A Not-So-Yellow Brick Road: The Flaws of Octopath Traveler

If you have a Switch and enjoy RPGs, then there's a high probability that you're currently enjoying Octopath Traveler.  In fact, there's a good likelihood that any of your Switch friends are also playing it.  It's been one of the most anticipated non-Nintendo published Switch games since the system's announcement almost two years ago and it's finally here.  So far, everyone that I've personally talked to absolutely loves the game and for good reason.  It has a fantastic art style and terrific gameplay... yet I've rarely heard anything outside of praise being said about it.  Well, I'm going to take a moment to talk about some things that I feel detract from the game.

To start, the biggest flaw in the game is capping your party to four members.  I feel the game's combat could have been that much richer and encounters much more engaging with a full entourage of eight people.  I can understand the design choice behind it being that maybe the developers felt eight people would be too many to manage, but any hardcore RPG fan would immediately hark back to the days when we had games like Suikoden giving us at least six.

Then, there's having to manage them outside of combat.  Whenever you enter a village, you'll have to swap out characters in order to use their path actions.  If you don't know what these are, they are abilities that allow you to interact with townsfolk in different ways.  You can glean information from them to find hidden items and get discounts at inns and shops (speaking of shops, you can only see what equipment can by used by members currently in your party, so you'll need to be swapping out your reserves if you want to see what works for them).  You can steal and purchase items.  You can challenge townsfolk to battle and recruit people to be summoned into battle.  If you want to do a thorough pass through the town using all your path actions, you'll have to swap at least one person out at the bar and then visit everyone again.  It's a bit inconvenient.

You'll also come across shrines that allow you to bestow a secondary job to your characters so they can use the abilities of someone else along with their primary skills.  The upside to this is that it allows you to become considerably stronger because you also get a stat boost.  The downside to this is that you can't make use of path actions related to these jobs meaning you still need to swap people out at bars to use those actions and talents.  This means if you find a particular situation that requires the skill of someone you don't have, say, a locked chest that only Therion can open, you have to go back to town and make changes at the bar then head back out.  It's more inconvenience.

Experience points also are not earned by people not in your party, so you'll need to rotate people in and out regularly if you want everyone to be around the same level.  If you're like me, then that means you won't keep the best people in your party at the expense of keeping others underleveled, so you'll have to endure some less fun fights that'll last a bit longer.  What makes matters worse is that whomever you chose to start the game with is stuck as the leader, so you can't just swap out people four for four; the leader will always be pulling ahead in experience points.  It can be a boon, though, as your higher leveled leader can carry your underleveled party members.

But it's not just managing the eight characters that's a problem.  It's the very nature of their positions in the game.  Octopath Traveler is a game that has eight people supposedly traveling together across the world, yet it never feels like you're all traveling together.  Since you're only allowed four in the group, you always have to leave four people behind and this breaks the immersion for me.  I know I'm supposed to surrender myself to video game logic, but I have a very hard time that while four people are traveling the road to one town, the other four left behind have taken some completely different road and arrived at the same town before you did.

This impacts the story as well.  There's no actual writing behind the characters' interactions with each other aside from a quick intro and occasional exchanges of banter.  Instead of a cohesive unit of adventurers sharing each other's stories, it instead feels like a disjointed telling of eight individual stories with only a few characters at a time along for the ride.  The individual stories themselves are interesting and well told, but nothing's bringing them all together.  There's no common goal or nemesis to rally against.  To be fair, I'm just now getting to everyone's second chapters so this might change later in the game, but I haven't really heard much from other people to suggest that it will.

Now that I got that out of the way, the other problems I've had with the game seem much more minor, even nitpicky, but I'll mention them anyway.  One problem I have with games is when they give you side quests you're entirely unprepared for early in the game.  I get that you can always come back to them, but I'm not one to make mental notes to return to towns to finish side quests I couldn't do earlier.  I'm of the mindset that if you're there and you can accept the quest, you should be able to do it.  There are instances in this game where you're sent to areas of a level far higher than you're currently at.  For instance, when I finished Ophilia's first chapter, one such side quest took me to a cave that was level 25.  Ophilia's level at the time? 10.

So yeah, let's not do anymore of that.

I guess the only other complaints I have about the game can just be chalked up to preference.  I know this game's appealing to RPG fans' sense of nostalgia, but I feel that in this day and age, RPGs shouldn't have random encounters anymore.  It's a relic of the past that should stay dead, even when making an old-school style of game.  It really is quite frustrating to be interrupted during your dungeon crawling with random encounters when all you want to do is check just that LITTLE bit of dungeon off to the right of the screen only to find out there's nothing there.  Then, as you're coming back, BOOM! Another random encounter.  It's also frustrating when you're being interrupted by these encounters by low level monsters you can flick away with your finger.  Cyrus does have a support skill that lowers the encounter rate, but then again... 

"This means if you find a particular situation that requires the skill of someone you don't have... you have to go back to town and make changes at the bar then head back out."

And while it's never been much of a problem for me as save points are always close by, I'd just like to see the abolishing of save points in games entirely.  I really would love to be able to save my game at any point just on the offhand that the game crashes (and several Switch games have crashed on me before).  Also, some items you can steal with Therion have a very low success rate so that means I go to a save point, save, try to steal, fail, exit to title, continue and try again over and over and over again.  Even with save points in every part of the towns, it's still a bit frustrating to have to walk over to the person I want to steal from a million times.  I guess games like Oblivion and Skyrim have spoiled me.  But seriously, save anywhere should be a standard and there's no excuse not to have it.

It does seem like I've gone on some time with negatives about the game, but they're hardly incidental to the overall enjoyment that I'm experiencing.  I really do love the battle system and the graphic style is unique and the artwork is just wonderful.  I just wanted to get this out there, though, because I honestly feel that Octopath could have been that much better if these issues were resolved.  I really would have loved a full party of eight first and foremost. but who knows?  Maybe more people like myself spoke out and Square might make another without any kinds of limits and restrictions.  Here's hoping.