Reviews from

in the past


I enjoyed the first game fine enough, but Octopath Traveler II manages to take everything about the first game that worked and improve upon it while dropping everything that didn't. Lowered encounter rate, day/night cycle, better stories and more consistent (and present) voice acting, auto progress for voiced scenes, better side quests, more interesting and varied towns and environments, improved upon "hidden" job classes, latent powers, the MUSIC! The list goes on.

What else can I say? It's the first game but so much better with much better stories, intertwined stories, better character moments, and an amazing climax where all the stories tie together into one last big bad.

I can't necessarily recommend the first game, but this is a must-play for old-school JRPG fans. Easily one of my games of the year and a soundtrack I'll be listening to for years.

It's objectively better than the first one, I'll say that. Unfortunately, its improvements are few and far between, and it still suffers from a lot of the same issues. It is impossible for me to trudge through this one after having already beaten the first. A shame, too, because it's BEAUTIFUL, and obviously lovingly crafted.

Osvald, Castti, Throne, Ochette, Partitio, Agnea, Temenos, and Hikari make the party for this game, and it's a great cast. The game surpasses the first one in almost every inconcievable way.
The world of Solista has so many neat little locations to find and it was always fun to explore and see how what the world was building to. The exceptionally beautiful HD-2D graphics made the world flourish and shine unlike anything else. To compliment that you have a beautiful OST to give everything even more life!
The party and their stories are the main event though. Each of the eight stories are great in their own way and have their own themes and lessons with them. They somehow had the stories connect in a big way, as the last chapter can possible make you shed a tear (i definitely didn't don't look at me!)
The fixed alot that felt missing with the first one with special chapters that had two of the travelers team up together with their own story, and some side quests that felt like they had meaning! The boss fights can also be very difficult, and also a little easy if you know how to cheese some of them(lol). Which i enjoyed that, it shows that the game has alot of flexibility within it.
I have no complaints, this was my GOTY for 2023 and has my highest recommendation!

It really is the most straight-forward and traditional JRPG experience refined into its best iteration yet.

The combat system is really satisfying during mob encounters, but still intense and creative during boss battles. Team building is also as fun as ever, as is figuring out some of the best combos you can pull off with your jobs and gear available at the moment.
Although the writing is a bit too silly for my taste most of the time, everything comes together nicely at the end. Some of the twists actually took me by surprise this time, and alongside some of the best soundtracks of the genre, I actually felt some goosebumps here and there.

It's the best parts of the first game combined with some actual decent story moments this time, highly recommend.

DIOS de lo mejor que he jugado nunca, me encanta todo (menos el ca**** de Galdera)

I both had a good time with this but also wish it could have been more. I really enjoyed the mechanics of the RPG battle system. I also really loved the art style. However, I just find the multiple character system limiting. I found it really hard to keep going for long stretches because there wasn't really a connective thread keeping me going.

Juegazo, un jrpg con una gran variedad de personajes y unas historias muy bonitas (que incluso pueden hacerte que llores)

PD: Ochette está rotísima

+ The npc bio writing is oddly very strong! Poignant, and terse; I felt very motivated to click on everybody and read a little two sentence life story, in a way that the likes of baldurs gate 3 or <any fallout> absolutely fail to do.

-job system is extremely dry and boring. so many things wrong with it. just steal from FFT if you can't be bothered to do it right.
-narrative driving force is non-existent; this is just a collection of 8 character arcs that are totally unrelated to each other
-as such, the texture of playing the game is much like hitting speedbumps over and over, as you get a new character and have to train them up from 0 again (and if you play their initial chapters, that's basically a whole hour where the net power level of your ACTUAL party has ZERO delta!!)
-whats the point in having 8 characters if i can only ever use 4 of them. this is a problem thats been solved for 20 years, embarassing to stumble into it again.

if you're going to invest a bunch of time / money into developing a character the feeling i get when i pick one up can't be:
1) great another bench warmer
or 2) make me feel negatively about replacing another character that i've already put a bunch of levels into

bunch of other mechanical issues with it that are deeply annoying but are too nitty gritty to want to get into here, and the character stories are simply not good enough (and often not good at all) to cover for it.