I decided to let this game simmer in my mind for a bit before writing up a full review as it was quite a long one. It gives a much better final impression than games tend to, and while I do still think the game is good I think it's not quite as good overall as the last piece of it felt.
I think the short of my thoughts here is that the game has plenty of issues that could be improved in a hypothetical third entry to make for a truly awesome experience, but ultimately it does stick its landing and leave a good impression on top of just being fun to run through in chunks over time.
In this review I'll avoid mentioning many spoilers because I think pointing out the bigger holes in the narrative and such can be done fairly easily without using them much.
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I'll start with this game's presentation: while it does have a mild piss filter resembling the first game, it seems to rely on it less to the point of generally feeling more colorful which I appreciate considering its pixelated style. The game isn't pretty by any means, but its style is distinct and feels fairly fitting of what sort of game it's trying to be; I think the biggest issue with it is that there are very few animations present throughout it, and it becomes noticeable fast. Almost every action that doesn't involve raising a hand or offering a hand or falling over is covered by a heavy writing implication followed by a fade to black with the action having completed. I cannot fathom why so little effort was put into making distinct poses for sprites that could be used generically, even if only for the main eight characters. It made the experience feel weirdly cheap at times. It also doesn't help that there were occasional performance issues on the Switch version, nothing too damning but occasional bits of choppiness or the x2 battle speed being unable to be retained at times.
Further regarding presentation, I found the sound design in the game was pretty remarkable for this style of RPG: the ambient sounds throughout the game were put together pretty carefully, and the soundtrack was (as usual) enjoyable for those who are fans of Eurofantasy-oriented orchestra. I picked up a copy of the soundtrack like I did with the first game so that I could use it easily for background audio when playing TTRPGs with friends -- I'd recommend using it for anyone who, again, is playing something like Pathfinder or D&D. Hell, I even see myself using some bits of this one for Call of Cthulhu.
The voice acting in this game was... okay, bordering on a bit misdirected at times. There were a few characters, notably Ori, who seemingly peaked the mic a number of times yet still had that kept in the game. To be honest I thought that was charming in a way, but obviously it's not exactly professional or immersive like the rest of the game's sound tends to be. I sampled the Japanese voices and played most of the game with English ones so I could do other things while cutscenes autoplayed, and neither cast stuck out a whole ton to me. I will say, though, that some of the voices I disliked from the English cast tended to sound a bit better to me in Japanese. I think if you're looking to play the game with the best possible voice acting experience you'll want to run Japanese even if only for virtue of the microphones not peaking.
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The gameplay loop is probably the strongest thing about this game. I don't tend to play games this long, let alone without speedups of some kind, but I was hooked throughout the 80 hour runtime simply for how satisfying the combat was. It's more or less identical to the first game, which despite its other shortcomings was still fun enough for me to nearly 100% just cause. It helps that the game generally feels good to play, too, with its controls being so intuitive even for its genre that I felt myself using muscle memory from it in other games to my embarrassment and detriment. It mixes well with the gameplay consistently being addictive and fun to run through in long bursts, though very long sessions with lots of story chapters tended to be more fatiguing.
Anyway, to describe the loop, you begin the first chapters of the eight playable characters as a mini loop of its own, then you begin to fill out the map as you complete more chapters with your party. As you do so you have plenty of battles, each of which provides opportunities to test for and learn the weaknesses of each individual creature so that you can exploit them in further combat. Along the way you fulfill side quests that often involve using Path Actions (special overworld abilities each character has) or fetching items along the way, breaking up the monotony of straight up combat while giving more opportunities to get to know the cities and roads of the world. You face bosses at the ends of most chapters, then you rinse and repeat all I described until you've finished the eight paths. Once that's done you unlock a final story a la Sonic Adventure, and from there it's a somewhat straight shot to the final boss. The loop is fairly simple but the combat is deeply rewarding to setting up effective move and party combinations, with damage numbers soaring into the tens of thousands by lategame if you play your cards right.
Compared to the first game the level curve is also much more generous in this one; while in the first game I swept through the back half of the game with very low-level characters using upgraded gear, I found that in this one I was somehow able to get the last four party members up to the exact same levels as the first four just from engaging in the main gameplay loop. That was probably the most notable general improvement, though the inclusion of a final story to bring all your characters together for a while before facing the final boss was also something I felt was sorely needed in the first game, which treated the secret superboss as its final boss with not much else to speak of in terms of 8-person party interaction.
Speaking of final bosses and combat, the final boss was an absolute joy to fight in this game, feeling like an absolute test of everything you've learned and strategized around up until the end. It felt like the kind of boss where you could surely do much lower leveled runs if you replayed it enough to figure everything out about it, and from what I can tell people have done just that. Still, following the game's standard level curve I felt like I had just the right amount of challenge for that boss and I can't praise it enough for that. JRPG final bosses don't tend to be the most engaging in the world mechanically, at least out of the ones I've played, but this one most certainly was.
There were also a lot of small things that I think were cool to have in the world. Being able to buy your way into things like an overworld ship and a worldwide music picker/player in taverns was soooooo cool, as was getting to change the time from day to night to access completely different NPCs and quests. The day-night cycle in general felt well executed on nearly all fronts, with various random mechanics tying into it in a way that felt like the world was imposing itself onto you as something grander than just a game (which is a pretentious way of saying that it helped immerse me and reminded me of how immersive Pokémon's second generation was in a similar vein). Getting to choose verses for the Song of Hope based on your personal takeaways was great, and so was the general gameplay of using one of many different mechanics to make your way past or toward NPCs for various ends. Everywhere it can, this game gives the player ways to feel like they're making their way through a little yet strongly cohesive world.
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Now to finally talk about the narrative! Oh boy! I would consider this the most mixed thing about the game, though overall I'd consider it to be a massive overhaul over the first entry (not that that was a high bar to begin with). The amount of party banter is pretty immense and I'm glad you can check it at any time in the Journal menu, though I very much wish there were more of them that featured more than 2 characters in a scene. Still, they were nice. They also helped add to the main narratives without padding them out too much, giving the characters much more flavor and time to speak while not giving them a ton of additional chapters (though the game did do that, and I appreciate it!).
While the first game felt as if it was 3/4 fluff stories with absolutely no substance to speak of while the remaining two were a bit more spotty in quality, this game flips much of that on its head. The vast majority of the eight paths in the game feel world-changingly important in context even without having equal stakes, and all of them being tied to each other one way or another certainly helps with the sense of cohesion in the party coming together toward their common goal in the final story. The secondary side stories were also a welcome inclusion, adding quite a lot more interactions between party members than the travel banter (which is still nice, don't get me wrong!). I do believe the quality is still spotty in all but the best of the eight paths, but overall it's appreciable and creates some interesting untouched threads clearly meant for the player to imagine about themselves or to make the world feel bigger than the confines of the game.
Again, world-changing importance does not necessarily mean stakes that are individually high. I found Agnea the Dancer's path to be the absolute height of the game's writing, constantly becoming better and better until its finale hit with a force significantly more powerful than anything the rest of the paths had to offer and an awesome final boss to match. The stakes? Agnea's career as a potential star in the world of entertainment. By comparison, Hikari's kingdom-retaking anti-war quest or Partitio's plan to kill poverty are significantly more 'important', but the game does a wonderful job of making everyone's individual stories feel impactful even if only for themselves. I was just as compelled to get through Throné's quest for freedom as I was to get through Temenos' mystery of a pontiff's murder, and I found that to be remarkable when looking back on it. One connecting thread that bothered me a bit was just how much the characters' parents were intertwined with their children's stories, as in basically guiding them into their current positions; I wouldn't have minded it much if it weren't so consistent and sometimes overemphasized. It's at least well utilized for the most part wherever it comes up, but it's somewhere in the realm of heavy-handed just how much these characters were inspired by or follow in the footsteps of their parents specifically.
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Returning to the paths, I found that only Osvald and Ochette were not particularly interesting even from the get-go, each for their own reasons. Ochette's story is a mix of bog-standard "gather X elemental Ys to save Z land" and vaguely ethnically insensitive gestures via the 'noble savage' trope applied to the primary non-white non-Japanese section of the game's world. It is veiled sloppily through an anthropocentric lens of "humans vs. beasts" where the kemonomimi species of Beastlings are persecuted by humans for their land. Yet, they just forgive forgive forgive and protect the humans until those humans just up and decide "you know what? I guess it's fine, we won't threaten your lives to take your land anymore" because the humans realized that they should be respected due to what is put forward as 'uncorrupted by civilization' values of peace and oneness with nature. Wow! I would genuinely not blame anyone for wanting to skip out on finishing the game just because they find this particular part of it to be indigestible. I only didn't skip every cutscene because I make myself read through everything for the purposes of reviewing literature within games to improve my own writing -- if I didn't feel committed to that I would absolutely have held B to skip every word.
As for Osvald, it's probably the only path that both starts uninteresting and finishes uninteresting. Following the boring nothing-tier story of the Scholar from the first game, Osvald's is a tale of single-minded revenge with fluffy bits of pulpy writing all over it that felt out of an older cartoon trying to escape the animation age ghetto by being "darker" than its peers. In reality it's the path that resembles the first game the most in that it's just a few chapters long, none of those chapters amount to anything of substance, and the ending is just the conclusion of the first and only thread ever established within it at all. His main villain is hilariously tropey, though, so I'll give the game that. Almost bad fanfiction tier, but in a way that I could giggle at. All the twists and turns in it are a nothingburger that only serve to undermine what few bits of intrigue existed in his path's premise, which I find very funny. If you loved Octopath 1's writing, Osvald's path is the one for you.
I'll get through the rest of the main paths in succession in roughly ascending order of quality. Throné's path is probably the only one where the very end of it makes a joke out of the rest of it as it all led up to what could very easily be described as a retcon involving an immortal sexual assaulter vampire-style hypnotizing various people (maybe?) so he could make a million children all across the Octopath 2 world for Reasons. Throné's 'true purpose' in the final path works fine even without this, so it seems like a genuine waste of writing that throws her simple but evocative dream of being free of a bloody and dark profession into the shitter. I hate hate hate that end section, but everything leading up to it was for the most part fine. The depiction of Stockholm syndrome in a character during one of the later chapters was a little clumsy but did its job, too, surprising me with its acknowledgement even if it was shallower than it could have been.
Castti's story would be in a similar boat to the last one if not for the fact that her final villain is about as funny as Osvald's while not at all ruining her own story in general. Her story is certainly the least interesting overall, sure, but I think the general twists and turns were exciting and their individual premises were strong as vignettes of a doctor doing her duty. It's a nice example of the sort of optimism the game strives for, as it feels somewhat formulaic like Osvald's or Octopath 1's paths yet does plenty with its formula to tell short and sweet stories. I think my main problem with Castti is just her being flanderized and pigeonholed as a "mother hen" for simply doing her job, putting a vaguely sexist tint onto her character writing that was otherwise just fine.
Hikari's path was fanfictiony feeling like Osvald's but with a positive connotation. Being a prince cast out of his kingdom while having some sort of demonic half constantly tempting him into causing the bloodshed he consciously hates so much sounds like something out of Fire Emblem, honestly. I don't really mind it, though, as his quest to gather allies and return to take his home back and bring about a world without war and slaughter is a solid one to go through. It's just a simple story from start to finish but does plenty to endear the player to Hikari as a character, not to mention his allies. I find that him contradicting and criticizing the hierarchical nature of monarchy to be something that feels very TTRPG -- I'll get to that sentiment later, as it's something that connects more than a few threads in the game.
Temenos' path is like Hikari's in the sense that it's fairly straightforward and works plenty well to endear the player to him and his allies; when deaths happen in Temenos' story, the player does feel their gravity. I find that to be pretty impressive considering how short of a runtime each path's chapters ultimately have, so I applaud the writers for getting across so much appreciative character writing within such a space. I can't say much about it because it being a mystery makes just about anything a spoiler, but the short of it is that while the mystery isn't the most compelling out there, it does its job well enough to give a good impression of just who Temenos is and feels, again, very TTRPG.
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Spoilers ahead for this section! After this section's over I'm returning to no-spoiler territory, so feel free to skip past this bit!
I think the implications of Partitio's path are just as interesting as the text itself, that text being carried primarily by the character's personality and sheer charisma. Probably more likeable than any character in either game besides Agnea, Partitio's forward-thinking nature is, like Hikari's, something almost anachronistic but neat. The interesting thing is that I've seen at least a few people bring up that Partitio's beliefs and actions can be boiled down at most to "ending poverty by being a Good Capitalist", but I find that that take misrepresents what the game is going for a fair bit. I do agree that the game as a whole is hardly trying to be revolutionary; if anything, it's generally conservative such as in how it's portraying this particular slice of culture as being on some inevitable path toward where we are now even in fantasy worlds. However, I do want to bring up the pieces that are a bit more hopeful in ways that do flirt with actual change:
- Partitio sets up a seemingly worker-owned and worker-run department store by flipping a converted run-down warehouse with the help of those workers. He does it in order to earn Alrond's trust, yes, and he names it after him as a feudal lord of sorts, yes, but the actual establishment is neither land he has given Partitio nor a factory or similar place that he owns and rents out or "gifts" to the workers. This is supported by Alrond's own personality being portrayed as eccentric, hopeful, and forward thinking, as well as the narrative implication of Roque's staunchly capitalist ideals being at odds with Alrond's lack of trust for big businessmen in contrast to the developing working class.
- The Partitio & Roque company that plans to create railways across the land for the sake of transportation and cultural exchange is pretty straightforward in its ideals. Given his connections to actual governing bodies via Hikari, Alrond, and Roque, I would be most curious to see if there would one day be actual government interplay with his company and others to adopt more publicly developed and run transport, particularly once nations develop into countries resembling ours more (as the game does, again, indirectly suggest may come to be). Given Partitio's demeanor and ideals I'd not be surprised if he were more interested in working in construction and maintenance rather than privately managing major infrastructure.
- Further adding to his style and idealism, Partitio straight up distributes plans for (and possibly units/materials of -- it's implied but not stated) the steam engine while eschewing the tightly-held concept of copyright and patent that Roque had previously clung to, all for the sake of creating jobs for as many people as possible and allowing people to own their own means of producing what they will.
Are these things enough to declare Partitio some grand Marx-like figure within his world? Fuck no, and obviously we don't see the changes affect the world mechanically for the remaining brief runtime of the game either. I do think that it's disingenuous to present his story as neoliberal capitalist dickriding, though, as it does at least have some potentially post-capitalist or alt-universe post-feudal ideas to sling around within the context of its world even if it doesn't develop them past the end of Partitio's path. Like the others, I find it's almost TTRPG-esque in that way. It's because of those general merits and Partitio's own personality that I found his story to be enjoyable overall, if not one of my favorites. It illustrates a lot of what this game is both compared to the first game and on its own, that being a respectable number of steps forward yet not a whole leap.
The final path is something I'll only spoil in light bits so that it's easy for someone to skip past here without seeing much. I believe the final path is what showed the most of the game's missed potential yet also caps everything off with exactly the sort of hope the narrative is going for overall. In this path only you are able to switch between your eight characters at will on the overworld - something which absolutely should have been available since the beginning of the game - and the game does not give quest markers, instead letting the player investigate the world for themselves. I found this to be wonderful and fun (outside of the repetitive music, that is), but most of all I found it lovely that they actually had a ton of character interactions in cutscenes between the entire cast of eight. Did I dislike Ochette's story and context? Sure, but her actual personality is still fun and has plenty of chemistry with the rest of the cast. These characters are all able to interact with each other in a way that shows off just how likeable absolutely everyone is, and it all culminates in a feeling of genuine happiness when finishing the final boss and getting to see the epilogue of Agnea giving a performance for her companions and loved ones. It feels... TTRPG.
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Now I finally get to get to the strangely worded thing I've been bringing up all throughout the narrative portion of this review!
When I say this game feels very TTRPG, I mean that a lot of pieces of the game's soul and writing feel like things derived from a tabletop roleplaying game that could have conceivably been played in the setting of Octopath 2's world. At one point I even wondered if the developers did so in order to get a feel for the world and characters and narratives to implement into the final game. Despite the game not getting enough time to flesh out the characters very strongly, they retained a sense of consistent likeability (outside of Castti's odd flanderization) simply from acting in ways resembling roleplayers being given the scenarios and backstories they have.
As I've said before, Hikari and Partitio in particular act in ways that feel much less like people who would realistically be in their positions and more like players playing characters with the benefit of hindsight... and I don't mind this at all, as it simply adds to the cozy and fantastical nature of things. As awesome as it would have been for things to be more heated and forward, I don't think it's particularly apt to claim that the game is trying to be something it's not or is not doing what one would have expected out of it.
The game isn't putting forward a powerful and compelling political drama about a noble combating hierarchy or a merchant tearing down capitalism before it has even fully taken a foothold in feudal civilizations: it's putting forward people roleplaying characters with some very modern goals and very modern overall ideals into a world that's very different from the one we currently live in. It's somewhere in the space of genuine idealism yet not full on revolution, and the game puts forward what it can even without a full focused game's runtime worth of nuance. That's... fine enough, I'd say, as in general it seems the game is going for that blend of current with decades to centuries past as its presentation suggests. Again, I do think it would have been cooler if the game challenged modern systems rather than previous-system strawmen of sorts, but also again I don't think I ever expected it to do so. If I wanted that, I'd be looking elsewhere.
So again, the way everyone acts isn't quite true to life, no, as the characters feel less realistic than they do as performances: whenever there was some banter between party members or they made quips or commentary or reactions toward their circumstances, it felt like something I'd expect to hear at the table. At times it was amateurish, or edgy, or almost preachy, but it was those things in a way that gave off a sense of genuine heart and optimism, not people having no writing chops.
The very low but present amount of emergent gameplay provided by the various Path Actions also gives this sense of tabletop-esque identity: it feels like players using their abilities from their sheets in applicable situations like in a tabletop game rather than straight up mechanical abuse. Hell, those mechanics depend on your party composition to the point where sometimes you may straight up switch out party members just to get something you want from a given NPC not unlike asking someone at the table if they can do something for you to further a plan of yours.
The way the world unfolds and is presented to the players, too, feels like a tabletop game. The open-world nature of the game excels at providing this sort of experience, as it sheds some of the uglier points of that genre through its own primary genre's strengths in order to give the player a world that feels like they're exploring and learning new things all the time rather than unlocking the correct routes by passing through key item gates as other RPGs might. It resembles a CRPG more than most JRPGs in that sense, though I would say the structure of the game resembles more how a tabletop game will have a variety of random plot threads and beats for each player as well as improvised stories at just about any location rather than having a single linear (or branching) narrative with sidequests per settlement.
That the game features plenty of individual focus per character depending on who is in the party is what I would say hits that feeling the hardest, though. It reflects the exact scenario of someone giving their players some focus moments throughout a campaign, with those moments tending to be focused just on the character's personal story with the party supporting them, with the focus being on someone who is (obviously) at the table that day. From the mix of quality to the weaker ends, it feels very much like TTRPGs as they're run, and I find that fascinating.
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In general I think one of the reasons why I resonated with this game so much throughout its runtime was because of the distinct TTRPG feeling it gave. It was almost cozy in a sense, getting to play through it in bursts for a long time and chilling for the ride as if I were playing a tabletop game and watching it unfold with an unseen person or people running it. The feeling given off by the sound design alone was nothing short of magical, resembling the calm wonder I always feel when I play tabletop games with my friends and acquaintances. Altogether much of the game's runtime was good and the conclusion was strong, with the overall narrative being just good enough to keep me interested while not overpowering the fun gameplay that could be found everywhere within the living, breathing world.
It was hard to pick the rating I did for this game, as it falls somewhere between this rating and the one above it. I do think the overall vibes really did add a lot to it as a whole, and that counts for a lot, but the problems the game does have are glaring and gross to think about. Still, having a likeable cast, solid gameplay, and a unique feeling few other video games can give adds up to something that felt worthy of just about all the time I put in... even getting through the shittier parts. I think that if we were to get an Octopath Traveler III and the writing team were, uh, rearranged and expanded to prune some of the worse elements of what this team produced, it could very well be the ultimate one of these games. I'm not sure if they'd be able to put together a path better than Agnea's (seriously, my brief description did not do that one justice; it feels practically made for artists and it's lovely), but they can certainly try to nearly match it and bring up consistency beyond what this game had.
I think this game is very much what a second entry should be, and I say that with a healthy dose of realism: a follow-up doesn't have to perfect what a previous entry did, no, but it should at least do everything it can to strive for greatness. I don't know for sure if this game achieved true greatness, but I can absolutely say that the amount of improvement shows and it's got plenty going for it. It's certainly worth a prospective player's time, but there's still lots of room for growth.
I think the short of my thoughts here is that the game has plenty of issues that could be improved in a hypothetical third entry to make for a truly awesome experience, but ultimately it does stick its landing and leave a good impression on top of just being fun to run through in chunks over time.
In this review I'll avoid mentioning many spoilers because I think pointing out the bigger holes in the narrative and such can be done fairly easily without using them much.
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I'll start with this game's presentation: while it does have a mild piss filter resembling the first game, it seems to rely on it less to the point of generally feeling more colorful which I appreciate considering its pixelated style. The game isn't pretty by any means, but its style is distinct and feels fairly fitting of what sort of game it's trying to be; I think the biggest issue with it is that there are very few animations present throughout it, and it becomes noticeable fast. Almost every action that doesn't involve raising a hand or offering a hand or falling over is covered by a heavy writing implication followed by a fade to black with the action having completed. I cannot fathom why so little effort was put into making distinct poses for sprites that could be used generically, even if only for the main eight characters. It made the experience feel weirdly cheap at times. It also doesn't help that there were occasional performance issues on the Switch version, nothing too damning but occasional bits of choppiness or the x2 battle speed being unable to be retained at times.
Further regarding presentation, I found the sound design in the game was pretty remarkable for this style of RPG: the ambient sounds throughout the game were put together pretty carefully, and the soundtrack was (as usual) enjoyable for those who are fans of Eurofantasy-oriented orchestra. I picked up a copy of the soundtrack like I did with the first game so that I could use it easily for background audio when playing TTRPGs with friends -- I'd recommend using it for anyone who, again, is playing something like Pathfinder or D&D. Hell, I even see myself using some bits of this one for Call of Cthulhu.
The voice acting in this game was... okay, bordering on a bit misdirected at times. There were a few characters, notably Ori, who seemingly peaked the mic a number of times yet still had that kept in the game. To be honest I thought that was charming in a way, but obviously it's not exactly professional or immersive like the rest of the game's sound tends to be. I sampled the Japanese voices and played most of the game with English ones so I could do other things while cutscenes autoplayed, and neither cast stuck out a whole ton to me. I will say, though, that some of the voices I disliked from the English cast tended to sound a bit better to me in Japanese. I think if you're looking to play the game with the best possible voice acting experience you'll want to run Japanese even if only for virtue of the microphones not peaking.
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The gameplay loop is probably the strongest thing about this game. I don't tend to play games this long, let alone without speedups of some kind, but I was hooked throughout the 80 hour runtime simply for how satisfying the combat was. It's more or less identical to the first game, which despite its other shortcomings was still fun enough for me to nearly 100% just cause. It helps that the game generally feels good to play, too, with its controls being so intuitive even for its genre that I felt myself using muscle memory from it in other games to my embarrassment and detriment. It mixes well with the gameplay consistently being addictive and fun to run through in long bursts, though very long sessions with lots of story chapters tended to be more fatiguing.
Anyway, to describe the loop, you begin the first chapters of the eight playable characters as a mini loop of its own, then you begin to fill out the map as you complete more chapters with your party. As you do so you have plenty of battles, each of which provides opportunities to test for and learn the weaknesses of each individual creature so that you can exploit them in further combat. Along the way you fulfill side quests that often involve using Path Actions (special overworld abilities each character has) or fetching items along the way, breaking up the monotony of straight up combat while giving more opportunities to get to know the cities and roads of the world. You face bosses at the ends of most chapters, then you rinse and repeat all I described until you've finished the eight paths. Once that's done you unlock a final story a la Sonic Adventure, and from there it's a somewhat straight shot to the final boss. The loop is fairly simple but the combat is deeply rewarding to setting up effective move and party combinations, with damage numbers soaring into the tens of thousands by lategame if you play your cards right.
Compared to the first game the level curve is also much more generous in this one; while in the first game I swept through the back half of the game with very low-level characters using upgraded gear, I found that in this one I was somehow able to get the last four party members up to the exact same levels as the first four just from engaging in the main gameplay loop. That was probably the most notable general improvement, though the inclusion of a final story to bring all your characters together for a while before facing the final boss was also something I felt was sorely needed in the first game, which treated the secret superboss as its final boss with not much else to speak of in terms of 8-person party interaction.
Speaking of final bosses and combat, the final boss was an absolute joy to fight in this game, feeling like an absolute test of everything you've learned and strategized around up until the end. It felt like the kind of boss where you could surely do much lower leveled runs if you replayed it enough to figure everything out about it, and from what I can tell people have done just that. Still, following the game's standard level curve I felt like I had just the right amount of challenge for that boss and I can't praise it enough for that. JRPG final bosses don't tend to be the most engaging in the world mechanically, at least out of the ones I've played, but this one most certainly was.
There were also a lot of small things that I think were cool to have in the world. Being able to buy your way into things like an overworld ship and a worldwide music picker/player in taverns was soooooo cool, as was getting to change the time from day to night to access completely different NPCs and quests. The day-night cycle in general felt well executed on nearly all fronts, with various random mechanics tying into it in a way that felt like the world was imposing itself onto you as something grander than just a game (which is a pretentious way of saying that it helped immerse me and reminded me of how immersive Pokémon's second generation was in a similar vein). Getting to choose verses for the Song of Hope based on your personal takeaways was great, and so was the general gameplay of using one of many different mechanics to make your way past or toward NPCs for various ends. Everywhere it can, this game gives the player ways to feel like they're making their way through a little yet strongly cohesive world.
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Now to finally talk about the narrative! Oh boy! I would consider this the most mixed thing about the game, though overall I'd consider it to be a massive overhaul over the first entry (not that that was a high bar to begin with). The amount of party banter is pretty immense and I'm glad you can check it at any time in the Journal menu, though I very much wish there were more of them that featured more than 2 characters in a scene. Still, they were nice. They also helped add to the main narratives without padding them out too much, giving the characters much more flavor and time to speak while not giving them a ton of additional chapters (though the game did do that, and I appreciate it!).
While the first game felt as if it was 3/4 fluff stories with absolutely no substance to speak of while the remaining two were a bit more spotty in quality, this game flips much of that on its head. The vast majority of the eight paths in the game feel world-changingly important in context even without having equal stakes, and all of them being tied to each other one way or another certainly helps with the sense of cohesion in the party coming together toward their common goal in the final story. The secondary side stories were also a welcome inclusion, adding quite a lot more interactions between party members than the travel banter (which is still nice, don't get me wrong!). I do believe the quality is still spotty in all but the best of the eight paths, but overall it's appreciable and creates some interesting untouched threads clearly meant for the player to imagine about themselves or to make the world feel bigger than the confines of the game.
Again, world-changing importance does not necessarily mean stakes that are individually high. I found Agnea the Dancer's path to be the absolute height of the game's writing, constantly becoming better and better until its finale hit with a force significantly more powerful than anything the rest of the paths had to offer and an awesome final boss to match. The stakes? Agnea's career as a potential star in the world of entertainment. By comparison, Hikari's kingdom-retaking anti-war quest or Partitio's plan to kill poverty are significantly more 'important', but the game does a wonderful job of making everyone's individual stories feel impactful even if only for themselves. I was just as compelled to get through Throné's quest for freedom as I was to get through Temenos' mystery of a pontiff's murder, and I found that to be remarkable when looking back on it. One connecting thread that bothered me a bit was just how much the characters' parents were intertwined with their children's stories, as in basically guiding them into their current positions; I wouldn't have minded it much if it weren't so consistent and sometimes overemphasized. It's at least well utilized for the most part wherever it comes up, but it's somewhere in the realm of heavy-handed just how much these characters were inspired by or follow in the footsteps of their parents specifically.
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Returning to the paths, I found that only Osvald and Ochette were not particularly interesting even from the get-go, each for their own reasons. Ochette's story is a mix of bog-standard "gather X elemental Ys to save Z land" and vaguely ethnically insensitive gestures via the 'noble savage' trope applied to the primary non-white non-Japanese section of the game's world. It is veiled sloppily through an anthropocentric lens of "humans vs. beasts" where the kemonomimi species of Beastlings are persecuted by humans for their land. Yet, they just forgive forgive forgive and protect the humans until those humans just up and decide "you know what? I guess it's fine, we won't threaten your lives to take your land anymore" because the humans realized that they should be respected due to what is put forward as 'uncorrupted by civilization' values of peace and oneness with nature. Wow! I would genuinely not blame anyone for wanting to skip out on finishing the game just because they find this particular part of it to be indigestible. I only didn't skip every cutscene because I make myself read through everything for the purposes of reviewing literature within games to improve my own writing -- if I didn't feel committed to that I would absolutely have held B to skip every word.
As for Osvald, it's probably the only path that both starts uninteresting and finishes uninteresting. Following the boring nothing-tier story of the Scholar from the first game, Osvald's is a tale of single-minded revenge with fluffy bits of pulpy writing all over it that felt out of an older cartoon trying to escape the animation age ghetto by being "darker" than its peers. In reality it's the path that resembles the first game the most in that it's just a few chapters long, none of those chapters amount to anything of substance, and the ending is just the conclusion of the first and only thread ever established within it at all. His main villain is hilariously tropey, though, so I'll give the game that. Almost bad fanfiction tier, but in a way that I could giggle at. All the twists and turns in it are a nothingburger that only serve to undermine what few bits of intrigue existed in his path's premise, which I find very funny. If you loved Octopath 1's writing, Osvald's path is the one for you.
I'll get through the rest of the main paths in succession in roughly ascending order of quality. Throné's path is probably the only one where the very end of it makes a joke out of the rest of it as it all led up to what could very easily be described as a retcon involving an immortal sexual assaulter vampire-style hypnotizing various people (maybe?) so he could make a million children all across the Octopath 2 world for Reasons. Throné's 'true purpose' in the final path works fine even without this, so it seems like a genuine waste of writing that throws her simple but evocative dream of being free of a bloody and dark profession into the shitter. I hate hate hate that end section, but everything leading up to it was for the most part fine. The depiction of Stockholm syndrome in a character during one of the later chapters was a little clumsy but did its job, too, surprising me with its acknowledgement even if it was shallower than it could have been.
Castti's story would be in a similar boat to the last one if not for the fact that her final villain is about as funny as Osvald's while not at all ruining her own story in general. Her story is certainly the least interesting overall, sure, but I think the general twists and turns were exciting and their individual premises were strong as vignettes of a doctor doing her duty. It's a nice example of the sort of optimism the game strives for, as it feels somewhat formulaic like Osvald's or Octopath 1's paths yet does plenty with its formula to tell short and sweet stories. I think my main problem with Castti is just her being flanderized and pigeonholed as a "mother hen" for simply doing her job, putting a vaguely sexist tint onto her character writing that was otherwise just fine.
Hikari's path was fanfictiony feeling like Osvald's but with a positive connotation. Being a prince cast out of his kingdom while having some sort of demonic half constantly tempting him into causing the bloodshed he consciously hates so much sounds like something out of Fire Emblem, honestly. I don't really mind it, though, as his quest to gather allies and return to take his home back and bring about a world without war and slaughter is a solid one to go through. It's just a simple story from start to finish but does plenty to endear the player to Hikari as a character, not to mention his allies. I find that him contradicting and criticizing the hierarchical nature of monarchy to be something that feels very TTRPG -- I'll get to that sentiment later, as it's something that connects more than a few threads in the game.
Temenos' path is like Hikari's in the sense that it's fairly straightforward and works plenty well to endear the player to him and his allies; when deaths happen in Temenos' story, the player does feel their gravity. I find that to be pretty impressive considering how short of a runtime each path's chapters ultimately have, so I applaud the writers for getting across so much appreciative character writing within such a space. I can't say much about it because it being a mystery makes just about anything a spoiler, but the short of it is that while the mystery isn't the most compelling out there, it does its job well enough to give a good impression of just who Temenos is and feels, again, very TTRPG.
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Spoilers ahead for this section! After this section's over I'm returning to no-spoiler territory, so feel free to skip past this bit!
I think the implications of Partitio's path are just as interesting as the text itself, that text being carried primarily by the character's personality and sheer charisma. Probably more likeable than any character in either game besides Agnea, Partitio's forward-thinking nature is, like Hikari's, something almost anachronistic but neat. The interesting thing is that I've seen at least a few people bring up that Partitio's beliefs and actions can be boiled down at most to "ending poverty by being a Good Capitalist", but I find that that take misrepresents what the game is going for a fair bit. I do agree that the game as a whole is hardly trying to be revolutionary; if anything, it's generally conservative such as in how it's portraying this particular slice of culture as being on some inevitable path toward where we are now even in fantasy worlds. However, I do want to bring up the pieces that are a bit more hopeful in ways that do flirt with actual change:
- Partitio sets up a seemingly worker-owned and worker-run department store by flipping a converted run-down warehouse with the help of those workers. He does it in order to earn Alrond's trust, yes, and he names it after him as a feudal lord of sorts, yes, but the actual establishment is neither land he has given Partitio nor a factory or similar place that he owns and rents out or "gifts" to the workers. This is supported by Alrond's own personality being portrayed as eccentric, hopeful, and forward thinking, as well as the narrative implication of Roque's staunchly capitalist ideals being at odds with Alrond's lack of trust for big businessmen in contrast to the developing working class.
- The Partitio & Roque company that plans to create railways across the land for the sake of transportation and cultural exchange is pretty straightforward in its ideals. Given his connections to actual governing bodies via Hikari, Alrond, and Roque, I would be most curious to see if there would one day be actual government interplay with his company and others to adopt more publicly developed and run transport, particularly once nations develop into countries resembling ours more (as the game does, again, indirectly suggest may come to be). Given Partitio's demeanor and ideals I'd not be surprised if he were more interested in working in construction and maintenance rather than privately managing major infrastructure.
- Further adding to his style and idealism, Partitio straight up distributes plans for (and possibly units/materials of -- it's implied but not stated) the steam engine while eschewing the tightly-held concept of copyright and patent that Roque had previously clung to, all for the sake of creating jobs for as many people as possible and allowing people to own their own means of producing what they will.
Are these things enough to declare Partitio some grand Marx-like figure within his world? Fuck no, and obviously we don't see the changes affect the world mechanically for the remaining brief runtime of the game either. I do think that it's disingenuous to present his story as neoliberal capitalist dickriding, though, as it does at least have some potentially post-capitalist or alt-universe post-feudal ideas to sling around within the context of its world even if it doesn't develop them past the end of Partitio's path. Like the others, I find it's almost TTRPG-esque in that way. It's because of those general merits and Partitio's own personality that I found his story to be enjoyable overall, if not one of my favorites. It illustrates a lot of what this game is both compared to the first game and on its own, that being a respectable number of steps forward yet not a whole leap.
The final path is something I'll only spoil in light bits so that it's easy for someone to skip past here without seeing much. I believe the final path is what showed the most of the game's missed potential yet also caps everything off with exactly the sort of hope the narrative is going for overall. In this path only you are able to switch between your eight characters at will on the overworld - something which absolutely should have been available since the beginning of the game - and the game does not give quest markers, instead letting the player investigate the world for themselves. I found this to be wonderful and fun (outside of the repetitive music, that is), but most of all I found it lovely that they actually had a ton of character interactions in cutscenes between the entire cast of eight. Did I dislike Ochette's story and context? Sure, but her actual personality is still fun and has plenty of chemistry with the rest of the cast. These characters are all able to interact with each other in a way that shows off just how likeable absolutely everyone is, and it all culminates in a feeling of genuine happiness when finishing the final boss and getting to see the epilogue of Agnea giving a performance for her companions and loved ones. It feels... TTRPG.
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Now I finally get to get to the strangely worded thing I've been bringing up all throughout the narrative portion of this review!
When I say this game feels very TTRPG, I mean that a lot of pieces of the game's soul and writing feel like things derived from a tabletop roleplaying game that could have conceivably been played in the setting of Octopath 2's world. At one point I even wondered if the developers did so in order to get a feel for the world and characters and narratives to implement into the final game. Despite the game not getting enough time to flesh out the characters very strongly, they retained a sense of consistent likeability (outside of Castti's odd flanderization) simply from acting in ways resembling roleplayers being given the scenarios and backstories they have.
As I've said before, Hikari and Partitio in particular act in ways that feel much less like people who would realistically be in their positions and more like players playing characters with the benefit of hindsight... and I don't mind this at all, as it simply adds to the cozy and fantastical nature of things. As awesome as it would have been for things to be more heated and forward, I don't think it's particularly apt to claim that the game is trying to be something it's not or is not doing what one would have expected out of it.
The game isn't putting forward a powerful and compelling political drama about a noble combating hierarchy or a merchant tearing down capitalism before it has even fully taken a foothold in feudal civilizations: it's putting forward people roleplaying characters with some very modern goals and very modern overall ideals into a world that's very different from the one we currently live in. It's somewhere in the space of genuine idealism yet not full on revolution, and the game puts forward what it can even without a full focused game's runtime worth of nuance. That's... fine enough, I'd say, as in general it seems the game is going for that blend of current with decades to centuries past as its presentation suggests. Again, I do think it would have been cooler if the game challenged modern systems rather than previous-system strawmen of sorts, but also again I don't think I ever expected it to do so. If I wanted that, I'd be looking elsewhere.
So again, the way everyone acts isn't quite true to life, no, as the characters feel less realistic than they do as performances: whenever there was some banter between party members or they made quips or commentary or reactions toward their circumstances, it felt like something I'd expect to hear at the table. At times it was amateurish, or edgy, or almost preachy, but it was those things in a way that gave off a sense of genuine heart and optimism, not people having no writing chops.
The very low but present amount of emergent gameplay provided by the various Path Actions also gives this sense of tabletop-esque identity: it feels like players using their abilities from their sheets in applicable situations like in a tabletop game rather than straight up mechanical abuse. Hell, those mechanics depend on your party composition to the point where sometimes you may straight up switch out party members just to get something you want from a given NPC not unlike asking someone at the table if they can do something for you to further a plan of yours.
The way the world unfolds and is presented to the players, too, feels like a tabletop game. The open-world nature of the game excels at providing this sort of experience, as it sheds some of the uglier points of that genre through its own primary genre's strengths in order to give the player a world that feels like they're exploring and learning new things all the time rather than unlocking the correct routes by passing through key item gates as other RPGs might. It resembles a CRPG more than most JRPGs in that sense, though I would say the structure of the game resembles more how a tabletop game will have a variety of random plot threads and beats for each player as well as improvised stories at just about any location rather than having a single linear (or branching) narrative with sidequests per settlement.
That the game features plenty of individual focus per character depending on who is in the party is what I would say hits that feeling the hardest, though. It reflects the exact scenario of someone giving their players some focus moments throughout a campaign, with those moments tending to be focused just on the character's personal story with the party supporting them, with the focus being on someone who is (obviously) at the table that day. From the mix of quality to the weaker ends, it feels very much like TTRPGs as they're run, and I find that fascinating.
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In general I think one of the reasons why I resonated with this game so much throughout its runtime was because of the distinct TTRPG feeling it gave. It was almost cozy in a sense, getting to play through it in bursts for a long time and chilling for the ride as if I were playing a tabletop game and watching it unfold with an unseen person or people running it. The feeling given off by the sound design alone was nothing short of magical, resembling the calm wonder I always feel when I play tabletop games with my friends and acquaintances. Altogether much of the game's runtime was good and the conclusion was strong, with the overall narrative being just good enough to keep me interested while not overpowering the fun gameplay that could be found everywhere within the living, breathing world.
It was hard to pick the rating I did for this game, as it falls somewhere between this rating and the one above it. I do think the overall vibes really did add a lot to it as a whole, and that counts for a lot, but the problems the game does have are glaring and gross to think about. Still, having a likeable cast, solid gameplay, and a unique feeling few other video games can give adds up to something that felt worthy of just about all the time I put in... even getting through the shittier parts. I think that if we were to get an Octopath Traveler III and the writing team were, uh, rearranged and expanded to prune some of the worse elements of what this team produced, it could very well be the ultimate one of these games. I'm not sure if they'd be able to put together a path better than Agnea's (seriously, my brief description did not do that one justice; it feels practically made for artists and it's lovely), but they can certainly try to nearly match it and bring up consistency beyond what this game had.
I think this game is very much what a second entry should be, and I say that with a healthy dose of realism: a follow-up doesn't have to perfect what a previous entry did, no, but it should at least do everything it can to strive for greatness. I don't know for sure if this game achieved true greatness, but I can absolutely say that the amount of improvement shows and it's got plenty going for it. It's certainly worth a prospective player's time, but there's still lots of room for growth.