Video games are entering an era where throwbacks are a lucrative business. High-profile remakes, remakes and revivals are now ten pennies – but the most successful of these is undoubtedly Octopath Traveler, the SNES-era Japanese role-playing game produced by Square Enix and published by Nintendo. year attracted viewers.Now Square Enix is back with a sequel, with a neat title Octopath Traveler 2.
Back in 2018, I called the original Octopath Traveler “beautiful, brilliant, and flawed” — and honestly, that description still applies to the sequel. Make no mistake, however: the second game is better than the first in just about every way you really care about it – even if some of the original’s niggling flaws still exist.
Nintendo’s exclusion from this sequel means Octopath Traveler 2 has been a multiplatform game from day one, available on PC and PlayStation as well as Switch – but that’s not the only expansion going on here . Overall, it’s a bigger, deeper game–and it delivers without diminishing the open-ended sense of freedom that one of the first game’s aces had.
Meanwhile, the biggest trump card is still on the table: the beautiful HD-2D art style that caught the eye when it first appeared a few years ago. But with that art now migrating to several other games, Octopath Traveler 2 can’t rely on it alone–so its unique structure is thought to carry more weight.
For the uninitiated, Octopath is so named because there are eight (octo means octingenti – eight in Latin, because Latin is apparently cool) different player characters to choose from. It’s a choice–you choose which crew member you want to start with, and then after completing their introductory chapters, you’re free to go out into the world and do what you like.
The result is a truly compelling sense of freedom, but also an unavoidable sense of lethargy. There aren’t as many grand, world-threatening genre-traditional storylines here. Instead, players experience a more intimate story about each actor. You recruit someone, and you work out their personal problems.
Both titles are the same, though Octopath 2 does a little more successfully to put things together in a slightly more satisfying way. The chapters are dense but fairly swift, and one major change is that the main characters actually exist in pairs–each with a specific ally that you recruit into their stories. Once paired, this reveals a new, optional side story–trying to address complaints from the first game that there wasn’t enough to tie these characters together.
It sort of works, but also falls short of the party ties and banter that make so many great genres special. That’s a tough one indeed, but – if you interweave everything more than that, the wonderful twisty exploration and arbitrary sequential recruitment of actors gets ruined.
In addition to combat abilities, each of the eight protagonists has several “path actions” that can be used in the world. This allows you more ways to interact with the world and provides new ways to acquire items, information, allies, or start battles. Each character has two of these; one to use during the day and one to use at night. You can switch the time of day almost anytime to help you explore.
I do like the Path Actions system as an idea, but it speaks to the overarching theme in this series of characters and systems, rather than being physically interconnected. You can carve a path of destruction through town, looting and killing, and there will never be any consequences. This causes the same uncomfortable itching to travel around with eight characters who don’t interact much – and it destroys the world.
Combat and progression are areas that honestly haven’t had much changed or tweaked. It’s still a great, snappy combat system, and the always-bright, furious combat theme helps it pick up the pace. I love a good job system – this game has that. Combat is engaging and fun, and exploiting weaknesses and tearing enemies to shreds with well-executed strategy is exciting – especially when Octopath Traveler 2 is occasionally unabashedly difficult.
This difficulty is a bit of a heartache, and one of the few thorns in the game. I totally love the difficulty of RPGs, but I’m not a huge fan. Even if you’re an old school style RPG, the only way to get around the difficulty spike is to grind it out on trash mobs… I think you’re kind of missing the point. Octopath Traveler 2 does a gated content swap behind higher level enemies – and all you can really do is walk away and grind “until you’re ready”. There’s also no passive EXP sharing, so four members not in your squad at any given time will inevitably end up at low levels.
I can see the logic here – it encourages you to explore the title’s rich marginal content (60 hours of content here, easily), and interact with all characters equally – but after a while it makes me want to turn the game down . It’s the same thing that happened in the first game – it’s the biggest problem that hasn’t been fixed this time around.
Still, Octopath Traveler 2 is generally better than its predecessor in every way. It has a denser world with more things to do, is by far the best looking HD-2D game, and neatly fixes some of the original game’s issues. By the same token, however, it’s a shame that the game’s other problems remain here – and hinder its greatness. I wish it had been a little braver and gone further – but a safe sequel to a good game is – surprisingly – very good.
Octopath Traveler 2 is an easy recommendation for old-school JRPG nerds — and might even appeal to eccentric newcomers. Compared to another 2D-HD gem, Live A Live, I wouldn’t recommend it much – but it’s still very cute.
