Octopath Traveler (Nintendo Switch 2018)

might grab this in the EU e-shop sale

can you turn off random encounters?

no

sounds like it’s not that much of an issue because the battle system is so good

Yeah this is a game primarily about hanging out with the battle system. I've found that you don't necessarily have to spend extra time leveling up your guys to beat bosses, as long as you don't have a mental block around burning through recovery items. (I did before I started playing this game lol)

reading this thread has given me much relief as i am about 11 hours in, have 7/8 characters through chapter 1, and was genuinely concerned that none of these 8 people were going to ever interact with each other/would just endlessly travel from solo plot to solo plot, never speaking, never explaining why they're together, just an archipelago of every-man's-an-islands forever taking a knee while anything significant happens in their walkmates' lives

there's some tales skit style conversations in chapter 2 onwards but outside of those it's as you describe

ah nuts. well at least there's the little skits, better than nothing

this is out on steam in june, surprising since i figured nintendo had partially funded it but i guess not

I'm finally playing this, have finished all the first chapters & just Therion's chapter 2. Do I need to grind all my characters to the same level more or less? It seems like it because Therion, at only level 15, sucked in the chapter 2 battles. And the other ones not in my primary party thus far suck too. I don't really just want to grind the underleveled characters in non story parts if I don't have to, but do I have to?

and if I do have to grind random encounters, is there some reliable place to do so? I was in the desert yesterday boringly grindingly away, but I can't keep doing that, it will drive me batty.

you do have to grind a bit because it doesn't have bench exp yeah. definitely the worst part of the game. you can kind of circumvent it by having 3 'main' party members carry a rotating 4th underleveled one through their stories. the postgame superboss is the only thing where you need to grind all 8 chars up to high level and that's totally optional if you're not a completionist, i checked out before it.

I did the rotating 4th under leveled one on therion chapter 2 & I beat the boss but it took an hour!

did you find the secondary job shrines yet? chapter 2 bosses and onward are tuned expecting your chars to have those

I just found the mage one! near the therion town. I haven't been looking for the others yet, sounds like I should.

Ophilia is my main & I gave her the mage second & with 200 spell points she's now a capable master

also equips, especially weapons, are more powerful than levels in this game, so seeking out good ones from npcs in the chapter 2 towns may be worth the time. iirc you can hand a strong weapon to an underleveled char and they'll contribute decently as long as they're not so low level that they're getting one-shot.

I tried to steal all I could in nobleville but therion's percentage for the good stuff was only 8% :(

or you can always just give one of the supportive secondaries to an underleveled char e.g. dancer or cleric and have them contribute that way

it still sucks that the game doesn't have bench exp when almost all other JRPGs have moved to having it in the past 10 years but there's enough of these ways to mitigate it that it's not as bad as it could have been

Going around the chapter two cities tonight w an under level party was good, grinding without feeling pointless as I open up map and find new cities and shrines. I found the starseer one though and holy fuck

oh yeah don't bother with the ones in the outer ring yet, those are for the endgame. i think my party was level 40ish when i beat them

I made it to the final boss last night, and it sucked. I haven't lost yet, maybe I can win it, but it's so tedious that I don't think I want to. I just put the machine to sleep after about half an hour, realizing that I have to somehow coordinate killing the dumb nodes it grows. Ah well, the game was pretty good until here! My party ended up in the 58-65 range, with Ophelia, my main, pushing 75 I think.

its more of a postgame challenge boss than a final boss. there's no dramatic conclusion or anything after it.

Cool

Any suggestions on another rpg on switch or ps4 if I dug this?

which elements of this are you looking for? turn-based? 'retro'?

turn based, retro not a pro or con really

I should add that I haven't played a Final Fantasy since II. I played Dragon Quest IV and V on DS a while back, but I don't know that series otherwise.

dragon quest XI is pretty good, its on ps4 and has a switch version coming out in a couple months

the FF games on switch are all from the PSX/PS2 era and i don't know those ones very well

FFX is turn based but very linear, FFXII is not turn based but really interesting imo
most of the modern turn based JRPGS that I liked were on 3DS, going to take a while for them to turn up on Switch

i am playing this in quarantine. the bad Middle English for the hunters is doing my head in.

is this ‘badly written’ by video game standards or is it just a long time since i played this type of video game

just went through the dancer’s prologue and oh lord everything about that was a bad idea, executed poorly. (i did actually download the demo and start with that one, two years ago? and i deleted the demo before i even made it to a battle)

(battles are tite tho. i went and did a level two quest and some random dungeons once i had a team of four because i couldn’t deal with any more inept first chapters)

i wouldn't call it a well written jrpg but a few of the stories have their moments

strength of the game is mostly the combat especially the boss fights. also the music

Imo if you’re playing a JRPG for the writing read a book

unless that book is the novelization of octopath traveler in which case play the game

Imo if you’re playing a JRPG for the writing read a book

lol i thought this was 'lamo' but i see it is 'imo' -- idk, i'm playing it for the battle system but i do wish the writing was less bad, one doesn't go to action movies for 'the writing' but the first couple terminator movies are a lot better written than suicide squad

Fair enough

the book version of the game of the novelization, though. Best in class

yeah i don't think a novelization of, say, ff7 would be very good but as a rpg scenario it lands its story beats strongly

octopath is mostly doomed from the start because the 8 short stories thing doesn't really work

idk it worked fine in dragon quest iv

i've never played any of the SaGa games w/ this gimmick or Live A Live, and i am curious now to see if they tick me off any less. the tonal inconsistency is what does it, the gross slippage from 'what if the merchant was the protagonist of the rpg?' (n.b. this is the fifth time i have seen this question answered) to the revenge thriller ft. human trafficking

I have 70 hours in this but I am doomed to never finish it

dear lord, does it get slower? i'm 18 hours in with 12 quests done

No I just “took a break” after getting crushed in a boss fight and then our daughter took over the Switch for Minecraft and Splatoon purposes. I got another Switch for the adults and moved my game over, but have been anxious about diving in again. I feel like at this point I’ve forgotten how to win and it’s not going to be like a bicycle and the boss fight isn’t going to be any easier even this I’m intellectually 100% sure of what I got wrong. And so forth. Ugh.

live a live is cool

all the other games that do this thing have you play each story separately rather than putting all the protags in the same party (or else they do that much later in the game)

And 70 hours seems like such a sunk cost I don’t want to start over. Double ugh.

My ex played this, sunk ~100 hours into it and didn't bother for full completion because... ~boring~

Me I'm gonna finally play Secret Of Mana and then Seiken Densetsu 3

most things are boring after 100 hours!