Wishvale. Home.
I was a bit worried when this game was first announced because it's easy for games to get townbuilding mechanics wrong. Luckily, this game avoided those pitfalls and made the town restoration an integral part of the story. It fits the existing gameplay formula of Octopath Traveler much better than I could've ever imagined. Coming back home after exploring the world feels very comfy, and as long as you grab mats as you go (a near instant interaction), you'll have more than enough to build the required things in town to progress, so the addition of crafting mats added 0 tedium to the gameplay loop, and arguably improved it by making the game feel more rewarding and giving you a home to go back to.
The overall gameplay formula of the game is very similar to the previous games, so I won't go over all that again. However, the main big change is in the way the story works. There are a lot more playable characters this time around, so each one inevitably has less total screentime than the eight travelers got in previous games. Instead of having one major story per character, most of the recruitable characters get a recruitment quest, and then their time in the spotlight of the story effectively ends; they join you as a party member but don't really take part in the dialogue etc. There are some exceptions, the main ones being Stia and Phenn. Unsurprisingly, they are my two favorite characters from this game.
The main stories of the game generally happen around your silent protagonist and involve NPCs that primarily appear in cutscenes. Aside from the Wishvale guys, most of the characters that are important to the main plot lines never actually join your party as playable characters.
This probably sounds like a bad thing. Well, I can't deny that the storytelling is technically more flawed here than it was in the previous games. However, I think context matters. This is partially designed to be a fanservice game. You get to spend more time in world of the first Octopath Traveler game and recruit all the travelers from that game, among many new faces. The idea is, you can fill your party with anyone you want. In a game like this, it's impossible for every playable character to be a major character in the story. The guys from the first game are here and are playable, but this story is not theirs. Is this inherently a ludonarratively flawed concept? Maybe.
The important characters in the story do tend to temporarily join as a 9th party member controlled by the game. It works quite well, and can really add to the hype in boss battles. I think they figured, if these characters had instead been playable but optional to use, it would have been pretty anti-climactic narratively if you chose not to use them during their own story. And they couldn't have forced you to use them because you're already forced to have your created character in the party. They didn't want to force a second character onto you because that would defeat the entire purpose of letting you use whoever you want. When you think about all of it, it completely makes sense.
But also, since most of the important characters are not playable, I think they had to hold back a little bit on the story, because a masterpiece there would have felt wasted on unplayable characters. What's crazy though is that despite this, the story is way more engaging than I feared it would be. There are some truly memorable, emotional moments. There's definitely unremarkable filler too though, so it's nice they added a fastforward button for that.
To elaborate on that last bit, I think some of the cutscenes sometimes felt slow or pointless. For example, when you've already clearly established through their actions that the antagonists are irredeemable and exist only to bring about suffering, at some point I just wanna go and pulp them. If a cutscene isn't giving me a reason to re-evaluate that, some interesting lore, some hype dialogue, some real tension or at least something entertaining, then I'm probably gonna want to fastforward or skip it. I wouldn't say it happens often enough to be truly annoying though.
For the sake of being informative, there are still multiple separate plot lines in this game, which don't really intertwine. This aspect of the storytelling, which some players called disjointed or bad in the previous games, is still present. It's like that by design, but yeah.
The other thing to note is that if you've played the previous OT games and didn't enjoy them because your party members don't interact much with each other, you probably won't like this game either. I say "probably" because I do feel Stia and Phenn got a ton of screentime together in the Wishvale cutscenes, so if you use Stia and Phenn in your party like I did, then you might feel like this game fixed that aspect a bit. But don't expect characters to interact with the stories they aren't personally involved in, which is basically all of them.
Thankfully, none of that flawed stuff ruins the game for me at all. In fact, most of these flaws are either minor, or completely irrelevant to me because they are necessary for the game to function in the way that it does, which I enjoy.
I felt very close to Stia and Phenn, and I'll always love Tressa. That was my frontline for most of the game. I really enjoyed my party. The narrative flaws can't be a problem when the playable characters are characters that I love and the enjoyment of the game primarily comes from the exploration, RPG mechanics, boss battles and most importantly, just the vibes man. Yes, the music, the enjoyment of being in those towns, in that world. The story just gives context to it all, and some of it is great. But a game this fun to play and exist in just doesn't need a perfect story. It's about the full package.
Of course, your mileage may vary. I don't know what you like. But this is my review. In some ways, I felt this Octopath game was the best one at fulfilling the series' ultimate vision, which is being a non-linear turn-based JRPG. You're able to choose exactly who you recruit and when, where you go, and the only thing stopping you from running straight to the furthest city on the map is your level, a.k.a your ability to not get pulped by monsters on your way there.
This was always the soul of Octopath, and now the sheer amount of characters you can recruit in this game makes it feel even more like you built your own little squad. Or big squad, I should say. You can bring up to 8 characters at once into battle in this one, and it makes the combat even more fun.
I should probably say, the game is not very hard at all, but I think that's a good thing. If the game was hard, it would just make less builds viable. This just lets you do challenge runs, make more creative builds, etc. I'm not of the opinion that an RPG needs to be hard to be fun, quite the opposite really.
You also have more freedom in how you build each character now. Instead of choosing a sub-class, each character instead gets extra slots to equip almost any skill that exists in the game. You find them in various ways, but one of the ways you can get these equippable skills is by learning every base skill on a character, and then you can "master" those skills, which creates copies to be equipped on other characters.
To put it simply, you can basically create your own sub-classes now. This has a huge beneficial impact on the gameplay and roleplay. Although, it's not like it was worse before, just different. The downside to this new freedom is that now each character only has their default outfit (except your created character). But this opens up things quite a bit. I actually enjoy how each Octopath game has had slightly different gameplay like that, it keeps things fresh.
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