I’ve been preoccupied with some other work lately, but fortunately, I’ve kept Octopath Traveler in my back pocket for an occasion such as this. It’s telling that I actually had to search the site to make sure I hadn’t already reviewed it; despite playing this only one month ago, most of my memories of Octopath Traveler have faded into oblivion because of an innate unremarkableness that oozes from its every pore. First, a disclaimer of sorts: I finished my chosen “main” character’s personal story, but my Game Pass subscription ended earlier than expected and I wasn’t able to finish everyone’s personal stories, and this is supposedly a prerequisite for the true ending that lazily ties everyone’s disparate stories together.

To be honest, though, I was already grappling with the temptation to set Octopath Traveler aside. Everything about it is clearly inspired by Final Fantasy VI—one of the games from my childhood that I know front to back—and yet all of the features and priorities that made that game work have been watered down and replaced with gimmicks that appear to have been designed solely to waste as much time as possible. Octopath Traveler‘s dialog drags. Its story meanders aimlessly. Its characters are dull tropes. Its mechanics never evolve. There’s very little to recommend here.

Do you have too much time on your hands? Fed up with enthralling plots and interesting characters? Then be sure to buy Octopath Traveler here!

Octopath Traveler takes the I Am Setsuna route of padding through overexplaining

Half a decade ago, I reviewed a game called I Am Setsuna that was trying to replicate the magic of Chrono Trigger in the same way that Octopath Traveler tries to tap into the magic of Final Fantasy VI. Setsuna‘s the greater success of the two, but its writing’s habit of repeatedly explaining the simplest things proved to be its Achilles heel. Having something you’ve already worked out explained to you is annoying. Hearing it explained by four different characters in a row transcends annoyance and enters the realm of padding. Octopath Traveler treads a similar path in a different way; while party members rarely interact with each other, that just means that all of them chew on every story beat like terrible dinner theater performers.

“Ah yes! What a tragedy that I, Sir Swordwielding Mopeypants, was cast out from the kingdom where I once served the king as a loyal royal knight! Alas, if not for my blind trust of scheming fellow knight Dubious MacGuffin, I would still have a purpose in life. Woe! I sure hope that no children in this village of my exile are kidnapped or otherwise imperiled by Sir Dubious, lest I be forced to journey anew!”

I hope you can appreciate a good soliloquy. Octopath Traveler is packed with soliloquies. Part of the reason for this is that there isn’t really a “main story” (at least, not in the 30-something hours that I played—they all come together later, allegedly, when it turns out that an unambitious mastermind facilitated all of the low-level crime that sets everyone’s stories in motion). Instead, there are eight characters, all of whose personal stories are resolved in four story beats.

Imagine how hollow the stories in various jRPGs of yore would be if they forced a resolution by the time you reached their fourth town. Now multiply that by eight and you have Octopath Traveler‘s cast of unremarkables. Each story is flawed in some way. I chose a priestess named Ophilia as my “main” character—for reasons I could never figure out, you have to commit to one character who can’t be removed from your party until you finish their personal story—and it was probably the best one of the bunch despite being fraught with sentimentality and that magical-friendship quality that I always find so grating. Primrose is her opposite, with her motivations essentially boiling down to revenge against the shadowy cult that murdered her family. For some reason, though, much of her story consists of overtly rapey content that’s a lurching tonal shift from everything else.

Another character who I kept in my party for gameplay reasons is a researcher named Cyrus. I’m convinced he’s a stand-in for one of the developers because of the way he’s described as being dashingly, irresistibly handsome, but prone to misinterpreting the resulting attention as intellectual curiosity. He’s fired from the school he teaches at, only to stumble across a conspiracy because he has nothing better to do. Another fixture of my party for gameplay reasons was the huntress H’aanit, whose manner of speech is so disjointed and bad-unique that I’m convinced that there’s a malfunctioning Ted Woolsey AI who’s responsible for it after being fed Cyan (Final Fantasy VI) and Frog (Chrono Trigger) dialog nonstop. It’s too much. If you have to go this far to distinguish your characters from each other, then it’s time to accept that you don’t have a story worth telling.

The gameplay hits a sweet spot 10 hours in, but that means it sucks before and after that

Octopath Traveler takes the solid turn-based combat of Final Fantasy VI and adds a couple of twists. And I do mean “couple,” as there are exactly two, both of which being potentially interesting but ultimately turning out terrible. The first twist is that enemies are weak against certain types of elements and physical attacks, and hitting them with attacks that they’re weak against a certain number of times causes them to enter a stunned state that prevents them from attacking for a turn while also lowering their defenses by around half. Most characters specialize in one or two specific elements and physical attacks, so you won’t be able to efficiently stun enemies until you slog through the early hours and recruit more characters.

Once you have enough characters who have leveled up enough to unlock a varied assortment of attacks, the combat finally hits its stride. Unfortunately, it’s ultimately undone by repetition; Octopath Traveler never does anything to spice up this system, so you’re doing the same thing for dozens of hours until it stops being fun. Worse, bosses eventually have their health bars supercharged, meaning that you’ll be stuck whacking at them for 10-15 minutes even when they pose no realistic threat to your party. They’re there to waste your time.

The second gameplay twist involves the unique out-of-battle skill that all eight characters have. Ophilia has the ability to “guide” NPCs, which causes them to follow her around. This can be used to solve some sidequests (but don’t get excited—it’s nowhere near as interesting as it sounds, and all of the sidequests boil down to “I need X” and “thanks for procuring X for me, here’s a reward”). They can also follow her into battle and be summoned a certain number of times. However, many of the most powerful NPCs can only be guided once Ophilia reaches a certain level. Primrose can seduce NPCs to follow her in much the same way, and her skill can net you some absurdly powerful NPC helpers since it has a percentage chance of working instead of requiring reaching a level threshold. However, failing is common and can force you to spend money restoring your reputation, and the economy is so tight that it’s faster to save/load.

Mandatory skill usage and the lack of experience sharing proves to be the coup de grace

Every character has a skill like that, though many don’t do much at all. Cyrus can examine things and sometimes earn a slight discount at a shop. H’aanit can challenge NPCs to a one-on-one fight that serves little purpose but to knock them out to get into rooms that they’re blocking. Much like Ophilia and Primrose’s skills, they tend to overlap a little. One commonality is that many of them rely on beating a percentage chance to succeed, though, and you can only fail at skill attempts so many times before they’re locked in the town/area you’re in. Once that happens, you have to waltz back to the nearest inn and pay an exorbitant fee to reset your reputation. Savescumming each time you need to use a skill is usually a better option.

Here’s the thing, though. Many characters’ main stories require succeeding at these checks, and the to-succeed percentages can be 15% or lower if the character in question isn’t at an adequate level. Characters don’t gain levels when they’re sitting on the sidelines, and since you can only have four characters in your party, half of the cast is always being denied crucial experience. You can’t count on the leveled characters you’ve been using. They can’t prop up a weaker unit when pushing the plot forward requires beating one of those 15% skill checks. Your only real option is grinding.

Upon realizing this, I resolved to do a ton of grinding so that any new characters I recruited would start at a higher average level. That’s how Final Fantasy VI works; if you can get your early character levels up to something ridiculous, every character you recruit from them on will join at a similar level, saving you a ton of busywork. No such luck; everyone begins as a level 1 character in Octopath Traveler. The conveniences that were available in that 1994 game are nowhere to be found.

Then I set out to find the best way of grinding. I spent 20 minutes slowly chipping away at a super-hard boss who was way out of my level range. In a normal game, this would net everyone a couple of levels. Two characters gained a level afterward, which wasn’t a reward commensurate with the time (and huge number of consumable items) that I put into it. The only way to jump several levels like that is to luck upon one of the rare high-exp enemies in a dangerous area and get lucky enough to beat it. At no point was any of this in danger of becoming fun. Fights are slow. Leveling is slow. Cutscenes are slow. Octopath Traveler feels like it was designed by barrels of molasses for barrels of molasses.

And I haven’t even gotten to the random encounter rate, which is ridiculous. A good encounter rate is balanced around the average time it takes to complete a battle so that fighting doesn’t feel like it takes up all of your time. Octopath Traveler‘s fights take forever to finish, though, and you’re always only a few seconds of running away from being in another fight. We’re talking Lufia and the Fortress of Doom levels of random encounters. The encounter rate doesn’t ease up until you’ve leveled up one of the characters who have the skill to reduce their frequency. I never unlocked anything that fully turned the encounters off, which is yet another way that Octopath Traveler ends up being a pale imitation of Final Fantasy VI.

Octopath Traveler‘s visuals and music don’t appear to understand their inspirations

Contrast is more important than Octopath Traveler gives it credit for; when every village and cave boils down to “brown or blue-tinted area with dust and/or smoke and/or fog all over the place,” it’s very difficult to establish a moody atmosphere anymore because there’s nowhere moodier to go. The character sprites are designed to Final Fantasy VI‘s exact proportions (which provides them with the ability to emote well, not that they have much material to work with), and the idea of placing those sprites in a world of polygons is solid enough, but it’s not revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination. Most of the time, Octopath Traveler just ends up looking like a duller, more perspective-restrictive take on Grandia‘s art style.

Finally, there’s the soundtrack. I suspect that the gameplay deficiencies were partially responsible for how difficult I found it to appreciate the music, but there’s definitely more to it than just that—something about the mixing/instrumentation and lack of evolution holds it back. There are a lot of happy village tracks. The combat tracks are upbeat. It’s all very expected, which made it easy to tune out. Most tracks don’t evolve in meaningful ways. There are a couple of tracks here that compare favorably to those in Final Fantasy VI and even pay homage to it, but the soundtrack is huge and filled with very few such keepers. Most of the music you’ll be listening to is the kind of generic orchestral fluff that you could hear in any random game or movie. And when a track with actual emotion begins to play, the story’s complete lack of investment or payoff makes it difficult to buy in.

Story: 1/3 Gameplay: 1/3 Visuals: 1/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ – 4/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

A super late Octopath Traveler review first appeared on Killa Penguin