Octopath Traveler UI/UX Review

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Octopath Traveler is a game that clearly takes a large amount of inspiration from JRPGs of yore, but the question is, how does this translate into the game's UI/UX experience? The genre as a whole has a tendency to be very menu-heavy, and oldschool JRPGs, like most games of the time, typically would stick with a fairly straightforward interface.

These days however, you have games like Persona 5 who are showing everyone how a UI should be done - and yet I find that there are a shocking number of modern JRPGs that are pretty far behind in this category. If you look through the credits, most still have no dedicated UI/UX designers.

So how does Octopath Traveler stack up? Let's start from the top:

(remember you can click on individual screenshots to get a larger view) 

The title screen we can see here is kind of symptomatic of a lot of what we'll see in the game as a whole. We have a screen that's very pretty, the environments and the post-processing effects show off one of the game's biggest strengths. But on many of the title screen's various backgrounds, the text becomes very difficult to see. You may not even be able to tell in this screenshot, that there are 3 options available here - "New Game" and "Settings" have almost completely disappeared. One has to wonder if graying out the non-active menu items to that degree is really necessary when you already also have the little hand icon next to the current selection.

When the player chooses to begin a new game, they are taken to this screen so that they are given the chance to choose who they will begin the game as. This screen is a very zoomed in view of the game's world map, with dark spots and semi-transparent clouds drawn overtop. One assumes this is to add mystery to the world the player is going to explore, or some such, but the result is you have a screen that's actually kind of hard to use. Pictured, you can see that you can have a screen where none of the 8 characters are even currently on it, and I think it's probably pretty easy to just miss one of the characters entirely when scrolling around.

When you do hover over a character, you are given some information on them (pictured on the right). Note that this is all the information we have available, for a choice that will lock us into this as our main character for at least 40 hours or so (in a game that focuses on player agency and exploration, mind). This is literally the first screen in the game - I don't know what a Path Action is, I don't know what a Talent is in the context of this game, and the background story is kind of pointless to be honest. The player is meant to recruit all 8 characters at the beginning of the game anyways. We will learn what everyone's story is shortly, but this is the selection that we are locked into, and the only thing this blurb tells me to inform me about the character choice that I'm going to be stuck with, is that "H'aanit is a hunter".

 
 

Exploring the game's environments is a pretty straightforward affair. You have a little minimap in the bottom-right which displays icons indicating the position of important things (exits to other areas, quest objectives, save points). At first this minimap seems largely pointless- it's less a proper map, and more like a compass pointing you in the vague direction of things. As you get used to navigating the game's environments, this seems less of a big deal though. The actual environments in the game are pretty simple, and it can actually be pretty handy to know that there is an entrance to a dungeon or shrine hidden in the area somewhere.

As you approach the entrance to a new area, you can see some text appear in the bottom left indicating the area's name, and a recommended party level - both of which are pretty handy. However it's a little odd when you have a dungeon that is multiple screens. There are very few of them in the game, but it will notify you of the same information when transition from dungeon screen to dungeon screen. Pictured above we can see the game notifying me that I am travelling to the Grimsand Ruins, which, I am already 2 screens deep into. When actually entering an area transition, this text stays put during the loading screen, which I thought was a nice touch that creates a bit smoother transition than just a blank screen with an animation in the corner, while also making sure you keep the context of this transition in mind.

While navigating all the game's various trails, you will come accross many of these signposts (pictured left), but they aren't actually interactable at all. It would actually be very handy if they were, because getting around in Octopath's world simply involves finding the path from area to area, but sometimes it's not entirely clear where a given path will take you.

Meanwhile we have these save points (pictured top right), which are the only interactable objects in the game that don't get a small prompt of some kind. There's the little quill icon that appears over them at all times, but nothing that appears when you are actually within interactable range. It would be nice to have a little "[A] Save" prompt, just to know you're close enough. The way the perspective of this game works, it can actually be a little hard to tell how far vertically into the terrain you currently are, and so knowing if you are within range to interact with an object can actually be kind of hard.

Elements that the player can interact with are typically indicated by a small prompt appearing when the player gets within interactable range of them. On the left we can see the little box that appears, indicating the various Path abilities the player can use with the Y button. These icons are all pretty clear, and I appreciate that completed actions are checked off (ie. we can see that we have nothing left to steal from this NPC, and that we have already interrogated them).

Many Path Actions will pop up a small dialogue like we can see on the right. There are variations depending on which action it is, but they are all pretty straightforward. Some of these can be a bit sparse on information though, for instance, I have no idea what Panic Slash (pictured here) does.

One thing we can see in this screenshot that I do really like though, is the yes/no prompt. We can see that neither option is selected by default, and instead the player has to consciously input up/down before they can make a selection, artificially creating a full stop before an option is selected. This is very handy for if the player is rapidly mashing through text or some such, and I imagine it greatly reduces the number of accidental selections. I dig it a lot!

A couple random screens that can be found within towns, which bug me a fair bit: 

Pictured left is the Inn screen. Here we are given 2 options - Rest and Exit. After resting, the screen fades to black, and then fades back in again, and we are still left on this same screen. Why are we still on this screen after resting? Are we going to rest again immediately after resting? What are we going to do besides exit? It has the effect wherein, I often feel like I'm not even sure when the game has returned control to me, there's just a lack of feedback here. I'd much rather if the menu exited and my lead character played a little animation or some such. Then I can at least infer that normal game play has resumed at the end of the animation.

Also, pictured on the right, is the shop menu, which is basically just the normal inventory menu but with different contents. We can see here that we have another issue with transparent backgrounds. This one isn't a common issue, but it comes up in some places. Specifically what I'm talking about is the physical attack value comparison for H'aanit, in the top right. Am I supposed to be able to read that number? Even zooming in on the screenshot, I can't for certain say if it's 364 or 384. Just another example of the game's reliance on transparent panes getting them into trouble.

Here we have the basic battle screen. It functions fairly well for the most part, but definitely has some issues. By a large margin, the biggest issue is one that can't be seen- but selecting enemies does not follow a normal grid navigation. In other words, it's really common to press down and see the cursor select the enemy on your right, or some such unexpected result to occur. This forces you to slow down your inputs considerably, and considering battle is the most common game state, this can end up being pretty frustrating.

Beyond that, we can see the large text "VULNERABLE" beneath every enemy. I can understand why that text is there - it's very useful for suggesting what the icons below it mean, but this is a mechanic that players learns within 10m of starting the game. Surely this space could be be put to much better use for the other 60+ hours of the game. Perhaps it could be swapped with the monster name. This would be nice, since we only see it when selecting targets, which is a state you typically are in for as briefly as possible. It's also true that there are many, many instances of enemies with very similar graphics, but different names. Seeing the name more readily would make it a lot easier to distinguish them.

The turn order display at the top of the screen is pretty understandable, and I appreciate the effort put into things like highlighting the turn icon for the enemy you are targeting, as well as the animation for "breaking" the icon, when an enemy is broken in combat.

These screens suffer a bit from visual infomration kind of disappearing. We can see that the (honestly very boring) combat menu overlaps the sprites for your teammates, which feels kind of messy to me. Also, the tooltip overlaps other menu items (this can be turned off with the Y button, but this isn't indicated anywhere). The HP and SP bars disappear into dark backgrounds, and especially because they are offset from one another, it can be difficult to see where the bars end.

The player takes out their weapon when you are changing weapons, but it is sheathed at all other times. This means the icon beside the attack command is effectively the only place this information is displayed. Even increasing/decreasing the BP of the current action will cause the character to sheath their weapon. I'm not entirely sure why the character shouldn't just have their weapon drawn basically at all times, or at least when the Attack command is highlighted / being targeted. It would be nice to have that extra bit of visual information, so the player doesn't have to look even farther away from the enemies, to hunt for one little square on the screen.

On a similar note, I find it kind of frustrating that, you can't increase/decrease BP spent while targeting an ability. This is most frustrating when targeting an ability like steal, that has a percentage of success displayed. If the player isn't happy with their success chance, they have to cancel the command, hit R to increase their BP use, select the command again, and re-select their target. It just feels like something you should be able to do.

I also am not a fan of the memory cursor in this game - it defaults your menu selection into submenus. In other words if I used a Blizzard spell last turn, it will default me into that magic menu. This is a game about carefully planning your actions ahead of time, you are rarely repeating the same action turn by turn, and so this form of memory seems largely useless to me. I'd much rather it remember my selection within the menu, but have the cursor placed at that menu when my turn starts (ie. start the cursor on the magic menu, not on the selection within the magic menu).

The victory screen is pretty simple. The player can earn bonuses for their performance in battle, though it's never really indicated how they work at all. "Break" will happen in basically every battle, but "Domination" for example, is a little mysterious.

It feels like there is some clearly missing information here. We are told how much money we earned, but not how much money we now have. I suppose it's complicated a bit by the extra money that is displayed from an "Untouched" battle bonus, since the format then already would read something like "2904 + 29", and just adding more numbers to that line could get confusing. Nonetheless, it seems very odd to have it not displayed anywhere, surely they could at least put the new total in the bottom left corner of the screen or something.

Similarly, there's no indication when a character has enough JP to learn a new skill. You just have to memorize the amount of JP they currently require, and remember to check their new value at the end of every battle. I realize the class system is a bit loose in the way it handles JP in this game, but I frequently forget I'm even saving up JP for anything. I think it would still be helpful to at least have a little exclamation icon beside their JP total if they can afford a skill for either of their currently equipped jobs.

Finally - I really dislike the way the party is placed on the screen. The character who landed the winning blow is standing so far infront of their allies, that it looks a little awkward to me. Additionally, characters shrink as they get farther away from the bottom. We can see here that H'aanit is so far back that she's actually blurred out! What a way to treat my main character. This isn't even a victory screen only thing- it happens in the regular battle screen too. It can actually make it kind of difficult to choose the correct character when targeting a party member. I accidentally healed the wrong person at least a few times in my time with the game.

Here we see the game's inventory menu. It's pretty standard fare really, but that's more or less this game's MO.

The party display on the right is inexplicably different from that used in battles. HP and SP suddenly have icons next to them, and the bars actually use a different shade of green/blue, for... some reason?

The menu cursor starts on Healing when the menu is first opened, which looks a bit odd, but works out well - It means that the "important" menu options are all within 3 inputs, while the "Miscellaneous" and (somewhat superfluous) "Status" menu options are 4 inputs away.

Using the world map as a backdrop works pretty well. It's a little busy with all the icons as well as the text that displays over towns and story entry points, but it's mostly just there to be pretty, which it does a pretty good job of.

The map itself doesn't have a lot to it, in fullscreen view. The border on the outside can tend to cut off the little text boxes at times, but it's not a huge deal.

Each town has a line dedicated to what area of the world it's in ("Sunlands", "Coastlands" etc) which seems to me like superfluous information that doesn't really add anything but bigger text boxes.

It's nice to have the little character heads displaying where their story continues plus a recommended level, but I wish there was more information here. For example, if I hover over a shrine or dungeon, it would be really great to see the area's recommended level, and perhaps some kind of display indicating if I've cleared the dungeon yet or not. As it is, it's hard to care about side dungeons because I can't tell what level it is without going to it, meaning if I'm not high enough level when I find it, I'm probably never going back. Plus, the dungeons are so vanilla and forgettable, that it's difficult to remember if I've been to a dungeon before, until I enter it and see looted chests.

Here we see the "journal" menu, which functions something like a quest log. We can see the progress of each character's story missions, as well as our side quests. I really like the little banner display that grows as you complete more of an area / storyline, but I wish it was easier to scroll between sections. The little sprites really disappear into the busy background, and the names are completely unreadable when you're scrolling fast. You also have no ability to scroll between sections when you've selected a section to display more information on. Especially for side quests, it would be really nice to be able to hit R/L or something to see the next/previous group of quests - the left/right arrows even still display on the screen around your highlighted section's icon!

As far as the side quests - it's kind of unclear that you have to press a button to swap the journal to "side stories" mode (and subsequently, a different button swaps it back to journal view). It's stated in the button prompts at the bottom, but I missed this for a while - It feels like the nature of needing to swap between the two modes could definitely be more prominent somehow, seeing as this is the only screen with functionality like this.

The side quest information itself is... lacking at best. As can be seen pictured on the right, you're not really given any information as to how to proceed in the quest (which, is partly the game's horrendous quest design, really), nor a very clear indication of where the quest giver actually is. It does say Frostlands / Northreach, but it's not very clear that Northreach is the location you are looking for. The town names in this game are very easy to forget - it didn't even occur to me until I was reviewing this screen, that "Northreach" was a town name!

Here is the inventory screen. Again, fairly standard fare. The tooltip blocks the next list item much like in the battle screen, but this can still be toggled off with Y, if you notice the button prompt in the bottom right.

Probably the most egregious thing about this screen is that, the cursor repeat speed is horrendously slow. One can move the cursor faster by hand, even with just a lazy mash of the down button, which to me seems to completely defeat the purpose of having a repeat cursor at all.

I also wish there was some way to sort your inventory. In general the default order is just fine, but the problem mostly comes from when finding new items, primarily in chests. When I get a new item I haven't seen before, I want to look at it and see what it does, but finding it in the inventory can be hard. This is complicated further because items found in chests inexplicably do not have icons beside their name, so something like say, a "Calming Stone" could well be a consumable, or an accessory. Then all I can do is guess the category, and scroll (slowly) through the list until I find it. Having an alphabetical / new item sort would help, or even just a new item indicator in the list itself.

The equipment screen is quite busy, but overall it functions ok. Dedicating screen space to "Optimize" and "Unequip All" seems kind of a waste, considering I have never used either of these options in ~50 hours. I do like the tab of characters along the left, which is a standard used in several screens, but I also kind of wish there was still an option to use R/L to swap between characters so that I can maintain my cursor position on the screen, rather than having to press left and then scroll the list manually.

Easily the biggest issue with this screen though, is the fact that the character can equip several different types of weapons at once, which proves to be hard for the UI to display. Essentially, any stats granted by a specific weapon are not displayed on the attributes unless you place the cursor over that actual weapon, which makes the rules for how these stats work very unclear. For example in this screenshot, we can see the Forbidden Blade gives +310 attack and +120 speed. That attack value is only used when attacking with that sword, however the speed value is applied to the character at all times. However if the player were to then move the cursor to a different equipment slot, the attributes would not include either value (even though the +120 speed is still active!).

Personally I think this would be better handled by doing something like this:

Here we've created a separate section for the weapon attack of each type of weapon, and moved "remove all" and "optimize" to button prompts to compensate (seeing as they are used sporadically - but the stats issue is a problem every time you open the screen). The main thing this accomplishes, is establishing that the attack value of your weapon and the secondary stats of your weapon have different behaviours. As a bonus, it also allows you to see at a glance what your power when attacking with each weapon actually is, because currently that isn't possible without scrolling through each individual weapon and remembering the values.

In theory one could also make use of the right-most 1/3rd of the screen, which is just inexplicably completely empty, but I think for the kind of changes we want to make here, keeping the new weapon attack values up close to the existing stat pane is very important to accommodate comparison and grouping. 

I appreciate that the job select screen is the one menu that has some small amount of visual flair to it, in the form of the circular job menu. My biggest issue here is more on the gameplay design side, really. You may notice that several jobs are locked, and that's because each job can only be equipped by one person (whether they are in your active party, or on the sidelines). You can swap to that job, but it will unequip the job from the other person. Simultaneously, that person will unequip any weapons that class allowed them to equip - a fact that I regularly forget until I enter a battle and wonder why I'm doing 20 damage. 

The main reason this is annoying is because it makes swapping around jobs both necessary, and also a pain. The game makes a point of giving your characters a JP pool that can be applied to any of their jobs, without them having to have actually spent any time using that particular job. This means you can instantly learn all of the skills you want, but you potentially need to boot someone else out of that job to do so, and they then will unequip their weapons. It can be a bit of an annoying juggling act even for those who don't regularly swap their characters around.

An easy solution would be to allow you to learn skills without switching to the job. The skill list is already displayed, and you can already learn skills from here - you just have to switch to the job before you are allowed to do so, because of reasons.

Conclusion

So that's a pretty exhaustive look at most of the screens in the game. There are several smaller things I didn't explicitly list here, such as certain menu transitions that tend to eat inputs, and things of that nature, or screens that I just didn't really have much to say about one way or another. In general that's kind of my feeling on this game's UI as a whole - it's just really not all that noteworthy. It has a couple of issues I would consider glaring (battle enemy selection and job/equipment juggling), but mostly it's just boring. Lots of lists and white text on semi-transparent black panels.

Even the fact that most of the UI's menus occupy a distinct 1/3rd of the screen kind of screams "lazy" to me. It means they were more concerned with being able to easily re-use components and mix/match elements, than creating a UI that actually serves it's purpose and functions well. I made the claim earlier that to some degree you can explain some of this away by claiming Octopath is trying to keep a "traditional", simplistic feel, but even early Final Fantasy games and such have fancy menu transitions and  highly contextual layouts and such.

I think Octopath does a decent job of trying to keep the traditional feel while mixing in more modern UI/UX concepts, but they definitely could have used some more dedicated time testing and designing what they've got, because there are definitely areas that could use some streamlining and clarification, and a lot of it could have been pretty easily accomplished without making any large changes to their layouts or existing art.