Why I’m Excited and Nervous for Octopath Traveler

NOTE: Minor spoilers for Bravely Default below. You’ve been warned!

Are you like me? Do you have an appreciation for the classics, for older technology, older music and games? I like to joke that I was born three decades too late, but there’s just something charming about 8 and 16-bit games. You have to appreciate what these developers were able to accomplish with hardware limitations, with pixel constraints on characters, with the inability to send out a patch to fix your game a week after it launched, etc.

But we live in different times, and the modern gamer has come to expect different things in their games. Carson and I were joking in our E3 coverage in Episode 2 of Scatterbrained about how it’s all mostly battle royale and post-apocalyptic games this year (Still not sure why post-apocalyptic has come around again; I thought we were over that a few years ago…)

Anyways, towards the end of last year one of my most anticipated games as of late was announced. It’s a JRPG for the Nintendo Switch, it’s from Square Enix, and it’s in the vein of classic Final Fantasy games (i.e. FFIV, V, and VI).

The game is called Octopath Traveler, and I can’t even begin to describe just how difficult the game’s title makes it to explain this game to the uninitiated and to make it sound cool.

Of course that would make sense because the game comes from some of the guys behind the Bravely Default games, another series of unfortunately-named JRPG’s.

Bravely Default was another game that I was greatly anticipating as it took the base gameplay of Final Fantasy V with it’s job system and being able to mix-and-match abilities. It took that and combined it with a whole bunch of modernized improvements, including being able to change the random encounter rate, having the ability to speed up combat (to the point where you could auto-battle), and simply having things like 3D character models and voice acting. It really was just a modern take on classic Final Fantasy, and that’s really all I needed to hear back then to get me on the bandwagon.

From all the promotional material we’ve had access to, the trailers, the live gameplay, even the two demos that have been released, it seems that Octopath Traveler is shaping out to be much of the same, perhaps leaning even more heavily into its classic Final Fantasy roots.

The visuals this time around are pixelated, but the scene is given modern visual effects like lens flare and high-definition shadows. The developers have given the visual style the moniker “HD-2D” and that’s probably the best way to describe what it is. It’s fantastic and quite stunning to look at.

As the name suggests, the game revolves around eight paths, or eight playable characters that you can recruit into your party. Each character has a fleshed out story and their own way of interacting with NPC’s around the world.

Ophelia, a cleric, has the ability to guide NPC’s around. She can then call upon their aid during battle where they will randomly use certain skills depending on what type of NPC they are. Olberic, a former knight, has the ability to challenge people to honorable duels. This gives you hilarious situations where you’re running around cities, beating up all the innocent townsfolk to get some extra experience and sometimes to force your way into their homes to find some items stashed away.

Each of the eight main characters has a special ability, and it makes party composition more interesting as you weigh the benefits of each not only in battle but also in exploration throughout the world.

But while Octopath Traveler seems to be doing plenty of good things just like its predecessor, Bravely Default, I’m also afraid the game will similarly flop in its story department.

Now, I do feel the need to go on record and state that I never actually finished Bravely Default. I also never played the sequel, Bravely Second, so I don’t know if my issues were rectified with the sequel. That being said, what I did learn about the story in-game (and subsequently my research outside of the game) led me to drop the game as I really couldn’t stick around for the story.

Bravely Default has an in-game item, a journal, that essentially tells you what would happen in the story. The short of it is that your party is trying to fix the world and they continually have to go back in time because they can’t quite seem to fix things. After trying over and over and over again, you finally learn who the bad guy is and you defeat them and you win.

My problem with the game is that time travel is used as a form of repetition more-so to seemingly drag on the game instead of actually giving you something meaningful to do. It’s one thing to have you experience a scene a second time in a game to kind of reinforce something, or maybe even to give you a different perspective on things. But from what I’ve seen and from what critics in general have said, the whole going back in time thing ad nauseam just drags the experience down.

Ultimately, it’s their delivery of a story in Bravely Default that really makes me worry about Octopath Traveler. The main tenet of Octopath Traveler is its eight characters and the ability to recruit all of them (if you want) and to experience their personal stories play out. But how do these stories intertwine?

From playing the latest demo, you start the game by choosing one of the eight characters and you experience the first chapter of their story. Then you basically choose to either explore the world or you can find other characters to recruit. When you find one of the other seven recruitable characters, you’re given an option whether or not to view the beginning of their story, which is nice, or you can skip it and recruit them instantly.

My problem is what happens when you officially recruit them. It essentially boils down to two complete strangers meeting up and being like:

“Hey, you look like a non-generic RPG character that has a personal problem and story motivations.”

“Oh yeah? I could say the same about you.”

“Want to party up?”

“Sure.”

And that pretty much sums it up! There’s no common goal, no true motivation. Some games outlets have been talking about a feature later on in the game, reminiscent of Dragon Quest V, where you can push a button and have your party members talk to each other to get insight in the current situation, maybe talk about a town, maybe have two characters reveal a bit about their relationship. A feature like that would certainly help give me a sense of camaraderie between the eight heroes.

And of course we don’t really know what the main story of the game is. I have to imagine there is some sort of evil empire or some otherworldly force that’s hell-bent on destroying the world. But then again, maybe there’s not! After all, the demo only gives you 3 hours to play and many of the games environments are completely blocked off. Additionally, each character is limited to their own beginning chapter of their story. So who knows, maybe things change later on in the game.

There’s also the thought of, perhaps, the game can stand on its own legs without an overarching story. Honestly, thinking back on Final Fantasy V (one of my favorites in the series), the story was quite forgettable and the game was carried almost entirely by its iteration of the job system, the best version the mainline series has seen to this day. Taking into account the beautiful visuals, the excellent and engaging combat system, the job system, the musical score…it really might just be another FFV in the making.

Octopath Traveler, much like its Bravely Default predecessors, has such a strong foundation. It just screams classic Final Fantasy with a bit of modern zest, and I love that. My fear, if nothing else, is that the structure of the story would bog the game down and detract from what is otherwise shaping up to be a fantastic homage to the golden-age JRPG’s of the 16-bit era. Here’s hoping that isn’t the case and we end up with an all-time JRPG hit.