I'm about 25 hours into the game right now and have cleared most chapter 2s for the characters. No story spoilers, but I'll talk about some game mechanics and character interactions I've noticed so far.

With regards to character interactions, it does seem pretty minimal unless things really change as the game progresses. They take the form of something similar to skits from a Tales game, and only happen at specific points when you have activated a specific character's chapter story. There's only been two for each chapter 2 story so far between the main character of that story and a random active party member. They might be more involved in later chapters. So, it's there, but pretty sparse.

Speaking of the party, you can swap out members at any given time at the tavern, but the character you choose at the start of the game seems to be locked into your party. I have no idea what it'll actually effect. It might be a Secret of Mana 2 thing where depending on who your main character is, their story's end boss becomes the game's overall end boss, but no way of knowing as of yet.

As seen on the Quick Look, characters level up and gain job points independent of each other, but I haven't really ran into any issues when it comes to needing to grind to get someone back up to date or anything. The main reason being there seems to be a fairly large number of small side dungeons that serve no story purpose, but might be needed for side stories and also give loot. Some of them have bosses in them, but not all.

Sub classes are unlocked via small shrines you find in the overworld. There are icons indicating their existence on the map, so you can't miss them. Each subclass can be only accessed by one character, meaning you can't have multiple characters that have subclassed into Sage, only one. There are also advance job shrines, but I've only seen one, and it was in an area I definitely should not have been in with a danger rating of double my party's level.

While you can only access the active skills for one subjob at any given time, any support skill you unlock is persistent even after you change said subjob.

Feel free to ask any other questions, but I think I've covered most of the stuff that I've seen people having questions about.

It is really weird to be collecting a full party of characters that barely exist outside of their own instanced storylines. Like I really don't mind if there ends up being no real overarching narrative with the team but there had to be a better way to structure all of this.

I've read when you completely finish your main character's story arc you can finally sub them out.

Cheers for mentioning the shrines in the overworld. I'm about 15 hours in and have gotten all the chapter ones finished but never noticed any, I'll keep watch for them. Also heard that you can sub out your main after finishing their story, it would really be a bummer if you couldn't since that would limit party comp no matter what you do.

I've also seen that there's a secret dungeon and actual final boss after you finish all 8 character's stories, but I have no idea how you unlock it because I'm trying to stay as spoiler free as possible. The writing hasn't been great so far, but hopefully picks up in later chapters.

I'm curious if anyone's had to stop and grind yet? So far I've been alright just going from one place to the next without grinding at all, but I've heard that it becomes necessary later on.

When you start the game, you should immediately go into the options and turn off corner shadows. This game is gorgeous, I haven't been this struck by the look of a game in a very long time. Everything is meant to remind you of old SNES/2D PS1 JRPG's, but it's all actually 3D, and it works exceptionally well. Except for the sprites, those are 2D, and I think those are excellent to. This whole thing has been a huge treat for me visually, I love it. I do think they should have included some options for the many filters they have going on, like some way to lessen the blur on the edges of the screen for people who might be bothered by that. But none of that bothers me, I can't get enough of looking at this game. I haven't seen anyone else have this kind of reaction to it, so maybe it's just me?

I like the combat a whole hell of a lot, too. It's really good JRPG combat, there's some good strategy in knowing when to break through an enemy's defenses and such. But it's not rewriting the book on JRPG combat. It's another small twist on SMT-style weakness exploitation that we've seen a lot of since... well, since SMT and its spinoffs became a pretty big deal in JRPG's. This is pretty great for me, I've played a lot of SMT games and I really like doing that, but if you're tired of that sort of thing then this game isn't going to do anything for you.

I also like the world a whole hell of a lot. It kind of just amounts to "there are lots of places to explore and lots of things to find and monsters to kill", but I like doing all of those things so consider me absorbed in it.

And on to story stuff. I have to do H'aanit's story and then I'll have finished all eight chapter 1's. I'm kind of dreading H'aanit's thing. I really, really hate how H'aanit and her people talk. It's just terrible - who on Earth thought that this was a good idea? I mean, there are people in this game who talk with a bit of a flair and it's fine. Otherwise, everyone's story thus far has been fine. I've come to terms with the fact that there's no overarching story, not even a weak one, linking all of these characters together. You just walk into town and the next character goes "I guess you can join me, I'll take some help!". It's especially weird in Therion's case, where his introduction involves him rejecting help because "he works alone". And then I walked up to him with Ophilia as my main and he just said "wanna help me steal stuff? All right, fine, let's go". It's even weirder because Ophilia is essentially an anime nun on a religious pilgrimage helping a shady dude steal shit for no reason. Olberic was also in the party at that time and he doesn't seem like the kind of dude who would be OK with pilfering someone's stuff either.

Each individual character vignette seems well-written thus far, if a bit formulaic. Any one of these could have been the jumping off point for a bigger story - Primrose's opening has an especially good hook for a globetrotting adventure where you gather seven other party members and do their loyalty missions while occasionally delving into some grand mystery, Bioware-style. Instead, you go through eight different calls-to-adventure and it just doesn't mesh well. It's even more disappointing when you think about the aforementioned Bioware formula, which has produced some of the greatest Western RPG's ever, or something like Final Fantasy VI, which has almost double the number of characters that Octopath Traveler does and gives all of them their own stories and special moments.

So this is what essentially amounts to reading eight different novellas at once. You read chapter one for the first one, then chapter two for the second, etc., then read chapter two for the first one, chapter two for the second one, and so on. I'm personally a little worried that by the time I've gotten back around to doing Ophilia's chapter two, I will have forgotten some key details. The game keeps a good log of what happened last time, but I don't fancy the idea of going back to read a log before starting each chapter.

All of that said, I am interested in what each individual story has to offer. I still think these stories all seem worthwhile and work well enough on their own. But I've found myself thinking several times that this pretty damn good JRPG could stand up to the genre's classics if there were something linking everything together.

Also relating to all of this, it kind of sucks that you can't take your primary character out of your party until you've finished his or her entire story. I specifically started with Ophilia because of this - always having a white mage on hand that can also cast one very powerful type of offensive magic is way more useful than, say, always having the apothecary on hand.

I don't want to sound too down on the game. I really like it, a whole hell of a lot, even the story (except for H'aanit's dialog, that shit's terrible). It's certainly worth your time and money - however, the unfortunate bits about the story make me want to say maybe wait for Dragon Quest XI if you need an overarching story and you're only going to play one JRPG this year. If you do that, you'll basically be choosing between "yet another story about some kids trying to stop a demigod" or "eight unrelated stories about people traveling the world for their own personal reasons".

Hopefully. But even still, not being able to do so until then makes choosing anyone other than the thief as your main character a mistake since you want the ability to pick locked chests with you everywhere you go.

H'aanits dialect is a bit of a chore but I can appreciate that they're going much further than most games do when they wanna approximate old English. If you're gonna do it then may as well take it almost too far.

@turambar: Not a defense, just a fact.

I GUESS? I really hate it. I like her character design, I like her in combat and I picked her for my main character. The voice doesn't super fit her for me, but that'd be fine if she didn't speak like this. I was bummed in the demo, until I found Ophelia and no one in her town speaks like it. Now I'm just annoyed because it just doesn't sound good at all. I felt like in Japanese it doesn't sound like she's speaking so proper, but even so I'd still be reading it. I'm only just stumbling on the third character, had a trio of games to beat and just went 3/3, but Ophelia and her chapter 1 was just fine in english and I kind of feel like sticking with it despite H'aanit.

I played a bit of the demo and started as the merchant girl because I thought it would be neat to see a game like this from the perspective of a merchant...and the story was pretty underwhelming. While the combat is fun and all I was really hoping for all 8 characters to link up and have some big overarching story, and since that doesn't seem to be the case, and the one character I've seen had a fairly boring plot I'm not sure I want to play the game.

Are any of the stories unique or really well told? Which ones are good that I should try with the demo? Also is there a lot of cool boss fights and good loot? Repeatable grinding of bosses and dungeons?

Only 1 hour in, so very very early impressions

+ : combat, music, path action has potential, art style is still very breathtaking

- : quite a bit of non-interactable NPCs, some of the dialogue from NPCs that do talk are too generic/dumb, and doesn't update with story events so far.

-- : man the game is blurry (hand held mode, corner shadow off doesn't really help)

Of the ten hours i played everything's great combat, visuals, but the story so far has being hit or miss, and you almost being forced to collect all 8 characters at the start doesn't help all that much IMO.

@turambar: Does that mean a lot of chests can be missable in most storylines if you don't pick the thief? Or is it like an easy option to get them compared to finding a key etc.

When I say locked, I that the thief is the only one that can open them. All of them are colored purple so you can tell right away. No chests are missable as every single area, even ones specific to character stories, can be revisited. It's just much more convenient having Therion be with you at all times instead of needing to go back a second time specifically for the chest. There's usually 1-2 purple chests in any given area out of the 5 on average that will be there in total.

I just finished the apothecarys intro which involves the apothecarys best friend whos also your colleague. After finishing it I talk to the guy (still as the apothecary character) and he just goes: "Hey im *Whateverhisnamewas* im this town's apothecary!"

No shit buddy, im supposedly your lifelong bff, colleague and we just saved your sister by using fucking apothecary skills !

@turambar: Ah, ok. That's not so bad. If you beeline for him as second party member it would minimize the backtracking even if you pick someone else as the main. I won't worry about it then.

@cjduke: The thief and dancer are pretty much the best as far as Chapter 1 stories go. Chapter 2 for the merchant girl might give you a bit more of what you're looking for, plot wise.

It's a real bummer what I'm hearing about your parry members lack of interaction between themselves and the world and events around them. It's one of my favorote aspects of RPGs. I wish this was more like Balders Gate 2 in that regard..... which came out 20 years ago? Lol

I'm liking the game a lot, but I really wish that I'd known you can't swap out your first character. I would've picked Cyrus if I would've known how much easier his ability to determine weaknesses makes the game.

I've done 7 of the 8 Chapter 1s... I started with the Hunter for no reason other than i often play that class given a choice. I wish I could switch her out. I feel I need the Cleric, and the Knight, really only because of his sweeping sword attack and how many enemies are weak to sword.. and I'd like Scholar for Analyze..and I'm always poor, so I want the Merchant also.. but there's no room for these members without being able to swap out my 1st pick.

The music, though, i loooooooooove.

Ok, the character interaction skits are actually less restrictive and more plentiful than I originally thought. They are not restricted to only during someone's story segment, and instead context appropriate dialogue can still appear even after it's over. They seem to randomly trigger when you swap people in and out of the party at the tavern.

Seeing a number of people here and there talk about how they have two static parties that they don't swap in and out much, I think that's helping give the impression of the lack of character interactions.

Note, there still isn't an abundance, and they're all in short one on one conversation form though, at least so far observed.

@sunspark: The one you get automatically at the start of a fight is certainly handy, but subclassing anyone else into a scholar and picking up analysis should still fill in that gap.

Apart from the story, the other major flaw that seems to be cropping up is that the character you start with has to stay in your party until you finish their entire story. I knew this going in, so I picked Ophilia because I really didn't see myself switching out the dedicated healer for someone else. Her healing lately hasn't been all that great, so I guess I need to find some equipment that pumps up Elemental Defense, but that's beside the point.

Cyrus is also a pretty good character to start with - he has access to several different damage types right off the bat and his mage abilities hit like a fucking truck. Plus, at the start of every fight he reveals one enemy weakness so you always know of at least one thing you can hit your foe with. I don't see myself switching Cyrus out anytime soon either.

Therion might be an OK starting choice because with him, there's no chest you cannot unlock. You can also immediately go south, pick up Alfyn, and the shrine with the Healer job isn't too far off so you'll have somebody with healing and holy magic pretty soon after starting the game, too.

But if you decide you'd rather start the game as Primrose or Alfyn, you're going to be stuck with a character whose usefulness isn't made apparent until they've got some skills under their belt. They're both support characters of the kind that you're not always going to want around, so neither of them can hit as hard as Cyrus's offensive magic or tank as much damage as Olberic, so you wind up having to make-do with them for the entire game. This problem is greatly alleviated, or completely disappears, when you start finding shrines, but each character still has some exclusive abilities that I find hard to let go.

Right now, I'm sticking with Ophilia, Cyrus, Tressa, and Olberic most of the time, and each of them has a subclass attached. I'm keeping Tressa around because she's not a bad damage dealer - not great, but not bad - and she finds tons of cash just laying around rather often. I've got like 40,000 fantasy bucks just hanging around in my back pocket, which at this point is enough to comfortably buy anything I can come across.

Those shrines that let you get a second class should be your top priority after finishing the first chapters for everyone.

It seems that for whatever reason, all the more involved party banters, ones that involve just more than two party members an discuss things outside of the character story lines occur only after the main story is over.

Fortunately, they are not missable. It's odd that they were not sprinkled a bit more evenly across the game though.

I feel like there's a lot of doubling down on all the bad JRPG mechanics that the genre has slowly, painstakingly started to phase out.

It's hard to be playing this and then look at what Bravely Default did with its Config options.

@efesell: Apart from random encounters (there's a skill that lowers those), what do you mean? I've been enjoying this game more and more over the past few days. I can't seem to play it enough... which means I'll burn out eventually but that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon. On the contrary, Bravely Default got real boring for me at roughly the 20 hour mark and I could never get back into it.

@justin258: Just general help to improve the flow of the game. Lots of encounters, the encounters don't move particularly fast, and I find that I need to do quite a bit of them to bring new characters up to speed... it's just sort of slowing the pace of the game to a crawl and the pacing is already really weird to begin with.

In Bravely if I get tired of encounters I open a menu and turn them off, or I can double them if I DO really just want to mindlessly grind something out. All the while fast forwarding battle animations if the need arises. I don't mean to draw such a direct comparison to two rather different games but its another attempt to trade on old JRPG stylings but at the same recognizes a lot of smart concessions it can make in the formula.

This... is not interested in that very much at all.

I don't see those two games as that different. Also, same team started octopath? But I'm not sure how much work was done there and how muddied development got overall as it switched to different devs.

I really don't see the time sinks as the worst part of jrpgs. Some good editing, level design and grinding mostly removed from the situation can stop those issues from needing to have settings to fix them(I'm not advocating that's what octopath has done). I find the worst part of jrpgs is the 16 year old and his crew need to save the universe from the big bad with a terrible script, story twists and characters. On that front, I kind of really enjoy what they did here differently.

I never beat it, but an early ass ps2 rpg, Tsugunai: Atonement, I thought was really interesting. The basic premise is you nearly die in the beginning of the game, wash up on beach, your soul is separated from your body and are told by the like 2 characters that can see you what to do to get back into your body. You then go around the town possessing certain individuals to work through their tiny personal stories in this one town. No world ending meteor or evil wizard. I really liked that, even if the game was hard to go back to even then in the mid 360/ps3 days. I wish more jrpgs could move in this similar direction in whatever way they want.

I think I would find what they're doing here refreshing story wise if it didn't feel so weird and slapdash.

Like it was mentioned above already but I just finished Therions intro and the sequence of that set up, his overly edgy backstory and 'All I need are these two hands' bullshit smash cutting immediately to 'Hey anime nun and noble huntress, do you want to join me for some Crime?'

It was ridiculous and its generally really hard to jostle me hard enough to take note of this kinda thing.

I thought that Bravely Default's "turn off random encounters entirely from a menu" was a nice idea, but it wasn't very organic. It felt like entering a cheat code, rather than something you actually earned in-game. It wasn't unwelcome, but it wasn't so much implemented as it was thrown in there. Also if I remember correctly, the original Japanese release of Bravely Default did not have that feature.

As far as bringing your B-team up to speed - they could have implemented something that other JRPG's have implemented, where characters on the bench get half experience so they're not totally behind when you decide to start using them. As someone who is really enjoying the flow and pace of the game, this hasn't really bothered me too much. If you must have a "b-team" of sorts, instead of swapping out characters regularly or something, then you could always just use them for running around the world, looking for shrines and dungeons and doing side-quests and any other side stuff the game may surface. This game world feels huge so far for me, with plenty of nooks and crannies and things for you to do while leveling up other characters. If worse comes to worse, you can always take three high level characters and your lowest level character into the highest level place around and carry that low-level character up rather quickly.

But all of this assumes that you're enjoying the battles and the world, which I am. To me, they feel quick and impactful and punchy, and there's more than enough variety in enemies to make up for having so many encounters. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. It is a strangely-structured game, especially for this genre, that structure doesn't always work very well, and I could see that not working for some people as well as others.

Me, I can't wait to get home and play it some more.

@justin258: That's the thing though and why this game having a skill you can learn to avoid encounters is more of a bummer.. it doesn't need to be something you have to 'earn'. It should just be a cool option you can use as you want or ignore as you will if you find it goes against the spirit of things.

I don't think the encounter slider is unique to our version of the game, just unique to the expanded release in general. I don't know anything about the very first release of the game and what is unique to that.

A Pokemon-esque item that lowers encounter rates is a great solution. You could have different tiers of it or something. You could do like Final Fantasy VI and have an item that just turns random encounters off, although in FFVI's case it's an item limited to a late-game character. You could also have an early-game spell that does it.

Alternatively, you could do like Persona/Radiant Historia/that 3DS version of Dragon Quest VIII and have enemies crawling around the world map that represent encounters. No items required that way, you just weave around them if you don't want to fight them. I don't think this solution would work well in Octopath Traveler, though, partly for presentation reasons and partly because the Switch already gets a wee bit frame-y sometimes when running this game.

I just think that going into a menu and turning encounters off is a clunky and inelegant solution to random encounters. The skill you get that lowers the encounter rate doesn't take all that long to get, it's a skill that you can equip on the Scholar class. Cyrus gets it pretty quickly.

Everything I've heard about this game feels like its a throw-back in all the wrong ways, at least when it comes to what drew me to games of this sort.

Light on character interaction and story, heavy on gameplay and unique mechanics and etc. Like, what its got it seems to have in spades, and what its going for it nails. But given I've always been a "in it for the story' person, it seems like a swing and a miss for me.

Which is a shame cause this was suppose to be the reason I picked up a Switch this fall/christmas. Now that there is one less JRPG I care about, unless we get that remaster of the first Xeno game from the WiiU on the switch, I might be holding off till next year to get a switch.

@justin258: All solutions that are in every way inferior to a nice menu option that I can go to and switch them off because I'm not feeling it. Even if it was somewhat cumbersome in Bravely Default by the next game it was just a side panel you accessed by tapping R. No reason they couldn't have refined it here.

Besides its all the same anyway whether it's a skill or accessory or what have you. You navigate a menu and do something to tell this kind of bad mechanic to chill out a little bit. Might as well skip all the bullshit and just have it from the jump.

After i found the first job shrines this game became way better.

I loving this game. I dig the combat system as you need to find out what enemies and bosses are weak too and even thinking of different strategies to give you party buffs or heals. The look of the game is gorgeous with its bloom and light effects and the music is simply fantastic. I do wish I can find some shrines though because I want to give my party members second jobs (want to give either Cyrus a dancer job or H’iaant a cleric job). I did beat H’iaant’s chapter 2 boss and that was exciting! Can’t wait to play more!

There should be a small symbol on your minimap/compass in the area where the chapter 2 towns are that represent the shrines. There's one shrine in each area.

This game is so damn good! I finally had enough time after work to start doing chapter 2 stuff and the game has really hit an amazing stride for me. This might legitimately be my favorite turn-based combat system (at least for Jrpgs, but I'd go farther than that). The versatility and satisfying build/payoff of the system is downright genius, it's one of the only grindy games where I have not yet been bored of a random encounter. And the only ones that got close to being boring was when I walked through an early area and just wiped things. When you are in that sweet spot of challenge in an encounter this is peak Jrpg. Fucking love it.