Octopath Traveler 2 Review: “Afraid to escape the limitations of its predecessor”
8 min read
Any individual who’s been actively playing online games for any duration of time must be accustomed to the pull of nostalgia. Remakes, homages, and genre revivals are a cornerstone of the medium these days, and qualified developers know just which buttons to press to rekindle the heat glow of a far more impressionable stage of life.
Quickly Facts: Octopath Traveler 2
Launch day: February 24, 2023
System(s): PS5, PS4, Laptop, Change
Developer: In-property
Publisher: Sq. Enix
Octopath Traveler 2, like its predecessor, is a products of such competent builders. It demonstrates a deep appreciation of ’90s JRPGs, not the very least Remaining Fantasy 6, and extracts their essence to recreate what built lovers tumble in love with these game titles in the initial location. For people of us of a particular vintage, it is really a big steaming bowl of ease and comfort meals – just like mamma SquareSoft used to make.
The issues with working in nostalgia, nevertheless, is that it can be tricky to reconcile with the needs of the existing. And for all the experience on present in this sequel, it appears worried to experienced or escape the restrictions of the first sport. Like convenience food items, as soothing as it is, it is really not able to shock, or problem anticipations.
One thing outdated, one thing new
The artistry of the nostalgia on display here, while, truly is a point of magnificence. Extra than most of present-day pixel-artwork tributes, Octopath Traveler 2 recognises that Square and Enix’s SNES JRPGs were being AAA productions in their working day, so simple retro revivals fail to capture that grandeur. In distinction, Octopath’s pixel-textured 3D dioramas evoke the 16-little bit age when supplying a feast for fashionable eyes. Flat planes turn out to be pop-up picture guides, their edges softened like wistful reminiscences, dotted with heat smudges of lights and fireplaces. The influence is completed by haunting melodies and rousing battle anthems that could have featured in Ultimate Fantasy 6 itself, experienced they been fed as a result of a SNES seem chip.
Striding around the terrific outside and tackling hazardous creatures is handled with comparable aptitude. The countryside is awash with blocky hills and design village views, plus a very little far more juicy to check out this time, thanks to the addition of waterways you can traverse on very small boats to search for hidden treasures and alternate routes. Combat, in the meantime, is a blend of old-fashioned turn-based encounters and slick bombast, from the way characters swirl with lightning right before unleashing driven up attacks, to the shattering glass seem effect when you split an enemy’s guard, as if it can be rewarding an act of vandalism.
That crack mechanic, together with the ‘Battle Points’ (BP) that your combatants accrue over time, also ensure a stage of tactical enjoy. To whittle down your opponents’ shields and score large hits you require to discover and then focus on their weaknesses to particular weapons or magic, diminishing their guard counter with each individual strike until you smash by means of, leaving them shocked and vulnerable for a change. Your BP materials can be made use of either to unleash many common attacks or include oomph to distinctive abilities. Ideally you want to preserve them right until you’ve got broken by means of then pile in at whole ability, but in some cases it is really prudent to deploy them quicker, to split a guard promptly prior to your opponent assaults all over again.
This balancing act turns into delightfully taut versus bosses – when once again brilliantly depicted as towering tyrants that dwarf your diminutive fees. You may possibly be racing from time to split them as they demand up a devastating strike of their personal, and judging when to save or devote BP can be a subject of lifestyle or dying. They’re the evidence that you will find a great deal of everyday living in this standard format yet, specified some clever tinkering.
Parts of 8
If you performed Octopath the initially, nevertheless, you previously know all this, simply because it is very simple recycling. Certainly, there are a few of contemporary additions to the method: ‘latent powers’ construct up as figures consider damage until eventually they can execute a unique talent – getting an excess change, say, or instantly filling their BP provide – when second jobs allow a character to incorporate the skills of yet another to their repertoire, providing a small far more bash adaptability. But neither drastically alter the circulation.
And the exact is accurate across the board, beginning from the framework of your adventure, which as soon as yet again focuses on 8 travellers from diverse parts of the world, each with their personal reason for hitting the highway. Pick one as your principal character, and you play through the opening chapter of their tale ahead of placing off to pursue a far-flung target. Ahead of you get any where in close proximity to it, although, you will fulfill the other characters in their household cities, perform their backstory chapters, then include them to your posse. Now you’ve got obtained eight quests to see by, 1 chapter at a time, scattered throughout the map.
As prior to, then, you have loads of independence to make a decision on the buy you recruit your gang and tick off their aims. You happen to be never ever constrained to a one area, and once you reach a new city you can hop again there as you see in good shape. This open up invitation will come at the charge of a singular narrative line that pulls the group in direction of a typical bring about. Apart from for occasional side conversations and the addition of a handful of inconsequential mini-chapters in which two figures perform together, each and every tale focuses on a single unique, with the relaxation of the crew basically featuring support in battle. The celebration dynamic so central to JRPG series from Dragon Quest to Persona is lacking.
The strain is consequently on the tales them selves to be powerful, but only a handful of are, not least simply because the characters are a remix of the initial game’s forged, occupying the similar array of professions – a warrior, a merchant, a cleric, and so on – and in numerous scenarios navigating similar eventualities. Some have brings about that are straightforward to spend in – like the thief, Throné, combating for her freedom from a lifestyle-time’s slavery in a criminal gang – or persuasive personalities, like the exuberant beast-girl hunter Ochette. But a few others are really hard to treatment about or in fact fairly irritating, especially Partitio the entrepreneurial service provider.
Sadly, if you want to see the denouements of your favorite tales, you will have to total all the other individuals as perfectly, in any other case you will hardly ever level up ample to endure later on, more durable episodes. Without a doubt, the inflexible amount suggestions that gate spots and chapters are one thing of a stumbling block as soon as once again in Octopath Traveler 2. Just after accumulating my gang, I found myself considerably more than-levelled for most of the 2nd spherical of chapters, rendering them a dull slog, then unable to keep all my people up to velocity afterwards on without the need of committing to prolonged bouts of grinding.
However, it’s no surprise that Octopath Traveler 2 asks you to commit so a lot time churning through battles, mainly because it won’t seriously have something else for you to do. Some exertion has been manufactured to range the standard plot-dungeon-boss cycle in chapters, but that only serves to emphasize how vapid the relaxation of the mechanics are. To development in cities, you have to have to use characters’ distinctive ‘path actions’, which help them to interact with NPCs in a variety of means. And this time, each individual character has two somewhat than a single, supposedly doubling the selections at your disposal. Still the new actions are all variations on old themes – obtaining goods, gathering facts, convincing the NPC to observe you, and knocking them unconscious – and include simply going for walks up to a selected goal and urgent a button.
Clerical Mistake
Possibly the finest fat about the game’s neck, nevertheless, is that it can be stubbornly traditional in the telling of its stories, seeming to absence a sense of awareness around how narrative design and style has developed together with struggle methods and visible types more than the very last 30 years. Even though the attractiveness of ’90s JRPGs was synonymous with little one-eyed wonder, about time those people eyes have turn out to be a lot more discerning and sceptical, but the fiction right here in no way will get beyond trite morality tales and hotchpotch fantasy confection.
The game’s two continents, for occasion, are loaded with a grab bag of cultural touchstones collected with scant concern for how they gel. Early present day European spiritual sensibilities are thrown in with an industrial revolution on the japanese landmass, even though in the west a North American mining frontier in some way exists adjacent to a kingdom of samurai warlords. Like the stories on their own, these lands are autonomous models that reduce coherence when merged. The American and Japanese facet in unique feels like it truly is been painted in careless stereotypical strokes.
Tonally, the tales are equally haphazard. On the optimistic aspect, you can switch in between lighter and darker stories as you see suit, but potentially significant themes these as slavery and prostitution are consequently sandwiched concerning, say, Agnea the dancer’s quest for stardom, and any moral ambiguity falls by the wayside as just about every chapter wraps up neatly ahead of the following. It’s a shame for the reason that some of the themes below are worthy of significant therapy.
The game’s cleric, for illustration, an inquisitor named Temenos, has the electric power to ‘coerce’ details out of NPCs if he can ‘break’ them in battle, which is, you know, shorthand for torture. This kind of conduct could be the catalyst to explore his flaws, but Octopath Traveler 2 serves its social gathering up as heroes operating to defeat terribly villainous villains. The script is at fault below – it can be enough, but rarely poignant, profound, or funny – but much more so is the fragmented, hurried plotting. Thrust into a murder investigation, the enigmatic Temenos immediately assumes a sympathetic position, exactly where you will find no area to interrogate how his techniques could chafe versus a noble intention.
In this way, the travellers’ tales are not only bland by fashionable benchmarks but lionise archetypes this kind of as type and just hereditary leaders, morally upstanding inquisitors and excellent capitalists. Included to the reality that Octopath Traveler 2 is a little as well content to rest on its laurels, and it shows that although nostalgia can be a joyous encounter, getting to be much too enraptured by the past can simply default to conservatism.
Octopath Traveller 2 was reviewed on PS5, with code supplied by the publisher
