OCTOPATH TRAVELER™

3/5 I'll start with the positives, beautiful art style, great music and a really engaging battle system. HOWEVER, this game lacks any amount of soul or heart. The writing is bland, and the character stories are not engaging. The early part of the game is based upon recruiting your other party members, each gives their personal backstory and motivation for setting out on their adventures. By the time I got to my 4th party member, i started to skip cutscenes, which I have never done in any game up to this point. The backstories were truly uninteresting and painful to sit through. If story and dialogue are less of a concern for you, then this can be a good game, but for a JRPG, I expect to be completely immersed in the world and invested in the characters. Octopath fails completely on that front.

Games like this make me wish I could give a "neutral" recommendation. I grew up playing classic JRPGs on the various NES and Sony gaming platforms, so for me the nostalgia is strong. This game is love letter to those old classics. That being said, the more I play the more I find myself getting annoyed with the frequency of random encounters (and yes, I know about the scholar ability to reduce those), the grind for gear, and the annoying HP sponge/Brick bosses. At the time of this review I just finished my first chapter 3 story, and I am honestly not sure if I will go on to finish the game.