Octopath Traveler

Misc

• H’aanit’s beast capture economy is kind of cool. I’m really glad you get full exp and such for capturing (and that capture chance is boosted by BP). Makes capturing always better than killing, even if it’s just used as an insta-kill

• I hate the way H’aanit speaketh. It just adds a half second to understand what she’s saying. It’s not worth it, don’t do this.

• I wish there was an auto-play option for dialogue, but I guess it doesn’t make tonnes of sense since most text isn’t voice acted

• The scaling effect on bosses and enemies seems to work pretty well. At least through chapter 1, I rarely felt like I was over or under challenged by anything, despite being able to do it in any order

• I appreciate that a character’s JP is unversal, so you don’t have to spend time in a class you dislike just to get their passives

• It’s kind of annoying the degree to which side quests are basically just “inquire / steal every NPC you find”

• It’s kind of annoying that H’aanit’s provoke is a pokemon battle, as compared to Olberic’s duel. It means she doesn’t make much use of her level / equipment, or her hunter skills. She can’t even make proper use of BP. It’s lame on its own, but also makes the fights boring

• There are a lot of signposts in the world, it would be pretty useful actually if you could like, actually read them

• Some of the sidequests are super cryptic and weird. It feels like there’s little balance between “path action everyone in town” and “I’m not going to even give you a hint”

• I do kind of appreciate that because everyone can be a caster, every kind of weapon has to have a magical version, which doesn’t need to be the “attacking weapon” to give the elemental atk, so planning who gets what kind of magic weapon is a kind of neat juggling act

• I wish more things scaled after chapter 1s are complete. The game is at it’s best when things are a challenge, but it’s not hard to outlevel the chapter 2+ stuff, at which point it’s just not even a challenge

• I wish there was more (read: any) fanfare for completing a chapter. The game just kind of dumps you back into the “open world”. Which, works for a narrative driven game, but I feel like it doesn’t here

• I appreciate that you aren’t punished for choosing wrong answers during Cyrus’ investigations, since I really never cared to read the scutinize text

• Considering opening purple chests is Therion’s special thing, they are quite often kind of trash. There are a lot of them, and most of them just contain a small amount of money

• It’s kind of unsettling how literally every person who looks at Primrose has to comment on how pretty she is. Like I get it, game, thanks.

Structure / Narrative

• I appreciate the ability to skip each character’s intro scenario- with 8 characters there are a lot of them, and it’s pretty organic if you can just wander around and nab the characters straight away

• It’s a little weird going through these intro dungeons with a full party, but at least the bosses still seem to be a suitable challenge

• The way each character’s story abruptly ends when you exit the intro scenario is kind of jarring

• A lot of the chapter 1 stories have really awkward transitions into the character joining your party

• I really don’t understand why they lock your first character in as your “protagonist”. It’s a mostly blind choice. The game is all about being open and freeform. I didn’t even end up liking the character I chose, but I’m locked into using them now

• This pacing is trash. It took me 12 hours to finish everyone’s chapter 1. You spend waaaaaaay too long on these super simplistic chapters, and yet you kind of have to just to get some levels to tackle any chapter 2s

• Because the world is designed in “tiers”, the balancing is really weird. It can be difficult to know where you should go until you break into that “tier”, but once you do, there’s 8+ areas you have access to, so its… still a little hard to know where to go

• There are a lot of moments that are cool, but it feels like nothing ever builds up any momentum because you’re jumping back and forth between storylines constantly. There’s never any feeling that any of it actually matters, just a drop in the bucket

• I’m glad the banter scenes exist, but at the same time, they feel like they just have no life to them. Compared to something like the Tales series’ skits, it’s not even closer

• The game just never really manages to make it feel like a party of characters with relationships, it’s literally 8 loners who happen to be following each other around

• Even some of the individual characters just don’t have any connecting threads between their chapters. They just kind of wander from town to town for no real reason.

• I get that RPGs tend to follow a formulaic flow, but doing town > path ability > dungeon 32 times in a row is going to get hella old

• The progression in this game is all out of whack. You learn like 90% of your abilities within the first 10 hours, and you’re left with very few new toys to play with until you start unlocking the secret jobs like 30+ hours later

• Character level feels kind of unimportant because of how strong equipment is. The only thing you’re really missing by being low level, is a chunk of HP and path action efficacy

• It feels like the different storylines just jump you around from town to town at random. The next objective is always the entire world away, not for any reason, just because that’s where it is

• This game can’t do a plot twist for shit. You’re given no capacity to care about anyone or any thing, so subverting your expectations is like “you know that thing we said, 20 minutes ago? It was a lie!”

Battles

• Not a fan of waiting for the battle start bark to finish before you gain control. They are short, is there any reason I can’t menu while it plays?

• I kind of wish there was some form of reward for downing every foe (ala persona)

• Definitely digging how the combat feels snappy but still deep, lots of nuance to even throwaway random battles, usually

• The game makes decent use of speed and turn order, despite battles being broken into rounds wherein everyone acts. Faster characters = more chances to break enemies and deny turns, and pre-emptives gives you 1 extra BP at battle start

• I appreciate that bosses get more complex as the story goes on. Things like swapping weaknesses mid-fight and such add some depth as the game goes on. It would be really formulaic without it

Graphics

• Pixel art looks way better at the right distance. Foreground objects are usually occluded so it’s not a problem, but sometimes you see things that are very blocky, or their shadows.

• Shadows especially can look really weird if they are dancing by torchlight

• Really not digging the camera skew effects in battle, it creates some really weird looking lines that move across the sprites

• Discerning depth can be difficult- definitely makes it hard to tell where the path is at times, you also get caught on stuff a lot

• Highlight effects look like trash. When a sprite doesn’t have the same post-processing as their environment, the pixels look very jagged and sloppy

• Bosses honestly just look really amazing

• Dungeons that rely on trees or something in the foreground are honestly the worst, these dungeons really aren’t interesting enough for it to be clever

UI/UX

• Slight delay after opening the inventory that will eat inputs

• Overall pretty responsive, though!

• I wish there was a way to use memory cursor, but not have it automatically go into submenus (ie. remember the last spell I had selected, but not that I was in the spell menu)

• Why does it not show my money total on the battle end screen???

• I dig the fact that the turn preview also shows a break vfx over the enemy portraits, when an enemy is broken

• I dig option dialogues where none of the options are highlighted by default- no accidental choices from mashing

• There’s a slight delay before you can send inputs when option select dialogues intro animations are playing. Not usually a problem except for when there are 2 dialogues in a row (eg. when you know H’aanit’s capture will be full, and you know you want to release the craeture)

• I wish I could increase/decrease BP usage while targeting an attack, especially if it effects %chance of success

• Is there really no alert when a character has earned ough JP to learn a new skill??? Why can’t I see my JP to next skill on battle complete???

• The minimap is kind of useless

• Always a fan of equipment shops that let you change your party’s equipment from within the shop

• Warning messages could use a little stronger messaging, maybe a red tinge or something

• I’m a fan of using the world map as a backdrop for the inventory menu, but I hope loading the map isn’t what causes the input delay at inventory load

• Seems weird that holding the run button doesn’t maintain through screen transitions

• Highlighting the adjacent area icons on the minimap to indicate quest/sidequest direction is clever

• I appreciate the tooltip on everything in inventories, but it would be nice to be able to toggle it off, since it obscures items below the currently selected one

• Repeat speed could stand to be a lot higher. Annoying in inventory menus

• I really wish danger level was listed for areas on hover in the world map, so you know at a glance if it’s worth going there

• The speaker names that appear in text bubbles are uncomfortably close to the top of the bubble- such that the outline around the name actually overlaps the edge of the bubble… why???

• Characters who can equip 2 weapons, the stat menu can be a little confusing, especially when it comes to things like elemental attack

• The hp/sp bars really disappear in battle, they are frequently on a black backdrop, so they just don’t work half the time

• It’s kind of weird that the hp/sp bars have a completely different texture, have icons and such, etc in the menu vs in battle

• Whoever decided it was ok for enemy selection in battle to be oriented on list order instead of screen space should rethink their life choices

• Sometimes the hover display over towns will be partially occluded by the world map border. How is that not something they tested???

• It would be nice if there was a way for side areas to be marked as “done” on the map, say if you got all the chests / beat the boss

• At first it seems a bit odd that the inventory cursor defaults to the 3rd option down, but it does a decent job of minimizing inputs to get to the important stuff. Nothing will ever be more than 4 inputs away, but this lets them visually huddle stuff together without needing the player to wrap the cursor around the top

• Choosing the right region in the journal is actually kind of hard. The names are pretty hard to read as you’re scrolling through them

• I wish I could use the shoulder buttons or something to scroll through regions after I’ve selected one. It even shows the left/right arrows still, but you’ve no way to tab through them

• Considering each job can only be applied to one character, and the game requires you to at least swap your characters around to do story quests, it would be nice if there was an easy way to remove a job. Either by pressing start on the job screen, or maybe even on the party select screen

• I’m not really sure why resting at the Inn doesn’t exit you out of the menu, it doesn’t even give you a confirmation message to accept, plus the only options are Rest and Exit, and you just finished resting, what else are you going to do?

• It would be really nice if you could sort your inventory, or if items you found always had an icon at least, it can be really hard to find a new item in your inventory

• Why do your characters sprites only show their equipped weapon when you are changing weapons? If you just select attack without changing weapons, your characters have nothing in your hand, you can only tell their weapon type from the icon

• Having to change classes to learn another class’ skills is annoying, especially if you have to unequip the class from someone else first, PLUS, you can’t even DO that if the class is equipped on someone who isn’t in your party. That’s not even counting the fact that changing classes around will unequip certain weapon slots

• The health of enemies can be inferred by their name colour (white / yellow / red), but this is really not obvious. I found it more confusing than anything; I thought it was somehow tied to their vulnerabilities

• On a similar note- why does the battle UI say VULNERABLE for every enemy HUD, I know you want to let me know what these random icons mean, but it seems like a VERY heavy handed tutorial for a concept that you learn in 5 minutes (vs a like, 70+ hour game)

• It can actually be a little hard to tell who you are targeting sometimes, when targeting allies, particularly because of the way the team skews into the background the closer to the top they are