easily the bets in battle for me, though that could be because I chose her as my starting character. Primrose is this fallen princess from a sun-baked land - so, you know, "exotic," albeit not explicitly "of color" - who's hellbent on avenging her father to the point where she goes undercover as essentially a sex worker in a brothel just to gain some intel on his murderers. Her story was dark as hell and her character was fairly complex - she's the foil to the healer, basically, but over the course of her arc her anger gives way to more of a sadness, an emptiness. This made for a harsh juxtaposition with, for instance, the young merchant girl who's just excited to see the world and sell her wares. This brings us to...

Story

All over the place! Kind of a mess, honestly, and in my mind a real missed opportunity. See, the eight characters are all pursuing different things throughout the story. Why they meet up and interact at all is really a complete mystery the game never even tries to address. There's not unifying evil force here; each of the eight characters experiences four chapters in their story and their only interaction with each other occurs in these little optional dialogue scenes during stories. What this means is you'll be playing as the healer-priestess, a bastion of good and light in the world, and then you'll use the thief to pick a townsperson's pocket. And the game just never does anything with this. The dancer is running around the world trying to murder her father's killers, and then there's an alchemist who just wants to like, sell potions and shit, and there's no reason whatsoever for either one of them to help the other achieve their goal.

What I would have done, had I designed the game, is something like this. There are eight characters, right? This means that there are 28 distinct pairs of characters. I would have tried to make some sort of plot element revolving around each and every one of those pairings. The scholar needs to gain entry to a library, for instance, so the dancer goes ahead and seduces a guard for the key. The priestess needs to enter an old church, but it's locked - so the thief needs to pick the lock for her, and she gains some newfound admiration for him along the way. This feels like such an easy and crucial aspect of the overall story that was missing - these characters just don't interact with each other, at all. What's the fun in having an ensemble cast if you're doing eight individual and non-intersecting story arcs?

Gameplay

Pretty solid. I absolutely made hay out of the elemental attack abilities, and it's not clear to me that the game isn't broken in that sense - my dancer and my mage could each deal ten thousand damage to every enemy with a moderately boosted dual-casting of fire, ice, or thunder by game's end, without any buffs. Meanwhile, my best physical attacker - the knight? - could deal maybe two or three thousand at a time to one enemy with maximum boosting, and he also missed his attacks like half the time. Did anyone else have a similar experience?

One critique I have is that the random encounter battles were all fairly repetitive. The battle system emphasizes "breaking" enemies by using weapons or spells that they're weak against a certain number of times in battle, and by even the middle of the game a lot of the enemies required four or five hits to "break." Once broken, they're far more susceptible to all damage and generally you can kill them in one turn at that point - but this meant a lot of the battles were extremely easy, but very time-consuming. That feels like a design flaw to me, I don't know!

The boss battles - and in particular, the eight "final" boss battles - were a lot of fun. Plenty of strategy involved, and each one required what felt like a "battle plan" beyond "the healer heals, the knight wails away on this thing, etc."

But, one thing I'll point out is that the difficulty curve was sort of "off" all game. Because each of the eight characters has their own arc, the first Chapter 4 boss you hit is just insanely hard. You're underleveled, or at least not sufficiently overleveled! But by the time the last one rolls around, you're almost toying with it. If there had been a way to scale the difficulty of the final bosses - ramp up their levels and stats, maybe, for every Chapter 4 boss you've already killed - this probably would have been a more rewarding game.

All in All

I mean, it was good! I had my gripes with it, but I don't think there's a JRPG I haven't had gripes with in like, twenty years.

Anyway, glad to have this one finally beaten. Bring on Super Smash Bros. Ultimate!