I enjoy this game. It's extremely flawed mind you. There's a lot of grinding and there's no bonus EXP to share with reserve party members, meaning you have to prepare for the long haul if you wanna complete every story. I also think the Job system is limiting since only one character can have one secondary job and you have to do some musical chairs to make sure your party is aligned correctly. Same with equipping armor for that matter. The journey to the final boss is also really time consuming

Despite this, I pretty much love everything else about this game. I enjoy the break system and the strategies that come with it, making you feel like a genius when you exploit an enemy's weak point. Each character's unique talent really do help with how you strategize each battle. The boss fights are also exciting when you figure them out, and this game can be pretty hard if you don't play it right.

Also being the first game with the HD-2D pixel art aesthetig of 2D sprites in 3D backgrounds and worlds I think it's a pretty killer style. It's definitely pretty flat compared to the games that came after (Octopath II isn't out yet as I type this), but I really do enjoy how the desert, snow, ocean, and forest area look the most as they really show what you can do with this art style. And the music for each of these areas are my favorite. The music during battle is also full of variety depending on the encounter. Being Yasunori Nishiki's first gig in fully composing his own soundtrack and he knocked it out of the park, and I can only hope he does more from here on out.

If you want to know my favorite character stories it's Alfyn > Therion > Primrose > Cyrus > Olberic > Ophilia > Tressa > H'aanit. I think every character has a good story though I definitely have my preferences. Alfyn's surprised me the most hence why I put him on top

So yeah, not a perfect game at all but I really love what this game set out to do. I disagree with the criticism regarding actual character interactions within the story because this game is about their stories in a vacuum; its like Live A Live in that sense, which is probably why we got a remake.

Gameplay's solid, exploiting enemy weaknesses is a very satisfying addition to regular turn-based combat that fleshes it out well, and the characters and classes each bring something fun and unique to the table that made me want to experiment and swap around party comps frequently. Graphics are also beautiful.

I understand why people find the party traveling together despite their stories being so disconnected questionable, but personally that doesn't bother me all that much. The overall quality of the stories is admittedly kind of a mixed bag. Some stories like Alfyn, Olberic and Cyrus's were quite good and featured a lot of fun scenarios and characters, but there were also a fair few lackluster stories like Tressa, H'aanit and especially Primrose.

I think if you like the general gameplay loop, the graphics and are at least intrigued by some of these characters' stories, you'll get a lot of hours out of this, but there's also nothing wrong with skipping this game and playing its superior sequel. If you play this game after 2 I think you'll find some difficulty readjusting to the many features that weren't in 1, but you may still have a good time.

The game looks gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous; the music goes from "ok" to phenomenal; the battle system has some cool ideas and is very simple to understand. And the plot of every character is pretty good. Nothing incredible but gets the job done. Even more when you reach the secret final chapter and everything is put together.

With all this said, I still don't know how they managed to make this game sooo slow, repetitive and plain boring as it is.
If you are a die-hard JRPG fan, I'm sure you will love it.
Otherwise, be careful. Don't be fooled by its reputation and amazing graphics: you are about to swallow a 90 hours-long sleeping pill.
You have been warned.

Ah, Octopath 1.
I remember being a lot hesitant of trying this game when I first got it, because the reception people had on the story and the characters, and I kinda told myself to agree to those statements. For the most part I thought the criticism of the game were enough to justify the "lack of quality" of this title.

But then I swallow this hesitation and finally tried by myself and...... this game is magical.

It's an amazing recreation of a old formula with a tecnology that not only evolves it from a graphical stand point (many people don't think that this game LITERALLY INVENTED the HD2D), but also from a gameplay stand-point, creating a combat that feels simple and deep at the same time, that alone makes you replay the title over and over again.

Yasunori Nishiki, the main composer, is easily my favorite musician in the industry, able to create some of the best OST I have heard in a videogame.

The writing is.... I like to describe it as a really tasty "Pizza Otto Stagioni": basically a meal prepared in eight sections, each with diverse ingredients, with each section having a different "tone" or vibe. As a whole it may feel too segmented (especially for a JRPG) and I get if people may not like it.
But the way it is all presented, prepared and cooked makes you understand how much care was put into it, despite its shortcomings, and makes you appreciate the title even more.

It's not a title for everyone and I personally prefer of Octopath 2 evolves the formula, but nonetheless, I will still recommend Octopath Traveler to any sort of fans of JRPGs. It's a gem!

I do feel a little bad about this. When I decided I Like RPGs Now the other month I dove into this one with the mindset that I'm going to see the story through and not give up when it gets tricky, and here I am doing that.

The battles are fun, or at least they were 30 hours ago. I kind of dread them now but that's probably me getting impatient with the game. The BP and weakness system create good strategies without getting overwhelming. Thing is, I ended up building a party that relies heavily on multi-target elemental attacks to whittle down the enemy defense, and I just ran into a boss whose ability is disabling those specifically.

Not a huge deal, all I have to do is change my party and grind the weaker guys up while figuring out a new angle of attack. Except... in 40+ hours, this game has not managed to make me care about any of these characters. The story is bad. No, worse: the stories are bad. All 8 of them, equally insipid.

I could do the grinding, or I could stop playing.

Oh well. I was only playing this because I heard such good things about the sequel. I established my baseline. Mission accomplished, moving on.

"The characters only have a few conversations with each other!" pop quiz, in no fewer than 200 words describe the fleshed out and engaging relationships between Garrus and Liara or Astarion and Wyll

"It's so grindy!" unironically skill issue, sorry the combat system expects you to learn it instead of brute forcing the entire game with Big Number

"The stories and characters are boring!" you are not worthy to be a worm in the dirt upon which Primrose Azelhart walks

Okay, so I've been militant about this game as like... 5-10% a joke for years. In seriousness, I can acknowledge it's a flawed gem, especially now that it has a sequel that absolutely transcends it.

But I love the anthology-style story, as uneven as the characters are some of them (see above) are great, the artstyle and especially the music should be the stuff of legends, and the Octopath combat system is simply my favorite for a pure RPG, all time. It has a ton of depth but it's also so punchy and bombastic, the sound design alone on the break and boost mechanics is satisfying on an almost indecent level. There's no dopamine rush quite like fighting a group of enemies, systematically wearing down their shields so that they all break on the same turn, and vaporizing them with a fully-boosted AoE spell. It's a system that's tense and challenging and asks a lot of you strategically, and at the same time routinely makes you feel like a wrathful god if you use all the tools at your disposal and meet those demands. Absolutely peak.

The worst thing you can say about Octopath Traveler is that it's not Octopath Traveler II, but that's a devastatingly cruel comparison to make for most games.

I have never fluctuated between enjoying a game and loathing it throughout as much as I have with this one.

It has a pretty fun combat system where you have to attack with your assortment of weapons and spells to break down armour. Doing so will cause the enemy to lose a turn or two while leaving it vulnerable to larger amounts of damage. You can also stack BP in order to strike multiple times with weapons or do big damage with spells. It forces you to choose whether to build up enough attacks to do damage when it's vulnerable or to save it to lower its defences quicker. Certain characters can only use certain weapons or spell types leaving some of them feeling more useless than the rest. Thankfully you eventually find a way to allow characters to add the moves of another party member in the form of jobs.

Each party member has what is known as a "path action" which serve as kind of a special action they can enact on NPCs. Doing so will unlock a variety of options, but most notably is that they are key to completing a lot of the side quests, some of which can be solved in multiple ways due to these path actions. This is a cool idea, but realizing that two characters can have path actions that ultimately do the same thing was kind of a disappointing revelation.

The thing most people laud about this game is the style, and that is completely fair. Vibrant colours and deep blur and bloom paired with the pixel graphics give this game an almost figurine like aesthetic. Enemies are given detailed pixel artwork, and the human enemies tower over you imposingly. It rules. It has a pretty standard fantasy soundtrack that I like a lot. Really good instrumentation that sounds exciting.

The narrative of this game plays out through each individual character's stories. They are not connected to each other whatsoever. This is where things get a bit messy. While some characters' stories are more intriguing than others, they are all fine in their own right. However, having to consume small chunks of each character's story over the course of an 80 hour game is brutal. You are pretty much unable to complete one character's story at a time due to the scaling difficulty. The very nature of this game obliterates its own pacing. Not only that, but party members barely interact at all, due to you being able to obtain them in any order and do each subsequent chapter the same way. I would have understood at the beginning when you are collecting everyone if they interacted very little, but as the game goes on it feels bizarre, and when they do interact it plays out so inorganically because as far as what the game shows, they don't even speak to each other outside of these 20 second intervals every 4 hours.

It's kind of sad to see such a unique product absolutely choke because of its own implementation. I did like the game overall, but it had the potential to be so much more.

It's a grind-fest with the main story quest progression locked by very high jumps in level and divided per character, so when you finally attain the level and can access these key missions, you don't even care or remember the backstory anymore. The game also comes with a cheap excuse to not introduce the rest of the party in the story of the selected character so you miss out from the one thing that makes jrpgs charming: character interactions. Art is good, though. For people with too much time to waste.