Leveling is slow, and there are arbitrary levels set on each chapter of each character's story. You end up in these weird double binds: "I need to level Hikari, Throne, and Ochette, but that's a physical dominant party without a good healer or support."
Do you compromise party balance? Do you compromise time, and succumb to grinding levels? Do you compromise the strength of the party, and just accept whittling down a boss for half an hour? Every choice feels wrong
I love the unique spritework that results from all of the job pairings, but functionally speaking there just aren't that many good combinations. "Latent Powers" funnel characters into predefined roles, and those roles aren't served by most of the other jobs (or their stats). When you pair this with the need to shuffle your party constantly, jobs almost feel like artifice. I can put a warrior in cleric's clothes, but it won't change the best actions to use their turn
Less positively: I'm not sure I have it in me to finish this game. I don't actually think the battle and progression systems are balanced well, because I feel so burdened by all of the random encounters and team management.
You have a party of 4, but you need all 8 party members leveled to be able to progress, and 1 of those slots is locked to your starting character. That means you constantly have to fumble & reshuffle combat roles AND gear into only 3 open spots
Dipping back into Octopath Traveler 2, since I have some travel coming up, and I really don't want to end up halfway through a 60-80 hour RPG on a TV console only to abandon it for a week. some scattered thoughts:
+ this soundtrack is unbelievable
+ such a freaking look to this game
+ the "path actions" and the way they are incentivized leads to REALLY cool player stories. I could (might?) write a blog post about the roleplaying mechanics of buying a boat as Partitio
