Octopath Traveler: Initial Thoughts

Let's get down to business, shall we?  I'll get one thing out of the way right now: I'm playing on version 1.0.2, which is the latest update as of this writing (I just checked to make sure).

Things I like

All the big things that might make or break the experience are fine.  The graphics are amazing, the music fits quite well and adds a lot of atmosphere, exploring the world and getting into fights is fun, the controls work, and there aren't any gameplay mechanics I've encountered yet that don't function as they should.

When you hold B to run in an explorable area, the radar turns red and your encounter rate goes up.  It's kind of a gamble, but also useful.  When you're right next to town and out of Healing Grapes or something, you may just want to hold B and hope you don't get an encounter to get into town faster.  At the same time, if you want to level up a bit, holding B and running around makes that go faster.  It works well, and the running encounter rate isn't oppressively high.

Mashing B while moving causes your characters to look like they're hovering.  In addition, the top half of their sprites fidget a bit, and you constantly hear the footstep noise.  I have no clue why this amuses me so much.

Things I think could be improved

Note: These are all "quality of life" improvements, or basically things that could easily be changed in that don't affect any kind of game balance, but simply make the player's life easier.  Some are gameplay mechanic-related, though, and I may find them solved by something later on in the game that I don't yet know exists, so keep that in mind.

In battle, your party's HP/SP/BP meters are on the right side of the screen.  This is fine, but as a player of a lot of other JRPGs, I'm so used to having that info along the bottom of the screen that it's taking me a bit to adjust.  It could do with some better contrast as well, as in some battles the gauges and text are hard to see.  This is less of an issue when the Switch is in portable mode and I have it right in front of my face, but when I have it docked and it's on the TV a much farther distance away, it gets a bit difficult.  This could be solved with a slightly transparent black background behind all characters' information, and applying a white border to the HP/SP bars so they stand out a bit more.

When you're using an ability that targets a party member, the game could highlight that member's stats on the right side of the screen to make it easier to see who's being targeted.  It already does this with their picture in the turn order, and it puts a selection cursor next to the targeted character(s); but I still find myself confused as to who's being targeted from time to time and this is a relatively minor change that would help tremendously.

Similarly, targeting enemies doesn't quite work the way I would like it to.  Pressing left and right works beautifully and exposes what's going on: it's using the turn order to decide which enemy to target next.  Using left and right in combination with up and down to try to move the cursor around the enemies, however, gets confusing quickly since the cursor doesn't move where you would expect it to go.  As a player who looks at the enemies on the left side of the screen to see where the selection cursor is, I would like the option to make directional inputs move the cursor relative to that, as opposed to sequentially through the turn order.

I know they increased the text size based on feedback from the original demo, but some text is still way too small.  HP/SP values and enemy names in battle are the prime offenders.  It's difficult to read the menu items from across a room with the system docked, they could either be made bigger, or simply apply boldface.  The vulnerability icons could also do with being a bit bigger.  This is not an issue in portable mode, just when the system is docked.

Navigating the UI is a little awkward for me.  I'm so used to Bravely Second letting me use directional inputs for entering and exiting menus in addition to scrolling through them that I keep trying it here and it just doesn't work.  I would love to have the option to make right be "Confirm" and left be "Cancel", just like in Bravely Second.  Also, a quick button for accessing the world map would be nice.

When using Tressa's Purchase ability, sometimes you can buy equipment from people.  It would be incredibly useful if the game popped up your party on the right side of the screen, similar to when you're shopping at the armorer, so you can see how an item you're looking at would affect your characters' stats.  Currently the only way to do this is to remember (or jot down) the stat boosts, then exit the Purchase menu, go into your Equipment, and compare manually.

In that regard, there are a lot of towns with a lot of armorers that have different inventories, and finding the best equipment I can afford at any given time gets confusing quickly.  I know it's an open world game and having a lot of equipment options that are spread out across that world is to be expected, but there's an in-universe way to solve it.  Your characters could keep a mental note of what they've seen and offer up bits of feedback like "I think I've seen a better one elsewhere..." or "this is the best I've seen yet!".  This leaves room for gameplay mechanics to improve that feedback.  Information or trade-savvy characters like Tressa or Cyrus being in the party could improve this feedback further, to include the name of the city, or even the specific NPC if it's an item that Tressa would have to use Purchase to buy.

Through my extensive use of Cyrus' Scrutinize path action, I've found out various bits of information that aren't hidden items, inn discounts, etc.; but have interesting names assigned to them, and I don't see where I can go in the menu to review what I've discovered.

Things I don't like

I keep seeing the recommended level for areas of the game going up as I level up.  RPGs that scale enemy level according to player level give off significantly less sense of accomplishment to the player.  There's no reason to do it, either.  The player absolutely should be able to level up and then go back to an early area and one-shot everything.  It provides useful feedback to the player, that maybe they should be fighting things elsewhere, and in doing so, progress to other parts of the game.  When you always feel the intended level of challenge regardless of your level, it destroys any sense of accomplishment granted by levelling up, gaining new abilities, and buying new equipment.  Guild Wars 2 did this same thing, and it's one of the reasons I don't play that game anymore.

The saving grace to the above situation is that currently it isn't scaling up very much.  Still, it would be better if it didn't do it at all.

Overall

The game is incredibly worth the price of admission to me.

Octopath Traveler: Session 2

Picking up right where I left off, I recruited Tressa.  Tressa is super cute and cheerful all the time, and has a fairly non-sad story.  She's the daughter of a merchant family and an aspiring merchant herself, pirates rob the merchant town of Rippletide that she lives in, she enacts plan to get revenge and take stuff back, etc.  Tressa's reason for travelling the world is very different from the other characters' reasons.  The other characters all have some kind of important task that they set out to accomplish that takes them around the world, but Tressa's motivation to travel is purely curiosity.  She just wants to see, and do merchant-y business with, the world.

Her path action, to approximately zero surprise to anyone, is Purchase.  She can talk to NPCs and buy things off of them.  As I found out later, some of these things she can buy are useful for side quests, but the rest are your usual consumable items and bits of equipment.  Also, as I found out later on, she can gain a chance of haggling for a better price.

Another thing Tressa does that I like: when you enter an area (whether an explorable area or a town), she'll find a small sum of money left behind by "an unfortunate soul".  I like having this little bit of supplemental income.  Combined with her Collect skill that takes enemies' money, and while still a small amount, every bit helps.

Satisfied with having recruited the ladies, I travelled a bit north of her town to start recruiting the gentlemen.  First up was Cyrus in the nearby town of Atlasdam.  He's a scholar and professor at the, which is this game's name for "Black Mage".  He's got all kinds of researchy aspirations, the headmaster at the Atlasdam academy is kind of a douche (but also kind of a good guy), one thing leads to another and he ends up on a search for a specific tome that's been missing from the Atlasdam library for 15 years.

Cyrus' path action is Scrutinize, wherein he interrogates someone, discerns their situation, and occasionally gleans some useful info or the whereabouts of a hidden item in the area.  This has a chance of failure, just like Primrose's Allure ability, and since I've failed at it a few times now I can describe a bit more about how it works.  You can fail a few times before you lose reputation, and going out of town to kill things for a while (possibly requiring visiting a different town) seems to reset the number of times you can fail.  If you exceed that number of failures, you lose the reputation; and just like I thought, you basically bribe the tavern keeper to get it back.  No clue how much it costs as I haven't failed hard enough yet, but once you fail the game pops up a tutorial dialog explaining how it works.

One of the neat things Cyrus can discover through careful scrutiny of people is the aforementioned chance of haggling for a better price that Tressa gets.  You can also get a discount at the local inn and an improvement in how townspeople react to various path actions.  One time, I scrutinized a town guard and found out that the armorer had a bunch of new stuff available to buy.  If there's more, I either forget them or haven't seen them yet.  I also haven't been all the way around the towns I've already been to in order to exhaustively scrutinize everyone yet, I'm comboing that into recruting the remaining characters.

Anyway, Cyrus is also super useful for figuring out enemy weaknesses.  First up, whenever you enter battle, he will permanently reveal one undiscovered weakness per enemy.  Second, he has the Analyze ability, which will temporarily let you know what an enemy's current and max HP are, and it will also permanently reveal a weakness.  Using the boost mechanic increases the number of weaknesses revealed.  So basically, no more having to hunt for all the weaknesses, you can just keep fighting things in an area and by making proper use of Analyze, you'll get everything in relatively short order.

One thing that didn't happen in relatively short order, though: Nearby Atlasdam is an area called The Whistlewood, and the enemies in there can take quite a lot of punishment.  I found this out the hard way.  Didn't suffer a party wipe, but in one fight I had one of those WTF moments when I used Analyze on the sole remaining enemy to find that it still had several thousand HP left.  I eventually weakened it to the point that H'aanit could capture it.  Sad thing is, I kinda want to go back there, because it was good money/XP/JP.

Speaking of money, as an aside: what the hell is the currency of this land called?  I've only ever seen it referred to by its symbol, which in true RPG fashion, isn't a symbol that can be associated with any kind of real-world currency.  Until I find out a name, I'm just going to refer to this currency as "money".

I decided to head clockwise around the main area, which I've already dubbed the "donut" because it's a series of areas connected by roads that all surround a large body of water.  Up next on the recruitment list is the other character from the first demo, Olberic, from the town of Cobbleston (all the Minecraft I've played makes me keep reading that as "Cobblestone").  But that'll have to wait for session 3.

After reaching Cobbleston, I did some careful scrutiny of the locals and grabbed chests and stuff, but that's basically it.  I had a bit of a scroll around the world map and I'm in awe of how large the world map is, and how most of it seems intended to be reachable by the player.  I don't anticipate filling in a huge amount more of it in session 3 since I've done a lap around the "donut" at this point, but who knows.

Also in session 3: Will the game finally let me set secondary jobs?  I have two characters who almost have all their abilities and I have three characters left to recruit; the completion of either of those could be a reasonable trigger for that...  STAY TUNED TO FIND OUT!

Octopath Traveler: Session 1

So, because reasons, even though I got Octopath Traveler on release day, I didn't start playing it until yesterday.  This post will be me discussing my first play session, my initial thoughts about the game after the first two sessions (I'm already in the second play session, which will continue later tonight; I consider a "play session" to be over when I go to sleep, even if it's split up around various other obligations like eating, exercise, and using the bathroom) will be in a followup post.

I find using gameplay time to define the length of an RPG or my progress therein to be too subjective to be of use, because I tend to mess around with various things to learn what they do and how best to use them, and early on I intentionally fight extra fights to get used to the battle system.  Thus, saying that this first play session was 10 hours means effectively nothing, since other, more tryhard players will ruin their blind playthrough by trying to speedrun and ignoring the story while feeling the right to complain about the things they're doing.  I vastly prefer to just describe my gameplay progress, which I will now do.

Starting out, the game has you choose one of the eight characters.  It doesn't really matter who you choose as after the first boss you fight, you gain access to the world map and at that point you can travel around to the other major cities and recruit the other seven characters.  You can even experience their back story, so you know exactly who they are and what their motivations are.  I picked H'aanit as my starting character simply because I like the whole ranger/hunter with a bow and a pet, and living off the land kind of thing, and she fit the bill perfectly.  Her path action is Provoke, which lets her fight NPCs in towns (and out in the wild) using only the beasts she's caught.  Oh yeah, she has this really cool mechanic where she can catch an enemy during battle and summon it for an attack or some other ability during battle later on.  Each one can only be summoned into battle a set number of times before returning to the wild of their own volition, so it makes sense to use them up while travelling so you can replace them with newer, stronger ones from later areas.  She also has a pet snow leopard named Linde that she can summon infinitely.

H'aanit is one of the two best hunters in her hometown of S'warkii (that I keep misreading as "S'wankii"), and without going into her story too much (play the game and experience it for yourself, dangit!), her master goes on a hunt and ends up requiring assistance of the urgent variety.  After a quick bit of looking around the world map to see where the other seven characters were, I realized that the cleric, Ophilia, was in the next town over; and I ain't gonna say no to having a healer in the party.  Ran over there and grabbed her.

Ophilia's story is possibly one of the sadder ones.  Not gonna delve too deeply into it, but basically she got orphaned because of a war, and taken in by the Archbishop of Flamesgrace (and in doing so, gained an adoptive sister named Lianna).  When I met up with her in her hometown of Flamesgrace, she's just made up her mind to do a once-every-twenty-years ceremonial pilgrimage of the Sacred Flame called "the Kindling" in place of Lianna, so that she can stay by her father's side while he's ill.  I love how the game introduces you to a character at approximately halfway through their story, it just feels neat.  RPGs have always had this vibe of "run around, assist others, and generally do good things for people", and this makes the characters feel a lot more human with relatively little extra effort required in the writing.  After she officially sets off on her journey, you can once again explore the world map to your heart's content.

Next up I tried to do some of the side quest stuff but got hopelessly confused when the incredibly basic things that I thought would resolve them failed to do so.  Ophilia's path action is Guide, which lets you take an NPC with you, and there are various side quest NPCs that need to find things or go places.  So naturally I grabbed one who needed to be escorted through the forest around H'aanit's village and back to her home town so she could be with her husband, and took her there.  Except that I then proceeded to explore the entire town and the area around it for good measure, and couldn't find her husband or any other NPCs with any dialogue that would progress the side quest.

I've done a few of the side quests that I've found to be extremely straightforward, but it seems like there might be prerequisites for the others, perhaps involving recruiting the other characters.  Recruiting a character opens up the side quests in their area, as well as spawning a few extra NPCs here and there, so maybe I need to do that for her husband to show up in the town.

I really like how the game handles navigating from one town to the next.  You gotta read the signs, man.  Surprise, it's an open world turn-based JRPG.  Whodathunkit?

Between getting Ophilia and making my way to Sunshade, I somehow managed to actually kill a Cait like it was nothing, and received a surprise huge monetary reward and enough experience for about three levels on both H'aanit and Ophilia.  I don't know how I did it, and I haven't been able to kill any more since then.  They have a really high evasion rate and flee from battle rather quickly, so even though I'm prioritizing them whenever I see one, RNGesus just isn't taking my side.

Anyway, once in Sunshade, I recruited one of the two characters from the original demo, Primrose.  Her back story is one of sadness as well, as she seeks to track down the people responsible for her father's death.  In doing so, she ends up working as a dancer in a tavern run by a guy who can only rightfully be described as a giant prick.  Basically, he's constantly abusive and demeaning towards his dancers.  He doesn't realize until the very end, once he gets what's coming to him, that Primrose was really the one using him, and not the other way around.

Primrose's path action, Allure, is similar to Ophilia's, where she can get an NPC to follow her.  This one has a chance of failure, though.  The game says failing will affect your reputation in town, but I haven't failed one yet to see how exactly you deal with that.  Tavern keepers have an option relating to it, so perhaps you just shove some money their way with a little *wink wink, nudge nudge* and your reputation magically gets improved?

At the very end of this session, I decided to recruit the merchant Tressa next, and left myself standing next to her in her hometown of Rippletide.  If you have the game and have been looking at the world map, you no doubt realize I've skipped over some of the characters, this started out as a coincidence and ended up being intentional.  I'm still gonna get all of them, I just wanted to get the ladies first ;)