Reviews Octopath Traveler II | Review Thread

[xghost777]

This is another thing that's great about Chained Echoes: There is no XP, only skill points. Level ups are gained by beating story bosses and advancing the story, and a few side bosses, that's it. So while you can sort of grind to get skill points and items/money or something, the impact that will have on you is VERY small compared to a level up and not worth it at all. So essentially, grinding is pointless, and since you can avoid most fights if you want to you don't really miss out on anything by doing so, either. It's a great system.

I will say, though, that while I dislike grinding most of the time, I think that it does have its place in specific games, mostly in the dungeon crawler genre: Labyrinth of Refrain/Galleria, for example, are practically designed so that you will grind, at least to some extent, because they give you mechanics for that purpose. Your runs through the dungeon are limited by your "RF" points, and there's a mechanic where you can choose to bank your XP from battles by spending one RF point per battle and it will put all of your XP into a pool and give you a multiplier for each successive battle; it's a risk-reward thing since if you die or escape a battle you lose it all. But if you can make it up to like a 3X multiplier and do a long dungeon run, your final XP total will be crazy good compared to what you'd get normally.

I haven’t played Galleria, but I don’t think a risk/reward mechanic necessarily means it encourages grinding. To me that sounds like a way to encourage being more engaged in combat so you can skip more later even if you could also use the same mechanic in the context of grinding.

In general with dungeon crawlers it’s about exploring and knowing when to pull out if resources are running low so you can get farther next time. Some dungeons have mini goals to work towards like opening shortcuts to make trekking back easier. Are unsuccessful runs considered grinding where you accomplish very little? I personally don’t think so.

Grinding in a game is staying in the same spot and fighting the same enemies over and over and over again to force a resource to multiply whether that’s XP, gold, or drops/materials. I definitely do it some times because I want something in particular, but generally it’s never something that needs to happen to overcome a challenge.

 

[SammyJ9]

I haven’t played Galleria, but I don’t think a risk/reward mechanic necessarily means it encourages grinding. To me that sounds like a way to encourage being more engaged in combat so you can skip more later even if you could also use the same mechanic in the context of grinding.

In general with dungeon crawlers it’s about exploring and knowing when to pull out if resources are running low so you can get farther next time. Some dungeons have mini goals to work towards like opening shortcuts to make trekking back easier. Are unsuccessful runs considered grinding where you accomplish very little? I personally don’t think so.

Grinding in a game is staying in the same spot and fighting the same enemies over and over and over again to force a resource to multiply whether that’s XP, gold, or drops/materials. I definitely do it some times because I want something in particular, but generally it’s never something that needs to happen to overcome a challenge.

Hmm... you're right, I guess in terms of doing an unsuccessful run and pushing it as far as you can before you have to pull out, that isn't really grinding exactly, even if you don't accomplish much. It feels closer to it than most things, but there's definitely a difference between that and the 'staying in the same spot' version. If we use that definition then I don't think there's any game that actually requires grinding (well probably some older, more obscure, super unbalanced RPGs, maybe?) but no matter what it's very, very rare.

 

[Deleted member 2]

Youre right that many are overextending this argument (like, there are level 1 strategies for FF8 with a strict skillset needed to do that run, without knowing the ins and outs of the game thats not possible).
And saying SMT5 is possible without grinding is fine on normal (i presume), but on hard, even having an idea for the strategies possible because of prior series experience, you still have to grind to get the right essences so that you can build the loadout.

With all that sad... there are jrpgs that have mechanics that scale differently. Attack up in early pokemon was pointless, stat boossts in FF where pointless to. Octopath? timing buffs, debuffs to be active during a break and having enough boosts (that dont scale linearly, so more bosst -> way better) means you can by not attacking constantly but setting up do massively more damage.
And then we have the factor: if your attacks say scales from 1-100 with level increase, but the weapons scale way above that (say from 5-500), then having an under leveled character with a strong 400attack weapon will deal way more damage then a character with level 100 but an 200 attack weapon.

Good JRPG systems work slightly like deck building in TCGs or say something like Slay the spire.

Essentially: has the game mechanics that multiply instead off add?
does a game insentience those? how do levels scale, how does the rest scale? (skill attributes, gear, maybe story locked stat boosts?)

And an important factor: how obvious is that during a first run? do i need in depth knowledge of later game machanics, hiddens mechanics, etc to figure that out?
a) If i can simply find it out by observing the game and engaging with it, i would say, usually its a miss on the playere to not engage with mechanics and instead falls back to grinding.
b) Is it obscured enough that without a guide or "post game clarity" it would not be possible to use them proberly? then its on the game designer, and its arguable that the game is "a grindfest".
c) Does a game simply lack those (outside of exploits and stuff), and its still hard to win? then its a grindfest by design.

Many JRPG fans over defend badly explained systems or games that fall int the b) category.

Octopath did fall between a and b, during the beginning its not that obvious, and only in the second half of the game the value of some of the skills gets clear, and it becomes clearer that gear is more important when you get enough new characters that you need to distribute your gear around. but then it should be obvious how 2 characters with the same level and similar base strength can do such different damage numbers. Yet it definitely is possible without grinding, my second run was waaay shortere and i flew through it with way lower levels since i had "post game clarity" how gear is more important, and what skills would be more usefull.

How do boosts scale nonlinearly in Octopath? Beat the game (and the final boss) but never looked into that.

 

[Monster Mash]

Really excited to see all these reviews independently talking about how much the writing has improved. I felt like the weakest part of Octopath was just how perfunctory all the character stories felt. I still loved the first Octopath, but really wished for more out of its story, especially with the structure of it

 

[SammyJ9]

Really excited to see all these reviews independently talking about how much the writing has improved. I felt like the weakest part of Octopath was just how perfunctory all the character stories felt. I still loved the first Octopath, but really wished for more out of its story, especially with the structure of it

It's interesting to me that some reviews are a bit down on the game for being too similar to the first, while several others are praising it for shaking things up. I guess it depends just how much you wanted things to be changed; Jason Schreier seems to be liking it a lot more than the first, for one.

 

[Vernal]

Cullen's review for RPG Site was recently brought to my attention, and after reading it I must say it's pretty great. Its most interesting snippets showcase some of the unsung strengths of Octopath: (Still give it a click and read it though!)

I imagine when it came time to create a sequel to Octopath Traveler, the development team found it difficult to decide what bits of criticism to take to heart. I think the most common complaint was that the playable characters never interacted with each other’s stories. I too would voice this complaint often when discussing the game, and I think many people will be disappointed to hear this hasn’t been directly addressed. Having spent weeks playing Octopath II, however, I have a better understanding of why it was important to design the game this way, and I actually love it quite a lot.

As I mentioned previously, Octopath Traveler is meant to be a structurally open game that values player freedom. The overall arrangement of eight individual characters with eight distinct storylines may not fit the more traditional and expected structure of a unified JRPG party and a unified goal, thus some concessions are made in order to fit that vision in terms of character dynamics. Maybe it took falling in love with the SaGa games - which share some common components - for me to begin to understand what Octopath was trying to do all along, but I think this was the right direction to take the sequel in. I'd rather not see Octopath change dramatically and risk its identity in order to conform to expectations it doesn’t try to meet. If you’re looking for linear, story-driven, party-centric RPGs, there are an abundance of them.

This one is especially exciting to me:

Even outside of the optional paired storylines, there is an abundance of extra content for players to find. Honestly, there’s an almost overwhelming amount of content in this game. You have your normal JRPG side quests, but much like the original game, they’re often hands-off and offer only vague hints at best on how to solve them. That’ll be a flaw for some, but when all the other side content in the game is equally mysterious and vague, I think it just works. One of the most peculiar moments in my playthrough was walking outside a random cave and noticing the environment and music seemed dark and murky. The music had changed, and my immediate first encounter soon after was an unknown and bizarre enemy that reset the world back to its original state once defeated. The game drew no explicit attention to this, and I was left giddy when I came across it. I feel like some games aren’t brave enough to be this mysterious anymore, and offer content that can be stumbled across by pure chance. I still haven’t figured out what caused this, but it set a precedent for me to uncover all of Octopath II’s secrets. There is a lot to uncover, and I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface.