Kristi ACW

PROs: -Lots to explore & aside from the main character quests, which are marked on the map, most of the game’s locations & quest items/NPCs are unmarked. -Combat is easy to learn & Difficult to master. -Leveling & discovering new skills really makes the characters & party more powerful & opens up new synergy between members. -Multiple paths to complete objectives. Party members unique skills are useful. -The soundtrack is enjoyable. -Visual art is a pleasing mix of pixel art & CG. CONS: -The starting stories are bad enough to be off-putting. The dialogue is even worse. -UI is tedious and unintuitive. -Party members who are not active gain no XP. It’s possible to hit a large XP multiplier & leave the inactive characters in the dust. It can be tedious to try and catch them up. -It’s possible to entirely miss important skill features if you don’t do much exploring. *** The reviewers that claim there are only 7 skills per character as far as level 50 must have missed the secondary and advanced class shrines entirely. I’m not sure that’s possible. Maybe they found them but never explored anything off the main quest rails. Fortunately, there is more customization to be found than what is there at the start. You have to explore to find it. The base beginner classes could open up 7 active skills and 4 passives. Don’t overlook the passives! You can set up a party that has less random encounters & never gets ambushed, for example, with the right passives. It’s possible to partially bypass the grind for currency, items & experience by using your party members’ talents & skills wisely. Like stealing items and coins from enemies during battle & using Bewildering Dance powered up x4 can give you anywhere from 2 to 100 x more XP for a single fight. It’s a wild magic type gamble that can debuff your party but is one of the most useful skills in the game. I had 22 skills available per all my character at level 20, and for two classes I found the shrines for secondary by level 13. Those are free with no combat. You benefit just by entering the shrines and interacting with the relic inside. Then there are advanced class shrines which are hidden in high level areas and require you to clear a boss fight. The combat is difficult and challenging. Even boss fights I optimized for were sometimes a real challenge. The UI could be more intuitive. This game involves a lot of clicking around massive menus & scrolling up and down and around lists. Even the turn based combat is operated via drop menus. The quests become more interesting and character banter & interactions get more complex after all the 8 characters starting questlines are cleared. I will admit that if I were basing story quality on the starting zone quests I would be giving a low review. The story isn’t going to win any awards for its quality but it isn’t jarringly bad beyond the starting zones. (The thief story in particular is threadbare.) The writing in most of the dialogue is, not going to sugarcoat this, beyond awful. It fades into the background eventually and becomes less noticeable as the game goes on but all the characters have obnoxious affectations. Some talk in a bastardized version of olde English. The worst (H’annit) talk in a bumpkin version of bastardized olde English (dost thou plannen to returneth, master?) Overall I’m enjoying Octopath Traveler and find it worth overlooking its flaws.