

Each character has two of these one used in the daytime, and one at night. This lets you interact with the world in a few more ways, and offers new methods to acquire items, information, allies, or just start fights. This is truly a rock-versus-hard-place problem, however - if you were to intertwine everything to any greater extent than this, the wonderful meandering exploration and any-order recruitment of the cast would be undermined.Īs well as abilities in battle, each of the eight leads has a couple of ‘Path Actions’ they can use out in the overworld. It sort of works, though also falls short of the sort of party relationships and banter that make many greats of the genre special. There's a wide range of memorable locations to visit, even if the world feels under-developed in a narrative sense. Once paired off, this reveals a new, optional side story - an attempt to address the complaint that there wasn’t enough tying these characters together in the first game. The individual chapters are dense but fairly swift, and a major change is that the main characters actually exist in pairs - each has a particular ally you’ll recruit who folds into their story. This is the same across both titles, though what Octopath 2 does a little more successfully is bring things together in a slightly more satisfying way. You recruit someone, then work through their personal issues.

Instead, players experience more intimate stories about each of the members of the cast.

There’s not nearly as much of the grand world-threatening storylines of genre tradition here. The result is a truly compelling sense of freedom, but also an inevitable sense of listlessness. And it is a choice - you pick which of the crew you’d like to start with, and then after completing their introductory chapter, you’re turned loose into the world to do what you like. The HD-2D artwork is back, further refined, and more striking than ever.įor the uninitiated, Octopath is so named because there are eight (octo for octingenti - eight in Latin, because Latin is cool, apparently) different player characters to choose from. But with that art having now migrated to several other titles, Octopath 2 cannot lean on that alone - and so one considers its unique structure with a little more weight. The biggest trump card, meanwhile, remains on the table: that beautiful HD-2D art style that set eyes and hearts ablaze when it first cropped up a few years ago. It’s a larger and more in-depth game in general - and this is offered without dampening the sense of open-ended freedom that was one of the first game’s trump cards.
#Octopath traveler chapter 2.grind Pc
Nintendo’s been pushed out of the picture for this sequel, meaning Octopath Traveler 2 is a multi-platform affair from day one, available on PC and PlayStation as well as Switch - but that’s not the only expansion going on here. Make no mistake, however: this second game is superior to the first in just about every way that you’d really care about - even if certain niggling shortfalls of the original remain. Now Square Enix is back with a sequel, the succinctly titled Octopath Traveler 2.īack in 2018, I called the original Octopath Traveler “ beautiful, brilliant, and flawed” - and honestly, that description still rather holds up for the sequel. High-profile remakes, remasters and revivals are ten-a-penny now - but one of the most successful is undoubtedly Octopath Traveler, the Square Enix made and Nintendo-published SNES-era style Japanese RPG that gripped audiences in 2018. Video games are reaching that sort of age where throwbacks are a lucrative business.
