Post Script
Why Octopath Traveler’s unorthodox storytelling is both its making and undoing
Our Octopath adventure begins with Tressa, a wide-eyed and improbably wholesome young woman, who sees a noble calling in her role as a merchant. “A good merchant,” she explains, “should understand what their customer needs and sell them what’s best!” She’s naive and optimistic in the great JRPG tradition, and yet she isn’t blessed with any special power, nor is she forced to deal with any potential world-obliterating danger. Her first quest sees her recover stolen goods from some thieving pirates with the help of a sleeping draught and some wine. True, hers is a coming-of-age tale of sorts, but she’s anything but your archetypal JRPG protagonist.
Likewise, Alfyn, the fourth recruit to our party. He’s a poor, unkempt but kindly apothecary, seeking nothing more than the opportunity to hone his craft and help others outside his village home. In fact, whichever character you choose as your lead, Octopath Traveler’s early moments seem keen to buck genre convention, or at least apply some kind of twist to familiar ideas. Primrose’s quest might be motivated by pure-andsimple revenge, but her story involves a thoughtful examination of the exploitation of women by powerful men: the kind of subject matter you wouldn’t ordinarily expect from this kind of game. This, by itself, is refreshing: it’s unusual to play a JRPG where the stakes feel relatively low in global terms, but deeply personal to each individual. It’s rare to find a cast with such wildly different motivations, let alone one that allows you to follow several smaller stories at once. And yet after the third or fourth of these tales, you’ll begin to realise why it’s not normally done this way. When a player’s journey can begin in any of eight places, it’s vital that the approach remains consistent. As such, by the time you’ve recruited your eighth and final character, you’ll begin to feel as if you’re going through the motions somewhat. The setup might be different, but the process is all but identical: introduction, explore town, field phase, dungeon, boss, return. And repeat.
Still, the game’s marketing line promises you can “embark on an adventure all your own”, so surely it opens up more thereafter? Well, only up to a point. The next chapter for each character comes with a recommended level, which rather forces you to tackle them in a certain order – there is a significant difference between Lv.21 (Primrose) and Lv.27 (H’aanit and Olberic), with the routes between new locations sometimes pitting you against even higher-level opponents to dissuade you from taking them on ‘early’. You can afford to have one or two of your party lower than the suggested level, but you’ll likely find yourself underpowered when you face the next boss. As such, unless you actively choose to grind characters, you’re likely going to have to follow at least four stories to see the endgame, and more realistically five or six. And the formula still doesn’t change much: with one or two exceptions, the general tempo and structure of each mini-narrative remains the same. Strictly speaking, the game is non-linear, but you’ll still feel as if you’re being nudged down a specific path.
Elsewhere, Octopath Traveler falls victim to that classic RPG problem, whereby the player’s agenda clashes with that of its characters: when someone is pursuing a goal that’s important to them, it makes no sense that they’d allow themselves to be sidetracked. But it’s exacerbated here by the game’s struggle to reconcile its individual character motivations. As gracious and open-hearted as Ophilia is, it doesn’t add up that she’d interrupt her quest to help an old warrior locate a figure from his past; likewise, why would Primrose, desperate to avenge her father, waste time with a scholar who’s merely looking for some old book or other? The simple answer, perhaps, is that they’re all fundamentally decent people, though that doesn’t account for the fact that they’re all prepared to turn a blind eye to Therion robbing villagers of their goods.
But then our heroes don’t really pay much attention to one another in any meaningful way. Yes, when battle commences, they’ll join forces, sharing BP and SP, and pooling their skills to take down monsters and men. And you’ll see them traipsing across fields and around towns in a four-person conga line. Yet there’s no real sense of togetherness. You’re occasionally prompted to press a button to engage in ‘travel banter’, short conversations or skits where another member of your party reacts to events in the current episode. But that’s about as far as it goes. During cutscenes, the other characters will simply disappear, which leads to some faintly nonsensical moments. In one sequence, Primrose must clamber into a carriage taking her to a secret destination, yet when she arrives, everyone else has miraculously made it. And when Cyrus rescues a woman from an evil cultist, she thanks him as if no one else had any involvement in taking him down.
It’s in these moments where you begin to appreciate the importance of a common goal, or some kind of overarching plot to tie everything together. If Acquire had let us follow individual character tales from start to finish without interruption, perhaps this would have felt like an adventure all our own. As it stands, while these vignettes give us a glimpse of how JRPGs might benefit from focusing on more intimate, personal stories, these eight mostly separate strands ultimately lack the cohesion of a single, cleverly woven story.
Our heroes don’t really pay much attention to one another in any meaningful way