👎 Not Recommended blindly — please check cons for this game
🕒 Hours Played: In‑game timer shows 73h, Steam shows over 80h
🎯 Completion Status: All story missions + last mission (“Story End”). Skipped: Majority of side stories, optional level‑40+ dungeons, and the Challenge Boss. I skipped side stories because they were boring; optional dungeons and the “secret” boss were skipped because I was exhausted with the game and just wanted it to end. My main character was Ochette.
🟪 Some Info
[📝] — One note: this is not a negative review of the game itself. It is a very solid title. However, I cannot recommend it to you with a clean conscience because the story and character development are not that good — or rather, because the story is split between 8 characters, it ends up being very basic. Story and character development are usually what keep me going in jRPGs, and since this was seriously lacking in Octopath Traveler 2, exhaustion became a very real problem for me. At some point I was progressing purely through willpower. This happened around the 40‑hour mark, when the game first forced me to grind. I still pushed for another ~30 hours, but not because I was enjoying the game — I just wanted to finish it. Please check “The Bad” and “The Ugly” sections.
🟩 The Good
[✅] Characters — I liked all the characters you play in this game. That actually says a lot, because I tend not to like “good” or “lawful” characters in games. Usually, if you’ve seen one of them, you’ve seen them all, and unless the game forces some morally questionable situations on them, there’s nothing interesting going on. Characters in this game tend to be “good” with idealistic worldviews, but I didn’t mind it at all and cared for all of them.
[✅] Game mechanics are solid — This game has a lot of mechanics, and they are all solid. A diverse and interesting battle system where you need to manage several resources. Many side activities. Town interactions through path actions. Side dungeons. Plenty of boss battles, each somehow unique in one way or another. This is a very solid jRPG from a mechanics point of view. Even if I personally didn’t enjoy some of them, players who do will find them a treat.
[✅] Ochette — I already mentioned that I liked all characters, but that goes double or even triple for Ochette. She is the Hunter in Octopath Traveler 2 and was my main character. I grew very attached to her during the game.
[✅] Items are useful throughout the whole game — Worth mentioning: items remain relevant for the entire duration of the game.
[✅] Game progression — The game has a nice progression system through items, class skills, class mixing, etc. There was almost always some weapon/armor/accessory upgrade or class development I wanted to try.
[✅] A lot of customization — Many interesting items and job combinations let you adjust your gameplay and characters to suit your needs.
🟦 The Neutral
[➖] Pixel graphics — Not much to say here. Either you like it or you don’t. The game is beautiful, but it’s still mostly pixel art — very high‑quality pixel art, but pixel art nonetheless.
[➖] The game is long — I personally think the game overstays its welcome quite a bit.
But if long games — even artificially long ones — are your thing, you’ll be happy. Keep in mind: most of the length comes from exploration, battles, path actions, and grinding, not from story. This is not the type of game that runs 2 hours of cutscenes.
[➖] Some jobs are late‑game only — There are 4 special jobs, and 3 of them (if you follow standard progression) become available only at the very end.
[➖] Path actions — Path actions let you gather items in towns or recruit characters to help in battle. They are fun at first, but the game has a lot of towns, and you can sink a lot of time into trying to gather everything. Later, it becomes a pace‑killer. Many path actions also require higher character levels than you currently have, adding another time‑sink layer through backtracking.
[➖] The game is easily breakable — You can out‑grind and out‑scale the game even without trying. There are some very unbalanced things you can do, and there’s a high chance you’ll start doing them unintentionally.
[➖] No difficulty settings — Normally I like this, because it means everyone plays the same difficulty. However, when I hit serious exhaustion, I really wished I could lower the difficulty to speed things up.
🟨 The Bad
[⚠️] Game Story — It’s a very basic story, or stories in this case. You’ve probably seen each of these storylines somewhere already, and that’s not inherently bad — I enjoy familiar stories retold in new settings. But because Octopath Traveler covers 8 stories at the same time, each one ends up short and very simple.
[⚠️] Characters are isolated in their own story sections — When you trigger a story chapter for any character, only that character appears. Outside of story chapters, you only get small talk between characters. There were many moments where another character would have fit perfectly into someone else’s story, but that never happens.
[⚠️] Lack of character development — I liked all the characters, but what you see in the first 20 minutes of their introduction is what you get for the entire game. They don’t change, don’t question their worldview, and don’t interact meaningfully outside their own story sections.
[⚠️] The game will force you to grind — Early on, progression feels smooth:
Level 10 → explore → fight → level up → gear up → level 15 → repeat. But eventually recommended levels jump higher than what you naturally reach. Not a deal‑breaker, but it creates a negative feeling — especially when bosses start hitting hard and grinding feels more appealing than frustration.
[⚠️] Late‑game bosses — A strange experience.
Their unique mechanics can be annoying, but at the same time you can start one‑shotting them even with an unoptimized team. However, if you let them act — and some can take multiple turns in a row — you might get instantly wiped. Some even have literal game‑over moves.
[⚠️] The game forces constant re‑customization — You must switch characters often, and not just characters — also their gear, jobs, and setups. It takes time, and in the long run starts feeling like a chore rather than a relaxing RPG.
🟥 The Ugly
[💥] Side stories — Side stories are basically small puzzles: bring item A to character Y, bring character Z to character O, etc. You usually have to figure them out yourself (or check a guide). Totally not my thing. I would prefer 3 solid side quests over dozens of these. Some late‑game side stories seem more interesting, but by then I was too exhausted to care. Another issue: some side stories cannot be completed when you get them because the required item is in a high‑level area. Example: a lighthouse side story in a level 5 town requires an item from a level 35 zone. By the time you can finish it, you’ve probably forgotten it exists — and tracking side stories is not easy.
[💥] Characters not in your party do not level up — This was painful.
You cannot (or rather should not) focus only on a few favorite characters, because sooner or later you will need everyone up‑to‑date. The game gives no XP to unused characters.
