This adds additional variety that the first game lacked. Some characters have more chapters than others, you might have multiple paths to go down within each chapter, and sometimes there’s not even any combat in the individual chapters. They’ve also made a fair number of changes to how stories roll out in Octopath Traveler II. Everything feels interconnected, and the level of detail and world-building is astounding. Even the NPCs in the towns have whole, rich backstories if you interact with them. Interacting with Hikari’s brilliant strategist Kazan is just as fascinating as watching the pure, pious Sanctum Knight Crick’s fun interplay with Temenos’ more dubious faith. Their stories are filled with excellent characters, too. Each of the eight has a strong personality, whether it’s Partitio somehow selling me on the potential of capitalism done right to help prevent poverty, or Hikari’s stoic kindness, they all jump off the screen making the world that much more vibrant. ![]() That’s what really sells the stories this time: the writing and the characters. I was particularly taken with both Castti and Temenos’ stories, two healers with vastly different personalities whose great character work and compelling mysteries drive their stories forward. I felt Osvald’s pain and rage over the loss of his wife and daughter and wanted to see his revenge through to the end. I was touched by Agnea’s desire to become a star I cheered when she put a smile on people’s faces. While I might have been less compelled by the opening hours than I’d like, the stories each get better as they go along, and I was impressed with all eight of them by the end. You start out by choosing one of the eight playable characters as your protagonist, play through their first chapter, then go to recruit the rest and play through their stories as well. As I noted in my preview, the premise is the same. Perhaps the most significant improvement is the storytelling, though some of the issues with the original are still present. While it looks and sounds and plays the way I remember the original, Octopath Traveler II takes everything good about the first game, turns it up to 11, adds a few quality-of-life updates, and is, in fact, the superior game overall. When I got past those first hours, though, I realized I was wrong. It made me feel like the sequel wasn’t doing enough to distinguish itself. ![]() Instead of evoking my memories of the classics, I just felt like I was playing Octopath Traveler again. I adored it.Īfter just a few hours with Octopath Traveler II, I didn’t have quite those same feelings. It made me feel like an eight-year-old sitting on my floor, staring up at my 20-inch CRT TV again. ![]() Octopath Traveler sounded like my memory, it looked like my memory, and oh boy, did the difficulty match my memory. They all seemed incredibly challenging to me, too, even if most of those games are a breeze for me nowadays. The synthesized scores sounded grand and operatic at the time, and it didn’t even occur to me that the instruments weren’t real. When I was eight, I felt like the backgrounds of games like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy IV had a beautiful depth of field, even if they didn’t. Instead, it reminded me of something remarkable about that game-it evoked the memory of how I first felt when I played a lot of the old classics. ![]() That’s not really a criticism of Octopath Traveler. I did a funny thing the minute I finished Octopath Traveler II: I booted up the original Octopath Travelerand played around on my old save file.
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