Octopath Traveler: Session 4

I began this session by recruiting Therion.  He's a fairly standard thief with a fairly standard story, except he gets sorta blackmailed into a quest to reclaim expensive stuff for a family of rich fucks in a town that has serious class problems.  His path action is Steal, which works like Tressa's Purchase except that instead of there being a price it's just a percent chance of success (and no money trades hands for obvious reasons).  Certain NPCs have items that say "Not for sale" in Tressa's Purchase menu, I imagine that Therion could simply steal them.

With all eight characters recruited, and Chapter 1 thoroughly complete, I spent some more time in the "donut" doing side quests and running around using path actions on NPCs.  H'aanit and Ophilia now have all their skills; Primrose, Tressa, and Cyrus are missing their eighth skill; and I still have a fair amount of work to go for Olberic, Alfyn, and Therion.  By the way, each character's eighth skill is called a "Divine" skill.  Not only do you have to learn their other seven skills before you can learn it, but using it requires a full BP meter in battle.

Something that's kind of curious is that almost every explorable area has a small side area contained within it.  I already kind of encountered this with The Whistlewood back in session 2, but I've been trying them ever since.  I completed up until the boss in the Cliftlands area, Carrion Caves, and probably could have beaten the boss, but it prompts you to make sure you're ready and I didn't think I was lol.  In my first ever usage of fast travel, I NOPE'd out of the Frostlands area, Hoarfrost Grotto, because I was in too deep and having to revive people way too often (Ophilia's Reflective Veil came in super handy, and for what it's worth I still haven't party wiped).  I actually fully completed the Riverlands area, Twin Falls.  The Flatlands Froggen VI that I caught in The Whistlewood helped on the boss tremendously since the boss was weak to spears and its attack is actually three attacks with a spear.  These areas' entrances are sometimes hidden or off the beaten path, so I really should duck in and back out of each one as I find it so it'll get labelled on the world map, but I haven't been doing that for whatever reason.

Cyrus is working overtime identifying enemy weaknesses for me.  Hopefully I'll finish the "donut" areas next session.  I think I have a few of the rarer enemies around Sunshade and Cobbleston left to get fully identified.

Speaking of rare enemies, I've finally beaten more than one Cait, and not as a fluke anymore.  Between levelling up and getting better equipment, I think my characters' respective Accuracy stats have improved by just enough for it to matter.

When you unlock a character's 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th skill, you get support abilities, and at this point I have a fair number of them.  Primrose has a nice one that restores some SP every turn.  I'm not quite sure how it calculates how much to restore, but it keeps going up as I level up.  It's restoring 7 SP right now, and it'll be interesting to see just how much it will restore when it hits the inevitable cap.  Ophilia has a support ability that allows her to be healed above her maximum HP (there seems to be a cap, which can be calculated by the simple formula cap = MaxHP * 1.11 and rounding to the nearest integer), which comes in handy in basically every boss battle ever.  Tressa has one that halves all of her SP costs.  Whenever I get the ability to set secondary jobs, which I know is a thing because of promo material showing the costume changes based on job combination, it's going to be interesting to play around with support ability combinations.

Session 5 will probably be a lot of me running around finishing up Chapter 1 side quests and swapping party members around to get all the skills and support abilities (and grinding out Alfyn's concoction list so I don't have to guess results based on vague item descriptions).  I might be ready for Chapter 2 main quest stuff in Session 6, who knows.