Oh we goin balls out with this one. This is ludicrously yakuzacore, it's just one of those games. If you boot up this entry with no prior context of its contents as I did, the first alarm set off is a missing core in the engine room. Where's Kiryu!! Well, he's doing what he ideally should, that is not getting lunch money by breaking noses in a land with free healthcare, but that was a good question raised tho.

Before we get to him, we have to explore the lives of more Kamurocho citizens appearing out of thin air. The first of those is Akiyama, he's that one uncle, it seems everything is wrong about him but factually there's actually nothing wrong he's just that G. The second is Saejima, I don't know why thugs even bother with this one, the third is Tanimura, the chinese government made him vanish for his controversial statements in 2010. These flawed men who can handle their liquor and cigs have their own story to tell, and stories told to, because this is where substories begin to have enough fuel in them to be enjoyable.

There's not a single good minigame shared globally, I make that distinction because I got Saejima to train a bum and it was fiiiiiye. That army guy's training was also fun. And that lady Tanimura is bruisin with after he said "donde esta el luego de la cagada" (his spanish sucks). Learning to fight is more enjoyable than actually fighting, that's not a foreign concept to the average behind the scenes fan, all catehories.

On another note, they did not miss with those final bosses. It felt so much like I was playing Yakuza 3's great combat again in an even smoother way. And yes, I beat the blowjob brothers AKA the Amon familia. First entry where I get to do so and boi did I die 15 times to the hammer guy and 0 times to the 2 others, i did lose like 3 times to Jo Mama but whateveeeeeer he had that hammer so it counts as a win for hammer guy. 7_7

While it feels a touch disingenuous to leave a negative review for a chunky game like Octopath after only ten hours, what I've seen in those ten hours was enough to convince me it wasn't cutting it (again).

If you are someone whose main criticism of Octopath 1 was something along the lines of: "The characters don't interact, and have nearly zero reason for teaming up with each other," then I'm here to tell you it's much the same. It would have been comical when aspiring merchant Partitio joins up with warrior Hikari on his quest for vengeance had it not been so stupid. Even better when hometown dancer Agnea joins the fray when her goal is to become a star performer.

The foundations of friendships and alliances in Octopath was always its achilles heel. No one is here to question its techical capability, so when such an obvious flaw (and one so vocally criticised!) is seemingly ignored like this, and the only notable changes thus far have been to combat I'm left feeling lukewarm.

I'm rarely satisifed by more of the same in media, so when a promising game like Octopath had a real shot at improving critical flaws with it's structure and characters I jumped at the chance to see it do so. Sadly however, it hasn't learned from its mistakes, and I'm not willing to roll the dice on another four individual stories of potentially wildly varying quality for forty hours.