“Hello everyone, nice to see you again!” I call out, very pleased, when I sit down at the role-playing table with my old buddies after more than four years. Well, my old buddies are more like my new buddies, after all Octopath Traveler 2 has nothing to do with Octopath Traveler 1: new game world, new early-industrial instead of purely medieval fantasy setting, eight new characters and thus the right to the title of the games series (yes, after two games you are a series, don’t look at me like that). You don’t need to have played Part 1 to understand Part 2. But of course it doesn’t do any harm, especially the game mechanics are practically identical, just expanded. More on that later. Now let’s get into the adventure!
The Playful Eight
“So, let’s get started!” I exclaim enthusiastically – and we’re all in the game. If you are one of the lucky group of people who have already gained experience in pen and paper RPGs together with other people and ideally friends, then you know that for a successful evening at The Dark Eye or Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder or any other tabletop needs another colleague in addition to the players: the Dungeon Master, in short: DM.
This is the selfless warrior who knows all the rules, manages the game world and the monsters, and provides the entire group at the table with an imaginary stage on which the heroes present act, intertwining their own backstories with the ongoing storyline of the game world.
At Octopath Traveler 2 (buy now €59.99 ) it’s very similar. And that’s very different from a more classic role-playing game: a Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger or Guild Wars 2 puts its story in focus and the player characters are tied into the world as part of that narrative.
Octopath Traveler 2 in the test: Totally charming and beautiful (3)
Source: Square Enix
Sure, you might save the mother of one of our heroines from a crazy machine in a side story, or drive a demon out of the subconscious of one of the party warriors who lost his family in a poison attack.
But basically the story of the world is at the center of the plot, the heroes as actors are only the central and mostly interchangeable accessories. In Octopath Traveler 2 it’s the other way around. There is no dominant backstory here. Instead, there are eight personal storylines, one for each hero.
These eight heroes are: Agnea, a dancer who just wants to see the continents and become a superstar to make people happy. Castti, a skilled apothecary and healer who, after suffering a bout of memory loss, remembers nothing but her medical skills. Hikari, a meek but competent warrior who has been ill-fated.
Ochette, a hunter who wants to protect her homeland from impending disaster. Osvald, a scholar who is primarily trying to break Hikari’s record for the worst playing along of fate. Partitio, a passionate trader who hates poverty, especially his own. Throné, a skilled thief. And finally, Temenos, a cleric and inquisitor who I’m not entirely sure if I don’t trust or what’s going on around him.
Octopath Traveler 2 in the test: Totally charming and beautiful (69)
Source: Square Enix
At the beginning of the game, you choose one of these eight daring warriors and begin the first chapter of his or her storyline. You then travel through the rest of the world, gradually running into the other seven characters who want to join you on your adventures, eventually forming a party of four active and four reservists. eighth
Your first character is therefore not the protagonist. All eight characters co-exist on an equal footing. Therefore, when you start the game, you should choose the one whose beautifully drawn artwork or starting concept draws you in the most.
Or just for a healer, because then one of them will definitely be in the group. As soon as you meet another of the Playful Eight at some point, you have a choice: you can recruit him or her directly and that’s it. During your first encounter, you can replay the opening chapter of the newcomer, which has the great advantage that you learn more about said newcomer and at the same time unlock equipment and levels for him.
Or you can wait and visit one of the inns in the villages later, where you can catch up on missed chapters of individual characters at any time. The system works very well and unobtrusively, you don’t miss anything and you can approach the eight characters in a relaxed manner at your own pace.
Ten friends at the gaming table
Okay, so here we are at our gaming table, ten of us: Octopath’s eight heroes with their interwoven storyline strands, the Dungeon Master in the form of the game, which simply sets the unobtrusive background world as a stage, plus me as the player of the whole. And so, after six or seven hours and the first completed chapters, I really don’t want to complain
Everything is … basically good. Everyone is having fun. But eventually I can’t bite my lip anymore. And so, as a veteran RPG player with 30 years of RPG experience between pen and paper and video games, I finally stand up, raise my index finger, open my mouth and prepare to address all the logic holes that open before me like an eye of limbo ; as spoiler-free as possible, because all of them take place almost directly at the start of the character quests.
The eight characters and the game in the form of Dungeon Masters look at me expectantly. My eyes sweep over the group. “Castti…” I want to say, “Why do you, as an apothecary, happen to come to a town where all the healers have traveled at the same time, just in time so that you can be in the spotlight when a plague breaks out?
Isn’t that a daring interpretation of a sustainable health strategy even for the Middle Ages? Why don’t you, suffering from amnesia and desperately seeking clues about your healing guild, listen to a single villager who obviously has a lot to say about your clan, none of it well? And why by Bahamut’s horny head don’t you talk to the only contact from your broken memories standing right next to you? I break off!”
