Level Up

Gaming & app news

The Nintendo Switch needs more exclusive AAA games, not the current slew of old ports and throwaway indie titles. To take advantage of this gap in the market, along came RPG-focused developer Square Enix and quirky developer Acquire. The result of this collaboration is Octopath Traveler, the first exclusive AAA title for the Switch in a while, but is it worth the price?

It’s a JRPG — a Japanese-style roleplaying game. You’re given a cast of characters, eight in this case, each with their own story path, hence the title Octopath Traveler. You can have four of them in your party at once and wander the world getting randomly attacked by monsters, and in combat your characters line up on the side of the screen and the enemies on the other and they take turns whacking each other until one wins.

Okay, that’s disparagingly simple, there’s actually a fair bit of tactical depth to the combat. Each character has a “job”, for instance the Huntress H’aanit can capture monsters and summon them in future battles to perform unique attacks, and the magician Cyrus can cast powerful spells that hit all enemies at once. It’s a bit like the old classic Final Fantasy III (or VI, if you want to be insufferably pedantic). Enemies also have a number of “shield points”, which you deplete if you hit them with attacks they’re weak to, eventually stunning them and allowing you free hits.

My biggest problem is that the story and characters are dull and I found myself hammering the A button during their interminable dialogue, thinking don’t care don’t care don’t care ... So unless you really like JRPG-style combat, the game doesn’t have much going for it. Oh, and I’m immensely grateful that H’aanit is the only character that speaks in that awful, faux olde English dialect, because if they all did it, I’d have chewed my face off before recruiting half of them. LS