I have a lot of unkind things to say about Octopath Traveler, so let's start with the good stuff first.

The game's music is incredibly well crafted, with a lot of amazing tracks courtesy of Yasunori Nishiki, he absolutely killed it delivering some of the best battle music the genre has to offer alongside beautifully melancholic and subdued emotional tracks that resonate deeply with me. The way the music dynamically trasitions from character theme to boss battle theme never fails to pump you up for the coming fight, and traversal through towns and dungeons is always a treat with the backing tracks on offer.

The game pioneered a new visual style that's highly distinctive and evocative of retro SNES-era RPGs, and while I know HD-2D has its detractors, I'm not one of them. The spritework on the enemies and bosses is particularly impressive, with limited animation tastefully keeping the sprites' silhouettes intact while offering a degree of liveness to everything. The official artwork by Naoki Ikushima is breathtaking and I couldn't ask for a better interpretation of the sprites on screen than the gorgeous art for each of the 8 main characters.

Unfortunately that's about where the positives end in my eyes, because while I can appreciate the artistic merit of the visuals and music when divorced from the game, Octopath's game component is just about the antithesis of everything that draws me to an RPG.

So where to begin? The story and characters are a good jumping off point, because it's probably the aspect the game fumbles the hardest. Simply put, there is no meaningful interaction between the 8 heroes. They do not form a party, they do not share common goals, they are not fighting a common enemy, they are simply complete strangers to each other that for some reason still decide to tavel together despite never acknowledging their party during a single story beat in the entire game.
It's genuinely baffling that they would set up a game like this and then proceed to treat every single person as a lone wolf going through their own adventure, the dissonance between having to manage a party of 4 and having NONE of that show during a single story-important event gives me the worst ludonarrative whiplash I've ever experienced.

To the game's credit the characters DO talk to each other sometimes... in optional banter dialogue that is never important to the story. What happens when Alfyn must confront the criminal whose life he just saved out of the boundless mercy of his heart and Therion, the party's resident thief, is also there? Nothing. Therion has nothing to say. At all. No one else outside of Alfyn does.

The individual stories aren't even good. They don't come together nicely like the ones in LiveALive do, and the amount of chapters I can even remember off the top of my head can be counted on one hand. The vast majority of story events in this game are just excuses to send you to a dungeon and fight a boss. EVERY chapter is like this, formulaic to the point of absolute flatline EEG.

So by the end it really does feel like playing 8 unremarkable different stories that have ZERO crossover except for some reason the girl looking for her dad's assassins was also there when Tressa confronted an evil pirate.
If you really wanted to set the stories up like that, I don't see why you would't crib from from LiveALive and just... make 8 different stories that you can engage with separately.

But it doesn't just end at the writing and narrative structure, I also quite dislike this game's battle and job system. Octopath's main idea is that of breaking enemies by attacking them with a damage type they're weak to. The problem with this is that really, until broken, enemies don't take much damage at all, so every single battle in this game turns into a race to break stuff as fast as possible so that you can get it over with. This creates a strong imbalance since breaking an enemy only depends on the number of hits you can dish out, making moves that deal multiple hits way more valuable than anything else you could possibly use.

However, this type of move only starts popping up an ungodly amount of hours into the game, meaning that for a LONG time the battles are just exceedingly slow and boring. This also destroys the creativity in strategic play, since breaking an enemy always skips their turn there really is no better strategy than doing it ASAP and then nuking them with all the damage you have, rinse and repeat. That's the whole game. Some bosses do try to mix it up by covering some of their weaknesses, but I can't stress enough how one-dimensional this whole system is.

BP is another system that on the surface seems like it would add depth, it functions like a sort of turn storage that you can burn to either use the standard attack multiple times in a single turn, or enhance one of your command abilities. Characters gain 1 BP per turn and can choose to spend 1 to 3 points for their action. This system is not terrible, but I can't ignore Team Asano's previous effort with the Bravely games, which featured a rich, carefully considered and wonderfully executed system that's everything BP is and then some, with a great balance of risk and reward by allowing you to go into the negative and burn some turns in advance and skip them later.
Octopath's BP feels like a limp version of this that fails to bring back everything that made the Brave and Default system fun, only functioning as a battery to burn on breaks to get the maximum damage output out of every attack.
Because of the way breaking works, you really only spend BP to maximize your damage, and the system serves very little purpose otherwise, once again resulting in an extremely one-dimensional game plan.

Compounding the one-dimensional and slow combat (no, the game does NOT have a speed up function), I have more complaints about the general structure and progression of the game.

First off, your party gets a "leader" character who is the very first character you pick to start the game with. This serves zero purpose in the game, the leader does not get any special abilities nor do they get any extra dialogue, which is especially baffling because whoever you pick first is PERMANENTLY LOCKED as the only party member you can't change. They'll always be your first, and you can freely swap the other 3 at taverns.
This really does not make sense to me, if they're not gonna have ANY special reason to be locked in and every charatcer is basically equivalent and goes through their story regardless of their leader status or not, WHY is this even a thing.

I happened to get stuck with Primrose who I found out to be an especially poor choice of leader, having access to only 2 damage types for a large chunk of the game (the least of any character), and ZERO multihit moves, making her pretty much the single worst option for getting breaks.
Objectively there is really no reason not to pick Therion as your leader, he's the only character who can open blue treasure chests so you'll ALWAYS want him in your party unless you're just a fan of missing free items. No other character gets an ability like this so it's honestly a no brainer.

The level curve of this game is also all kinds of fucked up. Since your leader cannot be changed, they'll naturally sponge all the XP you can possibly get, while benched characters not actively in your party will receive NO experience, meaning that every time you need to advance one of their stories, it's time to grind them up to the game's recommended level for that chapter. This results in an ungodly amount of grinding, the likes of which even NES RPGs would blush at. I seriously cannot understand why they couldn't just let benched characters gain XP and JP with the rest of them, that would've made the game SO MUCH better paced it maybe wouldn't have to take 100 hours just to reach the ending on each of the 8 stories.
Since your leader will naturally always be your highest level character, you COULD let them take over for each story, but I had Primrose so lol, lmao. Grinding the other party members it was.

Jobs are also insanely boring. And grindy. You have 8 jobs, one per character, that you can also unlock for use as the secondary jobs of other characters. You spend JP to climb up each job's skill tree and unlock passive abilities to equip to one of your 4 slots, and active commands for that job. This is pretty much the same as Bravely, which is good, but the jobs themselves leave a lot to be desired, with all 8 of them getting essentially powercrept later in the game by the 4 secret ultimate jobs that are so much better than everything else it's not even funny. No reason to use the 8 "normal" jobs as secondaries when those ones exist.

That about sums up everything that led me to eventually detest playing this game, but the real kicker arrives at the true final boss.
Aside from being unlocked through a convoluted series of sidequests regarding the most forgettable characters ever (oh yeah this game has sidequests and they SOMEHOW have even less personality than the main stories), the final battle is incredibly disrespectful of the player's time, like all the grinding wasn't enough already.
The last save point before the true final boss is located right before a gauntlet of rematches of the 8 final chapter bosses that lead straight to the final battle split in two phases.
Not only is the final battle the only actually difficult fight of the game that requires you to think deeper than "break and nuke", if you die at ANY point of this, you need to kill the 8 assholes again before you get another crack at the final boss proper.

This is just awful, the last 8 assholes aren't hard, they're literally just wasting your time, and is yet another example of this game trying to ape LiveALive and failing miserably. I know people who installed PC mods or used collision glitches to beat the 8 assholes and then go back and save so they could ACTUALLY start experimenting and formulating a strategy against the final boss without wasting hours of their lives beforehand.

So in the end this is unfortunately one of the worst RPGs I've ever played, all the while nothing is even offensively bad, but it's such a fundamentally boring and unremarkable game on so many levels it genuinely makes me mad I decided to waste 100 hours of my life finishing the 8 main stories. It's a disappointing failure from a team whose output I previously adored, both Bravely Default and Second ranking among my absolute favorite games, and that's what stings the most.

I've been repeatedly told the second Octopath game is good actually, but I honestly do not wish to play it at any point after the dreadful experience this one was.
I'm at least glad Bravely is alive and well with Bravely Default 2, which I actually liked a fair amount, although not to the extent of the previous two. It seems the plan for Team Asano is to continue both series simultaneously, and I'm glad those who saw potential in Octopath get to enjoy a seemingly decent game. Me though, I don't think I'll lay a hand on this series ever again.

Between the roaring success of Warren Spector's Deus Ex and the embarrassing downfall of John Romero's Daikatana, the third pillar of Ion Storm, Tom Hall, managed to find a different fate altogether for his game, that being obscurity.

There's something poetic about these three pieces and how wildly different the history of each one is, but while people talk to no end about Anachronox's older brothers, no one seems to remember this RPG epic.

Cards on the table, I went into it expressely with the intent of finding something to love about it, an approach I've been trying to apply more and more as my understanding of game development deepens over time. Still, I was pleasantly surprised by how, in the end, it didn't really make me dig for that something. There is plenty of good in Anachronox.

Admittedly it's not an amazing game, it radiates the energy of a project spawned from Tom Hall going on a massive Final Fantasy 7 bender in '97 and deciding to make something comparable.
As far as inspirations go, FF7 is sure a great one, but Anachronox doesn't quite stick the landing as elegantly.

Still, if anything, it manages to be extremely unique despite wearing its JRPG influence on its sleeve, being the one true Western JRPG as I like to call it.

Sylvester "Sly" Boots is a washed up private detective living on the alien planet of Anachronox, which is surrounded by a sort of spiked ball that has wormholes at each tip for various destinations across the galaxy.
Being a sort of huge trade center, Anachronox is naturally a pretty shitty place to live, a cyberpunk dystopia of smoke and dark skies where the rich live on an elevated layer from the poor.

While that is almost Final Fantasy 7 verbatim, the tone of the writing here is markedly more sarcastic and adult.
Adult in the "Isn't it fucked old Bertha had to amputate and sell her legs to cover the fees of her nephew's tuition?" kind of way, the way that's hyperbolic yet not far off from what we see here on Earth.
It manages to be genuinely funny in multiple occasions, with some scenes getting the odd belly laugh out of me while sitting alone in my room. Great stuff.

The story kicks in like 10 hours in, in proper JRPG fashion, after leaving Anachronox and witnessing a whole planet get inexplicably rended in half and deleted, our party being the sole survivors of this disaster, destined to become the universe's saviors.

Mechanically, I can make it sound interesting through words, I can tell you that the overworld exploration and progression is handled similarly to a 3D point-and-click adventure game, where reading dialogue and figuring out what to do through logical steps is key and the puzzles make sense, with collectibles scattered around the map.
I can tell you that the combat is FF7 inspired ATB, complete with unlockable limit breaks and a materia-lite system, and that encounters are scripted around the map like Chrono Trigger and not random.

But saying this honestly makes the game you might be picturing in your head sound better than what the reality of Anachronox is, and that's that 3D environments aren't really that fun to explore when all you can do is walk everywhere kind of slowly and regularly take multiple elevators to run errands around the map, and the MysTech magic system is heavily railroaded by characters only really being good at using one specific type, with the combat being very much a formality and incredibly simple.

Despite the game ending up less than the sum of its parts, there is a surprising amount of worldbuilding, and you can tell the people behind it really cared about the universe of Anachronox.
From Democratus, home to a bickering parody of council politics, to Haephestus, inhabited by religious monks who hastily build a theme park after the disaster awakens all the MysTech in the universe and makes it a hot tourist location, the narrative arcs marked by each planet are incredibly strong at making this feel like a truly varied and outlandish universe.

My absolute favorite bit in this whole game was saving Democratus from an invading alien wasp asteroid, leaving it behind as every person in charge of running that planet was evidently an insane democracy fetishist, and then witnessing this feverish scene of the WHOLE ASS PLANET pulling up into the bar you crashed at as a miniaturized version of itself (democratically shrunken down to follow our heroes) and joining your party as a playable character.
This shit just doesn't happen in other games man.

You probably get to know Democratus better than any other party member too, as later on in the story the planet is forced to return to its original size, and your party gets scattered on different zones of the surface, each going through their own solo mini-adventure in the varied locations of Democratus, and I mean truly varied. Some characters get stuck in a desert where soldiers are stationed, others in a forest reminiscent of Star Wars' Endor, or an icy, snow-swept town in the middle of a string of murders. Every party member has a possible substory here (well, except Democratus of course), and you only get to pick 3, so you'll never see them all by design, which is sort of neat.
It's common in videogames that use space travel to generalize a single planet as a sort of monolith, like "this is the fire planet" or "this is the science planet", but Democratus truly escapes this stereotyping, presenting various coexisting facets of the same world, extremely different but all part of the same démos.

I also ended up really liking what the antagonist really is, which, in a development I can't tell if it's giving nod to the original Final Fantasy or not, ends up being Chaos.
The Limbus part of the game lets us confront the forces of Chaos directly, before heading back to Anachronox for the grand finale against Detta, the crimelord turned billionaire that ruined Sly's life years ago, who we need to steal from in order to seal the portal that allows the forces of Chaos to attack the universe.

The saddest part is that, right as the game ends on a massive plot twist regarding one of your party members, and as the battle against Chaos is beginning in full, it ends.
Anachronox was meant to be developed across multiple games, but the collapse of Ion Storm and the failure on the part of Tom Hall to acquire the rights to it leave us with just the beginning of this space opera and the unfulfilled promise of much more.

Not too long ago I asked if Hall himself had any plans to return to Anachronox, and it seems like hope may yet remain.

So let us see if the forgotten third wheel of Ion Storm may one day finally earn the recognition it deserves for its uniqueness and inventiveness, this one-of-a-kind world sprung from the collision of JRPGs and WRPGs. I know it deserves it.