I dropped the first Octopath after 15 hours but ended up finishing this one all the way through. A big step up from the original but still has some of the issues. My main complaint is how the stories are still disconnected but they do come together at the end which is very nice. Otherwise, there were a lot of odd moments in the story due to the game pretending the other characters don't exist during someone's story. In terms of character writing, I enjoyed half of the character stories and thought the other 4 were just decent - mid.

The gameplay, exploration, and combat is a ton of fun and carried this game hard. The random encounter rates can get annoying at some points and it did feel like the mid game level progression (lvls 15-30) was a slog. The end game is also ridiculously easy if you know what you're doing but its very fun to break. Aside from that, this is one of the best JRPG combat systems out there.

Overall, one of the best games of the year.