I took Cyrus at random, and I'm glad I did. His passive owns in battle, and his nuke abilities are super strong. But the game...

I like the way it looks, I like the aesthetic, I like the combat a lot, but fuck me is the story content kind of...boring?

I get what they're trying to do. Tell several unique stories, each with a different protagonist. But that's all they are: unique stories. There's barely ANY interaction between characters, no interlinking connective tissue, I dunno. It's just not been "doing it for me" like I expected it to.

Plus the grind is real. My main 2 characters are 28, but some of my lesser ones are still level 6. How are they meant to stay relevant when they get killed in one hit?

I went with Ophilia. Normally I would choose a big ole fighter as my main, but I decided to switch it up with this game and see how it would feel having my healer right off the bat and getting her super strong before anyone else.

H’aanit for me too. Her Beast Lore makes her very flexible in hitting the right weakness if you have a beast that is able to do so. Plus her Legtrap Hold skill is excellent against bosses so you get more time to break their shields.

@stoneybologna: I also picked Ophilia. She's subclassed as a Scholar and level 42 right now and she's a real damage dealer. Not as good as Cyrus with offensive magic, but pretty good.

Given the option to choose a different main, though, I would have picked Therion because of the purple treasure chests. I wish there was a different way to open those, they have good loot in them and I hate leaving good loot behind.

I cannot see myself picking H'aanit. Her dialog is by far the worst aspect of the game for me. Who the hell thought that was a good idea? I like her story and her character, but Christ the dialog style is so fucking cringey.

Tressa because she's small and eager and positive and has extremely relatable abilities like Make A Bunch Of Friends and Take A Nap In The Middle Of Battle and she's literally a merch boss and she's ME

(also I really like her mix of weapons and powers and I feel better giving money to random people for things they want to sell rather than stealing them outright because REDISTRIBUTE THE WEALTH)

@justin258: I never used Ophilia as a scholar, she was a dancer or an "advanced job". With H'aanit I had to turn a blind eye towards the text and just power through. But she worked well as a warrior or for pretty much for every job.

The fact that you could chance jobs on the fly was kinda fun. I chose my teams based on the one whose chapter I was going to do and filled the rest with lowest lvl members (+ my main H'aanit). Which led to some fun team combos. Like at times Tressa was a scholar, at times a cleric and at times a thief.

I went with Primrose, and she ended up having one of the best stories in the game. Once I got the cleric subclass, she became a really good support character.

Throughout the game I was regularly swapping out all the characters except Primrose to try to keep them about the same level, and I recommend doing that because it saves you from having to grind characters you don't use as much just to get through their stories. The only difficulty you might have is having enough money to keep everybody well equipped until late in the game.

@zandravandra: Tressa was fun, she could easily swap between different jobs! And when I reached the end game and suddenly had over a million in leafs, I chose buying instead of stealing.

I'm about 3 hours in, and I chose H'aanit because she has a giant cat (as someone else said) so that's a given. I wish I had read a little more about the individual characters in retrospect because the Middle English-ish is still making me a little crazy.

I picked Tressa, who at the very least is super flexible stats-wise and ensures I have an absurd amount of money at all times. I do wish I had picked Therion though, if only because it's a hassle to put him back in the party every single time I want to unlock one of those purple chests.

H'aanit. Love her look, love bows, hunter stuff was a bonus. Olde Englishe could...SHOULD be better, but oh well.

You could change jobs just as often in Final Fantasy V and Bravely Default. I seem to recall Bravely Default's job system being a little more in-depth than this one, but I honestly can't remember in which way. I was not a huge fan of Bravely Default anyway.

Ophilia is fairly versatile as a character. She gets tons of MP, as a Cleric she should have plenty of Elemental Defense, and as something of a side effect of those she seems to get really good Elemental Attack, which is why I classed her as a Scholar. She's wound up being the "boring, but extremely useful" character of the group, as she covers a lot of weaknesses and can heal and can hit pretty damn hard.

The only character that feels kind of useless so far is Alfyn. I don't think "useless" is the right word, but he's not terribly useful outside of healing and causing status effects. If he had a skill that could heal everyone of status effects at once, that would be fantastic, but he doesn't seem to, and his stats never seem to reach the same heights that anyone else does. Maybe I'm just using him wrong, but I'm not really a fan of his combat potential. Shame, really, I think his character is rather likable.

Alfyn's Concoction skill can be used to heal status effects on the whole party at once.

I thought he was kind of a subpar character, too, before I started using Concoction. If you save your rare ingredients for hard fights, Alfyn can be quite useful in unique ways.

Went with Tressa and my main party is Ophilia (secondary scholar), Tressa (secondary hunter), Alphine (secondary warrior) and random 4th person.

Ophilia / Alphine split the healing duties based if its single or mass healing needs.
Alphine does alot of melee damage while Ophilia does alot of elemental damage.
Tressa gets the gold to fund the operations, while dealing decent amount of damage and sharing her BP.

Picked Cyrus because of my own profession. He sounds... snobby? I guess by design?

The 8 character-on-equal-billing structure of the game dictates that his 2nd chapter is half way across the map, and recommended level 27?! I already wasn't feeling too hot about his storyline (liked Tressa and Olberic's more, the only ones I've completed), now there's a 50/50 chance I just give up on the game before I see chapter 2. Octopath has a lot of things to like, music, look, combat, novel npc interaction system, but the structure doesn't work for me so far.

Damn it!

I didn't mess with concoction all that much, so I'll have to work with it some more later on. To be honest, I'm not really a fan of any of the character-exclusive in-combat abilities. It's cool that H'aanit can cause so much damage with her Pokemon skills, but capturing beasts isn't all that fun. It kind of interrupts the combat in a way that I don't like.

Naturally, this means that most of the time I'm using Ophilia, Cyrus, Tressa, and... OK, I'd like to keep Olberic in my party for higher-level fights but Therion has taken his spot because I don't like walking past those purple chests.

Cyrus's chapter 2 makes things way more interesting. It's one of the darkest things in the whole game and it really took me by surprise. Several of the chapter 2's did, actually, although some of them are kinda weak.

I don't know if you know this but you can fast travel at any time to any town in this game. Something being halfway across the map isn't a problem. With Evasive Maneuvers and Evil Ward skills active, you should be able to make it anywhere you want to in the game in a few minutes flat - though I don't recommend doing that particularly often.

I haven't had to do much real grinding in this game. I've done a lot of exploration, though, and I haven't skipped out on most random encounters. If you flee most of your encounters, never switch out your party members, and fast travel everywhere, then you are going to be way under-leveled. But if you explore the world and poke your nose basically everywhere you can and switch out party members from time to time, you'll never be far behind where you need to be. That's the game to me, though - the stories and the game's structure aren't so great but the combat and the world have kept me hooked for 35 hours at this point and I don't really feel like stopping.

@justin258: Thanks for the heads up.

I chose Therion because I always like playing as a thief/rogue in RPGs be them pen and paper, Western, or Japanese.

My boy Cyrus has an air of culture and knowledge, passive Analyze, and those good, good elemental nukes.

I went with Thieron and am working my way counter-clockwise through the map. His Steal HP and SP skills pretty much ensure he lives forever if he isn't OHKO'd, so he's been rather useful so far.

I went with Primrose, which has worked out fine, but I do find it frustrating you can't take the protagonist out of the party at any point. It's just such a weird restriction that makes it more difficult to keep everyone on par with each other. With hindsight though I would've picked Therion or Tressa.

Picked Primrose, I like her.

I picked Primrose in the first demo and really liked her story, so I picked her in the full game as well.

Though if I had to do it again, I'd pick Tressa or Therion just to get the money/equips rolling in right away, as that's been a major issue for me.