"New games in the old style" is the deceptively pat label Square
Enix has adopted for smaller JRPG projects like Octopath Traveler, and
one that invites an obvious question: which parts are old, and which
parts are new? Far from a reprise of conventions from Final Fantasy 6
and before, Octopath is a curious medley of tradition and risk-taking.
It engages with topics a JRPG of the mid-90s might shy away from: one of
the playable characters is a sex worker, whose quest to avenge her
father's death sees her grappling with the cruelty and chauvinism of an
outwardly blissful medieval world. But this is, nonetheless, a world
constructed according to a cosy old playbook, in which every town you
visit has the same facilities and a lone citizen loitering for all
eternity near the entrance, offering a crisp intro to all who visit.
It's a game that puts a familiar emphasis on timing, built around a
turn-based battle system in which the ability to strike first often
trumps how hard you hit. But like its spiritual predecessors, the
Bravely Default series, Octopath also lets you bend time a little,
banking action points in order to perform several attacks in a single
turn.
The vibe is almost analogous to steampunk, in that the game feels
at once archaic and futuristic. This temporal uncertainty is palpable at
the level of the visuals, as authentically smudgy retro sprites scurry
across dollhouse Unreal environments slathered in particle effects and
depth of field. The fixed, angled camera perspective evokes the
experience of wandering the mode seven overworld of Final Fantasy 4,
with all those flat landmark textures traded for 3D geometry. The use of
vignetting, meanwhile, creates an atmosphere not just of reverence, but
of mystery: it's as though you're peering through darkening glass into
scenes from the genre's history that never quite were. Each of the game's regions is lousy with treasure
chests, many glimpsed at certain points when camera and geometry line up
just right. You can fast-travel between towns to avoid the drudgery of
random encounters in areas you've cleared.
Octopath's faded, tapering concept art recalls the Ivalice universe
of Final Fantasy 12, and there is something of that game too in its
ensemble storyline, with eight, more-or-less standalone tales unfolding
in parallel across around 60 hours of play. You'll pick one character as
your main protagonist - they'll always appear in your party, and the
choice determines the ending quest you'll get - and scoop up the others
one by one. Each character's tale is broken up into chapters set in
different towns, their recommended levels marked on the world map. You
can attempt them in any order, resuming each character's quest by asking
town bartenders for news of their exploits, but the level curve imposes
a discreet running order. Level requirements are staggered across the
game's storylines, so that you'll generally want to change to another
character's perspective after finishing a chapter - or else, spend a lot
of time grinding between chapters in order to continue with the
previous character.
While pursuing one character's story, the other people in your
retinue effectively vanish from the stage - they'll appear only in
fights, plus the odd, flavourful but throwaway "party banter" interlude.
As a way of structuring an ensemble story, this may prove an acquired
taste: it's as though your party members were haunting one another,
eavesdropping at the bar, rather than acting as comrades. The fragmented
storytelling also keeps you at a slight remove from the backdrop, a
realm that again compares to Ivalice in being animated as much and more
by politics or civil discord as hellish slumbering evils. Dotted across the world map are shrines which bestow a
secondary class that can be assigned to any character at will, allowing
you to field some entertaining hybrid builds.
As noted, this is a setting somewhat in thrall to the foibles and
constraints of much older fantasies, with villages full of people who
stand in place, repeating the same lines like automatic checkout
machines, but certain character abilities expose another layer of
intrigue. Besides robbing and buying from NPCs you can Inquire about or
Scrutinise them for hints on sidequests or nuggets of incidental
writing. Not everybody has secrets worth sharing, but there are some fun
discoveries, such as dogs with startlingly arcane backstories. With the
right party members, you can also enlist NPCs to help out in combat,
which is worth doing if only for the bathos when Carefree Villager #5
bursts in from stage-right to lay the smackdown on a god of the forest.
The lack of overlap between character stories probably has its
roots in a need to minimise complexity for the writing team. There's a
similar air of project management to the design of each chapter's
challenges, which always default to speaking to somebody in a town,
using a character's signature action to solve a very gentle puzzle, then
proceeding to a dungeon area with a boss at the end of it. It's more
than a little dreary, but thankfully, the characters themselves are
strong enough to compensate. They're derived from familiar archetypes -
there's a warrior, two varieties of healer, a mage, a thief, a merchant,
a bard-type support, and a huntress who can capture and summon monsters
- but the writing is adventurous and textured enough that you rarely
feel like you're just levelling classes while popping the odd speech
bubble. Statuesque features aside, Cyrus is worth investing in
for two very useful passive abilities - one exposes an enemy weakness at
the start of a battle, the other reduces the random encounter rate.
The most unusual and problematic yarn is that of Primrose, the
aforesaid sex worker - her ability to seduce passers-by to act as
reinforcements in battle sits uneasily alongside a story about misogyny
and human trafficking. While their stories are comparatively
straight-laced, I had most fun with Cyrus, a handsome bookworm with a
Sherlock Holmes streak, and Therion, a sarcastic burglar who is obliged
to hunt for mystic gemstones following an ill-fated mansion heist.
Questing priestess Ophilia is your go-to for wholesome
pillar-of-the-community sentiments, while youthful trader Tressa has a
surprising amount to say on the subject of responsible capitalism. The
game's script is colourful and succint with a punchy, if occasionally
punchdrunk, taste for dialect. Consider the cautionary tale of H'aanit,
the stern huntress whose speech is peppered with agonising
olde-worldeisms and possibly unintended references to, of all things,
The Lion King.
If these characters exist at a remove in the story, they
collaborate marvellously in the game's turn-based fights. The bedrock of
Octopath Traveller's battle system is the usual JRPG parade of physical
and magical attacks, buffs and debuffs, turn orders and critical hits,
but it's lent uncommon snap and flourish by the aforesaid "boost" system
and the ability to break opponents by targeting their weaknesses,
lowering their defences and benching them for a round or two. Where in
Bravely Default you had to actively "default" a character's turn to
stockpile those actions, here characters accrue boost points passively
between rounds providing you aren't spending them, which means they can
still attack, cast spells and so on while powering themselves up. It's
the same, suspenseful process of holding fire in order to perform a
really devastating move when the time is right, just set to a faster
tempo. Summoned creatures can be decisive in bigger clashes,
but you can only cart around so many monster buddies at once, and most
have a finite number of uses.
Breaking, meanwhile, sees you exposing enemy weaknesses with
certain abilities or through trial and error, working out which members
of your party are best used to sabotage the opposition and who should be
left to accumulate boost. The brilliance of this system is the firm
line it draws between harming and undermining a foe, which counters a
common frustration with party-based RPGs where characters not in your
hand end up under-powered. Providing you exploit those weaknesses, you
don't have to inflict enormous punishment on an enemy to break them, so
lower-level party members can still contribute to a win by setting the
enemy up for a takedown. Breaking is of particular importance during
Octopath's gruelling boss battles, in which you'll often come within
spitting distance of victory only for your adversary to summon a bunch
of elite minions or wipe your team with a last-ditch ultimate. Many of
these dirty tricks have a charging period, giving you a window in which
to daze the enemy before the nuke descends.
Octopath Traveler is the kind of game that gets hand-waved aside as
being for "the old school", but that's to overlook its charismatic
innovations in battle and the strange, detached, even austere
construction of its narrative. For good and a little for ill, it's a lot
more eccentric than it seems. JRPG detractors will bounce off the
hoarier elements - changeless villages, that well-thumbed handbook of
classes and abilities, those sparsely animated sprites - and so, miss
the peculiarities those devices hide. Genre aficionados may take umbrage
at being forced by the levelling curve to alternate characters, and
never quite seeing those stories entwine as fully as in, say, the Mass
Effect games. Give the game time to bed in, however, and you'll find it a
bold contribution to a genre that has always been a little too in love
with its past and the past in general. There's much here to inspire
nostalgia for the classics, but Octopath Traveler is at its best when
following its own nose through a history of its own creation.
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