Despite its lack of real party members I can't really find anything about this game I dislike. It has a insane amount of customization giving it tons of replay value, I love the final villain, it's easy to get into, 100s of hours of optional content, monsters in the overworld, it's not the best looking DS game but it's certainly up there, optional multiplayer, and much more. On top of all that this game single handedly inspired the 3DS street pass feature which is great. I mean how many games can say they inspired a entire system feature?

Great visuals, great combat, that's really all I can say. Narratives of all characters are serviceable, but this disjointedness of hearing full blown dialogues on top of barely-moving pixels just doesn't work for me, it's really awkward. Moreover, and this is clearly generic criticism, I despise that there's barely any interaction between the characters. It's cool to see the way they relate all the stories at the very end, but before that, not much noteworthy happens. It's kind of like a RPG maker game, hampered by the limitations of the resources.

Ultimately, this reason makes Octopath fairly uninteresting besides its RPG side.

The first half of this game is honestly 5/5. It's perfectly exploratory, constantly getting new weapons, feels like an retro arcade game, and both alienating and welcoming. However, I think the second half really lost me. It quickly became a slog with too much backtracking and so many times I feel like I missed one tiny thing in an area and needed to go through the same area again. I gave up when needing to get the final artifacts. It is still a great game that I enjoyed my time with, just one of the few I didn't feel the need to finish.

>Be a Halo game
>Don't play as Master Chief
>Instead be a member of a tightly woven squad
>Set in fascinating locales
>Perfect developer sendoff after leaving the IP behind
>Be Halo Reach
>Pic unrelated