Meaningful Video Games #36
Octopath Traveler
What do a dancer, a thief, an apothecary and a scholar have in common? On the surface, not a lot perhaps — but they’re 50% of the stars of this week’s post.
I’ll be honest with you, I was saving this one till the triumphant week where I could waltz in, arms aloft, bathed in the warm glow of success. I wanted to proudly announce how thrilled I was to have finally defeated all the main bosses and completed all the storylines.
But there are only seventeen weeks of my #Write52 journey left and it’s looking less and less likely that I’ll be moving Octopath to my ‘finished’ Trello list during that time.
So why talk about it now?
For better or worse, Octopath been a big part of my life for well over eighteen months now. As you’ll read below, this past couple of weeks it has consumed me and I need to release my frustrations somewhere before I throw the game cartridge out of the window.
Ready for an impromptu therapy session?
Let’s start with all the positives.
Octopath Traveler is a Japanese role-playing game (JRPG) that harks back to the old school heavyweights of the genre. Final Fantasy. Chrono Trigger. Secret of Mana. Dragon Quest.
Taking inspiration from their distinctive 2D styles, it blends flat pixel-art characters with a semi-3D environment that gives amazing depth of field. I prefer 2D to 3D, but I appreciate how good Square Enix have made Octopath look, and it still plays in a 2D way. Plus the whizzy graphics make things like water, snow and sand look BEAUTIFUL.
Speaking of beautiful: the score. It’s epic. Orchestrated as a blockbuster movie might be, I find myself humming snippets of it…which can only be an endorsement of its quality.
As is the custom, each character has a class/role and you must balance these and the corresponding skills in your party line-up to stand any chance of success. For example, Ophilia is a cleric, with natural healing magic, while Therion is a thief and can steal items from enemies. It can be tough, deciding who to leave out of the group at any given time.
After choosing your primary character, you set off alone to travel the land of Orsterra, teaming up with the other seven characters along the way. You can only have four in your party at any time, but in that convenient way of the RPG, the other four can be swapped in simply by visiting any tavern.
How they magically teleport to whichever tavern you’ve ended up at, I’ve no idea. Best to not question it too closely.
Even though they travel as a group, each has their own distinct storyline and these do not intersect, much to the disappointment of many players. I personally don’t mind — trying to weave eight very disparate narrative threads together in a way that felt natural would have been impossible. If Square Enix had tried it, people would be complaining that it felt contrived. You can’t win ’em all.
There is a sort of compromise in the form of ‘travel banter’, brief cut scenes where two characters will discuss something that happened recently. These are nice enough — sometimes they reveal a bit more about a character — but more often they feel like a waste of time. Well done for trying, I guess.
Some of the plots are more compelling than others, it must be said. I chose Cyrus the scholar as my primary character, because his story begins with panic over a stolen library book. THE WORST OF ALL CRIMES! Of course it develops way beyond that, into dark and mysterious places, and it’s the only story I’ve completed so far.
I’m enjoying all the stories to various degrees. Some of the characters get on my nerves *cough, Tressa, cough* which doesn’t help, but that’s more due to the voice acting than anything else.
Battles are fought in a traditional turn-based style. This means that the members of your party and those in the enemy party take turns to choose what action they want to take. The little heads along the top of this image show the order of whose turn it is next:
Here, Therion (in purple) is choosing whether to Attack, use Thief Skills, use an Item, Defend or Flee. This is all pretty standard RPG stuff. You can see the party stats on the right, showing health and magic power, while underneath each enemy are icons showing what they are vulnerable to.
Hit an enemy’s vulnerability enough times and it will ‘break’, meaning its turns are paused and it takes more damage, giving you chance to smash it as hard as you can. The break requirement is shown in the little blue shields under the enemies, although I have to confess that it took a Twitch viewer pointing this out to me before I realised. This was after I’d been playing for about 60 HOURS if I recall correctly. #facepalm
It’s a satisfying battle system, which works incredibly well for me. I have never enjoyed real-time combat, my reactions simply aren’t quick enough — especially when I have to translate them into appropriate button presses on the fly. I already struggle with remembering what button does what…don’t make me have to do so at speed!
Turn-based combat is 100% my jam. No, it isn’t natural. No, I know real-life fights don’t freeze while you spend two minutes deciding what you want to do next, but I don’t care. It takes away the panic that real-time imposes on me and lets me concentrate on thinking and enjoying the experience.
Though the cute little anime characters might look cartoonish in style, I would argue that this isn’t a game for children. Not because it’s gory, as it mostly isn’t (though there are oddly bloodied weapons waved by boss characters occasionally), more for little excerpts like this one:
Don’t worry, Prim knows how to stand up for herself in this #MeToo era:
Moments like that make me really love Octopath, because it isn’t afraid to step away from the traditional kind of dialogue, that whole “oh no, the king is dead, which silent protagonist will be our hero in this dark time?!” kinda vibe. Prim’s story is one of the darkest and although her skillset isn’t one I find particularly useful in fights, she remains my favourite character.
It also has a beautiful map, and I’m a sucker for imaginary cartography…
So it seems like Octopath is everything I love about games, right? Great stories, interesting characters, looks nice, sounds good. What’s not to love?
I wish there was some way to adequately express it.
Oh wait, there is…
And hey here’s his friend…
What I now have to try and articulate for you is exactly how unjust Octopath feels at times and why that upsets me like it does.
If you play RPGs, you’ll be familiar with the tactic of over-levelling your party before taking on strong opponents. You might have done it yourself. I sure have, it’s how I get anywhere in any Final Fantasy game.
You can’t do that in Octopath. Believe me, I’ve tried.
Here you have to employ strategy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. All RPGs have this at their core, from the most basic “use fire magic on an ice enemy to do more damage” concept, right up to elaborate dances of buffs and debuffs, perfectly timed special attacks and all sorts. I love a nice bit of strategy, when you get it right it’s like solving a puzzle.
My problem is that in Octopath, you must master this to defeat it. And though I’d love to sink hours into that mastery, I just don’t have the time. I want to have a go using strategy, then if (when) that fails, keep clobbering the thing and healing myself for as long as necessary till it dies.
I get that Square Enix made their game the way they wanted. I’m just pissed off they haven’t let people like me play it the way we want to as well.
I started streaming Octopath in July 2018, right after it released. I was excited to share these stories with my viewers, and really get sunk into a satisfying JRPG experience. With eight characters and four story chapters for each, we had 32 delicious stages to get through, never mind all the side quests and secret shrines. Fabulous!
It started out well enough, each character’s first chapter proving unproblematic. Their second chapters, too. But then it started to get icky.
By December 2018 I had started on the third chapters and things were getting much tougher. After this defeat (30s video), I was so frustrated with it that I shelved it till March 2019. The break obviously did me good as this victory proved (30s video, excuse the language), but the whole experience drained me so much that I didn’t touch it again for six whole months.
What you can’t see in that first clip — and all the many other times I failed — is my devastated expression. Full-on face-in-hands despair. This was before I’d got up the confidence to have a face-cam on stream, but I can tell you I’ve felt utterly broken at the sight of every single Game Over screen. I’ve wanted to give up on it so many times. Past Me would have done so.
(Sidebar: I now have a camera, meaning my lovely supportive viewers can see my sad face LIVE every time it happens. I’m lucky that they’re loyal enough to hang around and watch anyway…or maybe they just enjoy seeing my misery?)
For the last three weeks I have been trying to beat one particular fourth chapter boss. I never expect to win on the first attempt, that one is always a reconnaissance mission to discover what they’re weak to, how much health they have, who might be useful to have in the party and such. I am fine with this. I have accepted that this particular Game Over screen is necessary.
I also accept that it shouldn’t be easy. There should be an element of learning involved, trial and error. This is the final boss in a storyline, after all — it should be difficult. I know this.
But these fights are looooong. That victory clip you saw earlier? It came at the end of a 50 minute fight. You put so much time and effort in and then WALLOP, the opposition flattens your party in a swift succession of moves and it’s all over. Again.
I’ve not cried at this game (yet), but I’ve sworn at it more vehemently than I have at any requiring precision jumping (my nemesis!), such as Duck Souls. It’s just soul-destroying to spend over an hour fighting something, for it to turn round and unleash For The King levels of unfairness on you.
Seasoned gamers are probably smiling smugly to themselves right now, stretching their fingers, ready to type that immortal line into the comments below: GIT GUD, SCRUB.
I’d love to git gud. Truly. But as I said earlier, I don’t have time to pump into mastering the strategy. I’m bitter and resentful that I can’t win the way I want to. And I don’t like that Octopath makes me feel like that.
I know it’s going to feel amazing when I clear the eighth and final boss. I know it is. I can virtually feel the relief and the elation. And I should be able to do it — all it takes is choosing the right menu options at the right time. I can’t even blame my failure on slow reactions or a lack of hand-eye coordination.
If it was an option to patiently plug away, whittling their health down to nothing, I would do that. I would sit for hours if that’s what it took. I’m not saying games shouldn’t be challenging. Of course they should, otherwise there’s no sense of achievement.
But this constant pattern of trying and trying and getting within sniffing distance of victory, only to be obliterated unceremoniously by a series of attacks is just soul-crushing. They might as well have animated a huge Python-esque foot to drop from the sky and squash me.
If I could only play my way, I’d feel better. Like “okay I’ve tried doing what you want, game, now let me try something different”. If I still lost after that, it would be so much easier to accept. So. Much. Easier.
I shouldn’t be left feeling angry or sad at something I’m meant to enjoy. I can’t remember ever feeling like this about a game. Ever. Maybe that’s because in the past I’d have given up on it much earlier and never gone back — but I really want to finish Octopath. That’s one of the reasons I stream it: to force myself to keep trying by means of accountability. But it sucks any joy out of it.
I’m sure I’ll see the end screen one day. And when I do, you can be sure I’ll be victory-screeching from the rooftops of every social media account I own.
#SorryNotSorry
So to wrap up:
- It’s been my biggest love and my worst enemy for the longest time now
- It has so many redeeming features that I love
- Something something never give up life lesson something?
And that is why Octopath Traveler is Meaningful Video Game #36.
This post is part of the #Write52 challenge. Why not join us? See who’s involved on this Trello board!
I’m Toyah and I write. I also proofread and — because I’m hugely curious — spend a lot of my time discovering and learning about new things. If you’re looking for someone to wrangle words, get in touch via any of these methods.
