Octopath Traveler II has Exceeded my Expectations! | Better than the Original?
69My experience with the modern day JRPG - Octopath Traveler II.
00:00 - What is Octopath Traveler II?
00:25 - Comparing Octopath Traveler I & II
01:22 - Storytelling
02:31 - My Biggest Criticism - Levelling up Secondary Characters
03:26 - That Art Style
04:11 - Octopath Traveler II Gameplay - JRPGs and Combat
05:33 - Closing Thoughts
💎Twitter: https://twitter.com/Peter3pg
🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpStbJ2ZipCSWcK_JWmRMYw/?sub_confirmation=1
#octopathtraveler #octopathtraveler2 #octopathtravelerii
Okay, so I've just finished Octopath Traveler II and it has exceeded my expectations, so what's so good about this modern day JRPG?
Well it just does a great job with storytelling, characters, music, it brings in a few new ideas, and the most stand out feature would be that incredible 2.5D pixel art style and goregous art direction.
I've gotta come clean, I've committed a gaming crime, I never finished Octopath Traveler 1.
My main issue and a common criticism with the original was that the 8 protagonists didn't interact with each other enough. Even if you'd have a full party, it was like the other characters were barely part of each other's story and the game would just focus in on the main character of that story chapter. This is something the developers have acknowledged and they've promised to improve in Octopath Traveler II. Yeah it's definetly better in 2, there's an all new system called "Crossed Paths" which are optional side stories for duos of characters. They definetly help, there's an improvement with 2 but characters still feel a little out of place in other character's stories. But I can easily overlook this when the game excels in so many other ways.
So, when it comes to JRPGs you need to get the storytelling right. Octopath is 8 Stories, 8 Characters, most are great. One of my favourite stories would be with Throné.
She's a Thief who's pretty much enslaved to the Blacksnakes - a cult of thieves. Basically you need to assassinate the cult's leaders for the keys to her collar and freedom but without spoiling too much it gets very crazy.
"That's crazy."
It's just a really well written story and when you look back on it you realise all the little sneaky story seeds planted throughout the journey.
While Osvald was the character I felt the most empathetic towards,
He's a family man and Scholar who's story starts off with him wrongfully imprisoned and he's scheming his own great escape prison break. I always had space for him in my main party, but he did also have access to pretty awesome magic.
I don't wanna reveal too much about the stories for spoiler reasons. I'm thinking I'm gonna do a quick tier list for all 8 of the characters stories in a seperate video, so that should be out soon.
Speaking of characters, I wanna talk about my biggest Criticism with my experience with this. So you have 4 active party members and they'll level up in combat, just like any JRPG. I had my 4 four favourite characters I'd stick to and I'd swap in whoever's story I'd be progressing at the time. While I didn't need to do any grinding for my 4 main doods or doodettes, I had to do some extra grinding to level up the other characters to finish all the stories. Yes, sorry about that.
Grinding comes with the territory with JRPGs and I didn't need to grind that much so I'm not going to complain too much, there's little bonuses for defeating enemies fast and efficiently too. But I think there's a really simple solution to this, whenever your party gains experience points for killing enemies, I think your inactive party members should also recieve a fraction of those experience points to help prevent them falling behind, I'm pretty sure Square Enix's other JRPGs have this feature - like Final Fantasy VII.
This game doesn't just excel at storytelling, the art style and art direction in this game deserves praise. It's a 2.5D world with Pixel sprite characters, it's probably the best 2.5D world I've ever seen, I love that a little bit later in the story you can invest into a ship and even more areas open up on the world map. There's also a new feature that let's you swap between night and day with the tap of a shoulder button, it just looks amazing swapping between the two. You can tell there's been a lot of effort behind the art direction with all the lighting effects and it just helps this 2D world feel alive. To be honest I wish the latest Pokémon game used this art style, cities are incredible as opposed to the disappointments we got in the latest Pokemon games. Can't even remember what they're called, kind of just went on a weird tangent about Pokémon.
One of my weirdly favourite things to do in JRPGs is raiding peoples homes and robbing them for their treasures and loot.
Other Videos By Peter Bytes
Other Statistics
Octopath Traveler II Statistics For Peter Bytes
At present, Peter Bytes has 4,644 views spread across 3 videos for Octopath Traveler II, with his channel publishing less than an hour of Octopath Traveler II content. This is 1.11% of the total watchable video on Peter Bytes's YouTube channel.