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!