What is the big deal with Octopath Traveler?
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I'm just used to blurry pixel art by this point, probably desaturated stuff too.Chimpzy said:
The amount of games that try and do pixel art and don't understand having contrast, and you just get weird slightly abstract washed over messes. Doing it all one or two colours (whether its grey and brown, or the one headache inducing game I played that did pink and purple that I forget the name of) just makes the problem worse.
I'm finding Octopath Traveler incredibly lacking.
There is little to no party dynamic, and each character's story is simply their story and has nothing to do with who else is in the party or interaction with any of the other characters. They don't bond, they don't become a team, they simply exist at the same time in the same place and nothing more.
The battle mechanics could be great, but the problem is that the game incredibly inflates the health of the monsters depending on your numbers, makign leveling up seem pointless at this stage in the game for me. To make battles tougher they add extra minions to boss fights the more people on your team which only adds padding to the fight not challenge. I like the idea behind the burst system and using extra points like in Bravely Default to perform extra actions or boost spells at a cost of cooldown. But in practice I find myself stocking points until i slowly beat down an enemy's shield, then unleashing all the boost I have to maximize damage all at once. Then repeating the cycle while healing when needed.
There is nothing special or exciting about it at all. The story's so far aren't even all that interesting themselves.
Game's very pretty and sounds very good though. So there is that.
There is little to no party dynamic, and each character's story is simply their story and has nothing to do with who else is in the party or interaction with any of the other characters. They don't bond, they don't become a team, they simply exist at the same time in the same place and nothing more.
The battle mechanics could be great, but the problem is that the game incredibly inflates the health of the monsters depending on your numbers, makign leveling up seem pointless at this stage in the game for me. To make battles tougher they add extra minions to boss fights the more people on your team which only adds padding to the fight not challenge. I like the idea behind the burst system and using extra points like in Bravely Default to perform extra actions or boost spells at a cost of cooldown. But in practice I find myself stocking points until i slowly beat down an enemy's shield, then unleashing all the boost I have to maximize damage all at once. Then repeating the cycle while healing when needed.
There is nothing special or exciting about it at all. The story's so far aren't even all that interesting themselves.
Game's very pretty and sounds very good though. So there is that.
The game looks like a traditional Jrpg so of course people will be happy cause traditional Jrpgs are amazing. Also the switch is lacking in good games of that style so it getting a solid one is very big. I don't have one yet but this game is swaying me, now I just need smt5 and I'll jump in it!
Is that going to change the text or the writing quality? Very few games even have writing on par with like a 7/10 TV show, chances are Octopath doesn't as well. Even if the game has good writing, it still wouldn't be worth trudging through gameplay I don't like to experience it when I can just find someone that put together an Octopath Traveler "movie" on Youtube and watch that instead. It's not a game that I'd enjoy actually PLAYING which is why I'm not going to play it.Casual Shinji said:
It's really hard to make turn-based combat good if you remove positioning from the equation IMO. I know there's a break system but it doesn't seem like it'll add enough depth to make it worth grinding in combat for hours upon hours. I've explained my issues with "classic" JRPG combat at length just a little bit ago as well.aegix drakan said:
The JRPG random battle resource management "experience" just isn't very good in comparison to other much more engaging ways to implement resource management IMO. Even if the resource management part is engaging, the actual battles probably won't be (as I've gone into depth why most JRPG combat sucks). If you have visible enemies, you still got a good amount of consideration like do you go off the path to find treasure than can help you but is it worth the resources it takes to get there? Or do you skip battles to save resources for the boss fight but you come in underleveled? I'm posting my main 2 reasons why I hate random battles to CaitSeith.
Lastly, RPGs (J or W) shouldn't have combat be the thing I'm doing the most because they're RPGs not combat games.
DnD's type of random encounters vs JRPG random battles are pretty different. Even if the DM rolls randomly to decide there will be enemies on your path, you can still scout ahead, locate them, and just go around them if you like. The only time there might be an actual random battle is if enemies set up an ambush basically.CaitSeith said:
1) Random battles actually deter you from exploring. If you're on the world map, and want to explore some random corner, not only do you have to kill enemies on the way to that corner (which is fine), but you will most likely find nothing over there (which, again, is fine) and then you have to kill enemies as you return back to your original position (which is not fine and it's just stupid because you cleared a path).
2) Having random battles and obviously no enemies on the screen makes the world feel completely lifeless. I remember getting to the Calm Lands in FFX and it's supposed to be teeming with monsters and such but it's just one big plane of grass with nothing on it, my backyard is more interesting to look at. Then when I go to play FFXII and one of the first things I see when I step out of the city is a T-rex walking about, that's just awesome and totally brings you into the world.
2) Having random battles and obviously no enemies on the screen makes the world feel completely lifeless. I remember getting to the Calm Lands in FFX and it's supposed to be teeming with monsters and such but it's just one big plane of grass with nothing on it, my backyard is more interesting to look at. Then when I go to play FFXII and one of the first things I see when I step out of the city is a T-rex walking about, that's just awesome and totally brings you into the world.
I'll probably end up getting a Switch at some point for Bayonetta. I couldn't care less if a game is exclusive to something or not to determine if it probably sucks. I would almost certainly hate both Octopath and Xenoblade 2 but I'd probably love the Bayonetta sequels and Mario Odyssey, I could honestly see Zelda going either way on whether I'd like it or not.Ellux said:
I don't want to spoil anything or burst bubbles, but once you get to about midway through the chapter 2's you start unlocking job passives that basically trivialize the game's resource management. Luckily, that hits around the time elemental attacks start ramping up in power due to better weapons, and elemental weaknesses become more common and important to exploit. At around level 30 or so, SP management over the course of a dungeon crawl just stops being a concern if you build the characters halfway competently. That's the point generating and manipulating BP gets important, but that's not a matter of resource conservation over the course of multiple fights.aegix drakan said:
I do wonder exactly how far those critical of the game played, though. There's a pretty beefy difficulty curve in the chapter 2's, and boss fights get a lot more puzzle-ish in them. One of the chapter 2 bosses almost wiped me due to a certain mechanic I didn't expect to see and was totally unprepared for, and all my characters were in their 30's when the recommended level was 24. The characters do start interacting with each other in cutscenes in chapter 2 and beyond. The ability to manipulate random battle chance comes as early as chapter 1, you really only have to stop to grind if you're fast traveling everywhere and neglecting characters; even if you do, the game's tiered design (and a few other mechanics) ensure grinding to get characters where they need to be is quick and painless.
There's textboxes dude. And even if there weren't, any game worth its salt these days has subtitles.McElroy said:
No, just the delivery, which is just as important to the storytelling as the writing.Phoenixmgs said:
And that whole 'your Excellency' bit is actually part of the character writing and has an emotional pay-off later on. This is why showing it out of context, dubbed badly, and criticizing it for bad writing shows the person in question either doesn't know what they're talking about or are just looking for something easy to make fun of.
I read more posts about the story being trope-y and basically "meh" than the occasional person that thinks it's really good.Casual Shinji said:
If I actually thought the story might be something really good, I would. I even played the original Nier because of all the praise of the story and it was nothing special. A Taro Yoko or Dan Houser would be considered hacks if they worked in any other medium. There's probably like maybe 10 video games whose writing would be on par with TV shows/movies I'd consider 7/10 good. People shouldn't be coming to video games for writing because 1) hardly no writing talent is working in the medium and 2) games are developed backwards where writing is done after game design. Even something like Bioshock that is considered really good writing for video games but it's literally the reason why we have the term ludonarrative dissonance. Uncharted 3 won a freaking award for best narrative, that pretty much says it all for the medium. I'm not just pessimistic about Octopath, it's video games in general because of the 2 reasons already stated.CaitSeith said:
The writing does actually have a fairly specific problem that more japanese media seems to have where everything needs to be made extremely obvious. "Show and tell" is the motto here. Everytime the game had some kind of theme going they ruined it for me by having a character explain said theme. There were conversations where I was wondering why they didn't just cut out half of the dialogue. The thiefs introduction for example, has them break into some guys house where they are ambushed by a powerful butler. Now I understood by the fivehundred clues that he gave that the butler was there to get us to do something for him and that the breakin was a test that the character was not aware of, but it took the thief character and the butler endless pointless dialogue and a bossbattle (which you win in the game, but lose in the cutscene, naturally) to establish that 15 minutes after it was completely obvious that it was going in that direction.Phoenixmgs said:
Are there microtransactions? I got Bravely Default because people were saying it was a return to classic form and was really well done and blah blah blah, but I was pretty surprised there were microtransactions in a single player JRPG.
Well then.. I guess that's that.Phoenixmgs said:
You know, you can make the same claim about screenplay writers when compared to novelists. About how they'd be considered hacks. Books are considered by most to have better writing than movies. But does that mean movies suck at telling stories? No, they tell stories differently, and so do games in comparison to movies. And if you can't see that, then I don't understand why you ever played games at all, unless it was 100% for the mechanics.
And Uncharted 3 winning best narrative doesn't say anything about the medium, except that there probably wasn't that much competion that year. Or maybe it wasn't even deserved -- You know shitty movies and books win awards all the time too, right? Uncharted 3 winning doesn't equate to that being the best gaming has to offer in terms of writing.
And seriously, if you're THAT pessimistic about videogames, why are you even discussing them on a gaming forum?
It looks like(and from the reviews I've read/seen) is a callback to SNES JRPG's from the mid-late 1990's, which many consider a golden age of the genre. From what I've heard it's pretty good as long as you're onboard with that, though a constant criticism is that the 8 character arcs don't really intersect very much
I still want to play it, though it'll have to wait till I break down and buy a switch.
I still want to play it, though it'll have to wait till I break down and buy a switch.
Ah, I feel Dan Houser does the exact same thing in Rockstar's games.Pseudonym said:
Maybe you can claim we've gotten the best writing from literature but movies/TV are no slouches either. TV was pretty bad for a long time and now it's better than film on the whole, and that all changed really recently. However, there's a giant chasm separating literature/film/TV and video games at this point. There's just so little writing talent in the medium and games are developed backwards as well. How is a game's story/themes supposed to come together and gel with the gameplay/levels when those elements are done first and the writer has to come in and just make it work as best as they can? Video games are a young medium and we are far far from seeing their full potential and we really only get flickers of brilliance.Casual Shinji said:
Sure, the best screenplay may not win every year and you look back at a year and ask 'how the hell did XYZ beat ABC?' but it's not like a Michael Bay movie is winning best screenplays either. Uncharted 3 is so horribly written its not even funny, you can tell how disjointed and rushed the game development was just playing the game. The plot points don't even make basic logical sense along with the characters motivations being in opposition to their prior selves. And, that's the best video gaming can put out in a year? That's pretty sad. It's not that you don't have quality writing at times, but those are few and far between as the talent just isn't there execute such things. There's tons of games with good, fun B-movie writing like say Blood Dragon, Binary Domain, Bulletstorm, Metal Gears, most Platinum games, etc. I really don't see why anyone would play games primarily for story when you can get so much better anywhere else.