Outside of combat, each character has Path Actions to interact with the world around them. Character-specific Latent Abilities have been added, which charge up during combat and provide crucial buffs, like giving characters an extra turn or refilling their BP. While each character has a native Job, providing skills and weapon proficiencies, characters can equip sub-Jobs later in the game to expand their capabilities. Characters can attack multiple times or power up their special abilities by spending BP, a resource that recharges every turn. Combat is still turn-based, and focused around “breaking” your opponents by attacking them with weapon and elemental attacks that they are weak to. The continued lack of integration between the storylines for the most part still feels like an odd missed opportunity.Īs far as the gameplay goes, it maintains the formula of the first game, with some expansions and alterations in some places. I enjoyed the interactions that we got and seeing how, say, the grim, determined assassin Throné and jovial merchant Partitio bounce off one another. However, this issue highlights the drawbacks and inefficiencies of telling each character’s storyline separately, rather than treating the party as an actual ensemble cast and spotlighting certain characters at different times when appropriate, like most other JRPGs do. The tone issue can be mitigated if you play through the storylines in a particular order, or force yourself to do one whole story at a time. As you are jumping between storylines, it can be many real-world hours between each character’s chapters, leading storylines to feel disjointed as you forget what happened in the last one and need to return to your in-game journal to remind yourself. You’re encouraged to play through several characters’ plotlines concurrently, rather than one at a time, leading to strange tone shifts as you play a chapter of Osvald’s dark and serious prison break plotline and exploring his tragic backstory, and then a chapter of Ochette’s quirky “gotta-catch-’em-all” monster collection quest. The characters themselves are very charming, from the eccentric Sherlock Holmes-esque cleric Temenos solving a murder mystery, to the laidback and friendly merchant Partitio travelling around trying to make the world a better place. However each character’s personality and arc is generally distinct enough from their Octopath Traveler I counterpart that the sequel overall doesn’t feel like it’s retreading old ground too much. Each of the characters fills the same gameplay niches as the first game you still have a thief, a merchant, a cleric etc. After completing the first chapter of their story, you then are free to explore the world and steadily recruit the remaining seven heroes to add to your roster. Just like the first game, Octopath Traveler II starts out inviting you to pick one of eight protagonists whose story you would like to follow first. With a compelling and well-written new batch of heroes, some welcome gameplay tweaks and a giant world to explore, Octopath Traveler II is a fantastic JRPG that genre fans will love, as long as they have a tolerance for grinding and aren’t looking for too much innovation. Taking the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to sequel design, Octopath Traveler II is a more robust revisit of the first game’s formula, improving in many areas, yet migrating many of the first game’s flaws. Five years has passed since the release of Square Enix’s Octopath Traveler, and its sequel, the aptly-named Octopath Traveler II, has now launched as a multi-platform release.
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