Octopath Traveler 2 Left Me Absolutely SHOCKED... | Review

thank you [Music] welcome back to Retro rebound ladies and gentlemen it is that time for us to eat good again Square Enix continues to feed us these beautiful hd 2D games it is the absolute Spirit of retro rebound watching modernism as well as Nostalgia crossover into a beautiful RPG octopath traveler 2 has been one of my most anticipated games since its very announcement I adored the first one so much even if I had my critiques of it but I knew oh it's round two baby the gloves are off it's time to see what square has got and they delivered in Spades I've been playing this game for a week shout out to Square Enix for the review copy I love octopath traveler 2. easily right now one of my favorites to start off the year I can't believe how much they nailed it now it does come with one in particular snag that I'm gonna highlight in this video but otherwise I am floored by the improvements and the quality of life enhancements that they have made throughout this entire game it is awesome so ladies and gentlemen if you are new here and you are into Retro games Classics Nostalgia focused content and your occasional Day One reviews you're in the right place consider subscribing get ready you got your your fork you got your spoon your bowl because we are about to eat ladies and gentlemen I just want to start off with everything that's new I just want to Screech about this game on everything that's new that's fantastic and then I'll settle down and get into my criticisms it's the only way I can do this so let's get started one of the big complaints with octopath traveler one and I'd be right there with you is some of the individual character stories were less interesting if anyone can tell me what olbrick or alfin did that was of notes you let me know but I can't recall much from the first game in the terms of story it's really the visuals the presentation that truly won me over mixed with fantastic combat so with octopath traveler 2 this this was an area I was really hoping that square would Shore up the defenses on and they've come out swinging big time so one thing I love when you look at the first octopath traveler versus the second is the stories here are much more dark outside of I'd say agnia every character in this game has a pretty tragic start to their story you look at characters like Oswald who is a scholar that's accused of murdering his wife and child and is now struggling with the grief of the situation or Throne a who is a part of a gang that binds their members to collars and they take what they please and kill who gets in the way you're gonna see throughout this story character deaths torture scenes again barring agnia who's a dancer and I actually thought her story was pretty adorable and heartwarming so I did like it everyone else here is pretty tragic and if you know one thing about me I love dark tragic storytelling sometimes the industry goes a bit Overkill with it but I think when it's done right which is what I saw here it is fantastic each of these characters on their own are way more interesting than the first game I it is like night and day truly and I'm not getting all hyped because it's the new wave I've been very critical of octopath Storytelling I was curious if they would you know just rest again on the visuals and the gameplay but no they have made some truly compelling characters where I want to keep going and learning about their story and even some surprise sizes for example oh Chet right she's your Huntress in this game and when I looked at Hani she was one of my favorites in the first octopath traveler and I was thinking can you top one of the Octo goats I mean it's not a high bar to pass but can you pass honey and honestly I was very impressed that ochet is one of my favorites her kind of whimsical nature but yet the surprising dark twist in her own story I just gotta give the Roses to the storytelling here I know it's not what everyone's probably playing octopath for there's so many other things they do even better in this entry but I just want to emphasize the storytelling here is great it does come with one caveat which will dig into a little bit later but yeah there's still very little cross-party interaction these are still eight individual Tales it seems like Square Enix is solidifying this is the motif of the series this is what you're gonna get with octopath when a new octopath comes out take it or leave it I would have loved to see a lot more interaction here it is probably the only part that I'm disappointed with because it's just missing but I guess in my head I think well maybe in a third game they can add more of that but right now I'll keep with the Positive stuff that I've been really digging which is pretty much everything else we'll get into my critiques a little bit later so storytelling has been improved and also what's been improved is the art efforts now if you look at octopaths Traveler you know they have not really spared any level of detail here I mean the effort is impressive across every single map you visit it's just handcrafted beautifully placed lighting particle effects the Sprites moving delicately in the wind this is absolutely beautiful but it's not just these environments that really have won me it's also the level of effort they've gone to additional Sprite art in the game so typically an octopath traveler one you just have your main characters as the ones who have all these different outfits for the jobs that they can equip and that would change the amount of weapons they would be able to use and for those who don't know what this means it exponentially increases the amount of sprite work square has to do for every single job they add they have to redraw the character sprite do all the moves for them all the skills for them etc etc change that so it's just a ton of work when they add more what I was so pleased to see is on top of adding more of that they've also added in guest party members so now some of those opening chapters to the personal character stories are a lot better because you're not just doing one on five and methodically crawling through battle and it gets a little long in the tooth none of that here really you actually have just random characters from the town that you're starting in helping you out and it's a good way to introduce everyone's individual path actions and sort of set the stage rather than centering it all around the character I think one of the narrative woes of octopath one was putting all the weight on a single character's shoulders but instead here it's spread out there are interesting Side characters that are going to help you out to reach your goals and like a perfect example that is thrown a like I don't want to spoil anything else about any of these characters but when you see the guest characters and how they utilize them it's so well done but the Sprite work goes beyond just combat it's little things like details and cutscenes you'll see characters spit lightest cigarettes start smoking there's a more human element to the Sprite work here in octopath travel or two and I love it because cutscenes are now less stagnant where normally you'd see two characters just standing side by side Frozen like this the game is more active is how I'd like to describe it again from those environments where you actually see characters taking actions around the map they're walking around there's still a degree of people just standing all over the village I think that's okay it's not the end of the world because again there's so much more detail on life in these cutscenes there's one moment with Hikari in the start of his story where he's standing on a hill overlooking the castle of coup and I'm like Oh What a Beautiful shot and then the camera rotates and it transitions beautifully into the middle of this absolute war going on and it's there you go oh squares in their bag right now they are killing it I was just geeking out the whole time for the cutscenes the storytelling the art detail here there is a 3D element to this camera like even in combat you'll see it rotate when you do a Max boost you'll see it rotate a little bit to create a more cinematic Flair it sounds little it sounds not that big of a deal but it brings the game to life so much more because everything's not as static as it was in the first game subtle improvements here but drastic if you were a huge fan of the series so I adore this change all in all now on combat there are new bells and whistles here overall it's pretty much the same system you still Target enemy weaknesses Whittle down their Shield points when you Whittle down their Shield points you break them open they take more damage they missed a turn so you can really maximize all the damage you're gonna do to an enemy and it also has the Boost system so you're gonna click that right trigger over and over and over and you're gonna boost your attack up to four times and that leads to some massive damage so there's a little bit of a currency management system within combat but again this game is really to me all about new wrinkles that just shake up the formula perfectly for example latent power sounds basic break the enemy Shields attack their weaknesses and you'll build up this little circular meter that you'll unlock during the first chapter of each character's story okay sounds good what do they do well each one is different so you'll have one with a chat where she uses or animal instincts and she'll have a set of skills where she can claw multiple enemies or just one enemy or Whittle down Shield points even if she's not targeting a weak spot so you don't have to use uh say a specific Elemental weakness or physical weakness you can just go at it or you'll have someone like Throne a who can go two turns in a row or Oswald who's able to just take all of his magic potency and put it into one spell that targets one enemy and does massive damage when you combine that with an advanced magic spell now you're just nuking your enemies the possibilities here are endless so that one wrinkle actually turns into a cascading effect where there are multiple new strategies you can approach combat with this also is an accounting for quality of life things that some people may like I didn't really use it I did test it though for y'all's sake they added turbo mode it's a two-time speed specifically for combat I like that it's here because especially as a trail span I typically always had turbo mode on but with this game it's just something about the r just draws my eyes I want to take in every last little detail I possibly can so for me personally I didn't use this much but it is there if you want to speed up some battles and this can be good for grinding this game will get into it they'll have a little bit of grinding in it a little bit of grinding energy I think with the turbo mode that makes it manageable I think that makes it okay because you can now Sprint in the Overworld so while you're sprinting and using two-time speed the battles will go a little bit quicker and if you want to level up your other party members this adds a little more haste to that which I do like now there are familiar classes I talked about ochet right the hunter so you have new wrinkles to these classes so as usual you can capture creatures in combat for those who don't know it's kind of like Pokemon where you'll have ochet pretty much capturing creatures for you and each creature has like a different attack style and strength level it's awesome but the new wrinkle here is now you can use them in the Overworld to produce items so I can take a creature and produce jerky and then in certain parts of the world they don't trade with coin like in Toto haha Village they instead trade with jerky so it not only builds the world which is another fantastic element of this game but it it gives purpose to a class in a new meaningful way and I gotta say I just love what they've done with the world here you know in octopath one it just felt like this almost one-off continent and that was really it but when you have an octopath to a western continent an Eastern continent you have this southern island of Toto haha you have a feeling here of cohesion as you'll hear people talking on the western continent about what's going on in the East and it builds things a little bit more as you also hear references to the first game I really love what they've done here like I just can't emphasize it enough so yeah combat's seen some new wrinkles Beyond of course the obvious things like new jobs that you can equip it's still the same kind of thing you've gotten used to in the first one where you'll finish off battles you'll get job points you can go into your skills section you can unlock skills as you earn these job points and then you can equip them to your character and as you unlock more job skills you also get support skills that you can equip and there's also ex skills that you can find out in the Overworld so these will make your character classes even more destructive before you can even start sharing them which is awesome there are guilds in this game so that's how I unlocked for example the inventor class which is awesome and as you help make inventions for the inventor class you're going to unlock new job skills again just oh so smart like the game is just so smart I think is the best way to put it but it's fun too so running around is Oswald is this Mage inventor classic it doesn't make sense it's not a good build but it's just fun that I can have him take out a trebuchet and shoot Spears out of it or I can have them just new people with magic that's the fun of octopath and they just play with those systems more and more building Sprite work for it those guest characters all this stuff and it's wonderful now when you're not in combat you're going to be exploring and octopath always had a bit of an exploration Focus you know combing every corner finding every chest that type of stuff matters now you're gonna have bigger areas here so you're gonna have much bigger roads that you're gonna go from town to town they've easily I'd say doubled maybe even tripled the map count here so when you're going from one town to the other and octopath one I feel like according to memory it'd be one or two and three was a lot we're here in octopath two the norm is three sometimes four maps and each of them are just so different like I remember I was going to a town once I think I was going to Rio and I was going through this Coastal section that I was going to a bridge under construction and then I started riding my boat out to a broken down Lighthouse that led me to a lair it was just like wow they've put so much more time into building out this world more where it's not open world but you can kind of feel where they're trending in the direction of where it's tight-knit exploration but it's open enough to be free and go off the beaten path with octopath one it wasn't really Limited in my opinion but you knew there was room for growth here in octopath two you see that growth now so the areas are much bigger I mentioned boats this part because I went on media blackout by the way I should have said this earlier but I went on media blackout for octopath too so I didn't know about this at all when I stepped into a boat and started sailing around going to Islands I went oh oh this is such a cracked video game right now because it just opened up the world way more but you're not just confined to land paths I just what a great idea well and truly love what they did here with the exploration because now you're just seeking out every chest and because these areas are bigger what I found in octopath one is oftentimes I'd stumble into you know a cave that was for a story moment later and I go okay um interesting well I guess I got all the loot here and then I come back later in the story and go oh all right well now here there are so many dedicated maps for specific moments that typically you're not going to have that happen so again it does let you just go off the beam path do your thing if you so desire and find all the secrets in the world without feeling like you've seen something a bit too early than you should have so another reason why I'm absolutely loving this game so the caves and dungeons are fantastic and better yet not recycled I get why they built their dungeons the way they did in octopath one but because they're reusing assets intelligently and then building new ones on top of this caves for example look and play entirely differently some Forest dungeons look and play entirely differently it's just a much more visually diverse game and it's because they're not building a whole entirely brand new graphic style from the ground up and then doing something with it right so now they know their tool set they know what they need to do with it and it's absolutely fantastic I think my only complaint with the visuals and it's as someone who works in Unreal Engine is you guys won't care about it but I just need to say it for my own sanity is sometimes their terrain tool usage is me messy like you'll see really stretched textures that do not look like natural land and that's part of what happens when you start doing that type of terrain tool with pixel art you'll notice that but there is a smoothing tool that you can use to kind of fix that up so I found it in some instances a little sloppier than others because I could tell when they really polished the scene and when a scene was all right good enough so it's not the end of the world most dvl won't care but as someone who works in the engine it was just something I picked up on and I figured for those of you who work on games you may want to know that but to the next Point another new thing here is so many new things isn't it awesome uh day and night cycle I thought when I heard I did catch wind of this one A friend told me about it and when I heard about it I kind of shrug my shoulders he didn't give me details and he went oh yeah this day and night cycle on okay cool I didn't think this would be as awesome as it is so number one it's not gimmicky okay because what it does is for starters lets you do different path actions so path actions are kind of the key component to octopath Travelers side quests you use them to interact with the world and NPCs you can investigate you can interrogate you can hire people you can have them follow you as the dancer you can steal from them and get free items there's a level of interaction here in this game and if you know me and you know my favorite games you know I love interacting I love interacting it's great it makes the world feel alive it's what every game I feel should do so now they've expanded the path actions where you have pretty much three for most characters you'll have a day path action a night path action and then sometimes for certain characters their path actions will activate in combat so if you're with thrown at night her path action activates in battle it's like this is great you start off with a huge buff it's great like the game just goes totally insane he says like let's just give the player a lot of fun things here to do so that's one way the day and night cycle shines the other is the music changes just watch the scene take it in and admire its beauty [Music] yeah the music changes so the soundtracks effectively doubled and the soundtrack of this game my ears oh my ears oh these delicate little holes they just get TR I don't want to finish that sentence that was about to sound horrible the music is fine fire that's what I was trying to say the music is fire okay and not only did they change the music which is incredible here like I actually find it to be an upgrade from the first game and I know again y'all are gonna think I'm just hyped up the up the Wazoo here but no I I love octopath one soundtrack I write to it all the time I listen to it all the time this soundtrack I think is fire like it's a more quaint peaceful nature to it in a lot of the tracks but when it ramps up it is so delectable but also because the day and night cycle exists they now have day night versions of of the combat Maps it's just as someone who who works on this type of stuff I just cannot emphasize how much effort went into this game and I hope that people don't skim over and go oh oh it's just night time bro no they put so much effort into this game it's insane like this is such a magnificent step forward to me and then also because there's a day night cycle NPC schedules change what so now you will be able to find different NPCs doing different things at different points in the day and access different solutions to different quests it's just dude oh my god wow Square Enix just I gotta bow down for this one the last thing I want to highlight here that's new it was already in the first game but it's much improved voice acting I found the audio balancing in the first octopath to be weird I played the first octopath in complete Japanese because for me when I played it on switch I don't know am I crazy but I could barely hear the English VA and I just couldn't deal with that like there was no energy to it but in this game every story moment is fully voiced the side content isn't like if you're gonna interact with a random NPC they're not going to be voiced smart like yeah we don't need that I leave some to the imagination that's the beauty of these pixel art games but I like that the whole story is fully voiced from side character to main character it's all voiced great change here some of these cutscenes are long I'm trained for this baby I'm a Trails fan but yeah for some of you it may be a little bit slow but I think you know what you're getting into here but no there's more of the voice acting there's more dialogue but there's also the auto play option is what I like to call it so you can either click X for each single or a depending on what console you're playing on I played on PS5 to go through each dialogue selection or if you click R1 you'll actually switch over to a play button which Auto passes the dialogue and I think this is great because sometimes I was just kicking my feet up snacking a little bit and enjoying some Peak fiction it was fantastic all right so there's plenty more for you to discover but that those are the main things I wanted to highlight that were new now for the old now for the critique so we got like at least a quarter of my recording time here about 20 plus minutes of me geeking out so clearly you know where I'm trying to like go pick this game up but there are some critiques so what is the same here well you still start off the game by selecting one of eight Travelers there still is that what is considered the slower part of octopath where you do have to pick up your entire party gradually so you're starting at the base level for each of them there is that feeling of kind of regression each time where okay I got a full party like I got five people now I got six people now but then when you start the characters chapter one story it's like oh okay like back to level one back to the solo ride there is a feeling of oh man I wish I didn't have to relinquish what I've built here but for me it's not the end of the world I I think again it's kind of just understanding okay this is where they want to go with the story with that being said probably my biggest critique is there's very little party interaction still and I get because now the game set the standard of well we want to voice these major sections there's interaction in little ways like when you're in combat for example let's say you break the shield with ochet and throw any steps up she'll say something like nice workout chat that stuff is like oh that's that's what we've been looking for yes yes more of that but they don't really go ham here and I just wish there was more interactions even if it was just text just there are characters here that are relatable to one another for once and I would have loved to see more of that cohesion the way they come together makes sense and as always with octopath there is that moment of oh this is why we're all getting together here so it's not one of those situations where they go completely ignorant on it but it hasn't been massively improved like to me everything else in the game I just wish there was a little bit more of that interaction there otherwise backup party members still don't get XP they all chill at the tavern I don't like this this is definitely another big critique of mine I like the idea of party diversity and swapping out when you feel you need a different strategy but this design inherently increases grinding and for me to say Okay I want to level X characters up I guess I gotta go back to the bar grab at least two of them with two other high level characters so I don't get wiped in combat but I'm gonna fight in a higher level area to ensure that you know they gradually level up at at least some type of Speedy rate I don't like that you can't have party members with you that can swap into combat so you have access to everyone in all their builds I don't like that I don't get back up party member XP to me this is just with everything that's moving forward and modernizing in this game this just seems like an age-old decision that is a part of a mechanic that I don't think really belongs fully in the industry like there are smart ways to grind this is an old way to grind I don't like the choice here otherwise that's really it y'all that's really that's my list of complaints there and are they the end of the world no no like they're really not I I I love the game I really do it's it's fantastic I can't get enough of it every time I sit down I'm glued to my screen I don't know if anyone had this feeling with octopath one where and I remember I first started getting into it there was a degree of like a smidge of being whelmed because I was so excited for it was one of the main reasons I picked up my switch like I saw the project octopath I'm like oh I want whatever that is and when I was playing it the path actors were cool there were a lot of cool ideas but they didn't feel fully fleshed out here they do like here it feels like gloves off this is the octopath we dreamed that the first game was amazing in my eyes but game two was uh just the game of Dreams in many ways so this is I think a must play if you're into these types of games if you like the older School RPGs if you like retro style RPGs if you're just into RPGs I'd say this is the one you give a chance to it's just high quality there's nothing quite like octopath with its path actions of course they've pioneered a brand new art style its presentation is fantastic the improvements here are ones I think a lot of people looking for it's just don't expect that magnificent story crossover quite yet there's still interactions they happen but I want more even if it's silent I want more and more and more that's everything I gotta say about this fantastic video game let me know what you think of octopath two in the comments down below other than that take great care of yourselves and I will see you in the next retro rebound peace

Channel: Retro Rebound

Views: 164,681

Keywords: octopath traveler 2, octopath traveler 2 review, octopath traveler 2 gameplay, octopath traveler 2 impressions, octopath traveler 2 preview, octopath traveler 2 trailer, hd 2d games, jrpg, retro rebound

Id: mbW57RKeesI

Length: 26min 7sec (1567 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 24 2023