Went back to Octopath Traveler 0 out of network necessity

Something that should never happen in this day and age happened in my part of the world last night: The internet went out for everyone in the area. It was kind of a real eye-opener for how completely reliant myself and I think almost everyone else has become as far as constantly being online is concerned.

Because of the network outage I became acutely aware of how most of my PS5 games cannot be played at all without a network connection, even if said game is a 1-player local game. What a crock of doo doo!

Because my Nintendo Switch is not dependent upon network in order to function I had a rather limited number of options to play and that is the only reason why I fired Octopath Traveler 0 back up.

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Octopath Traveler 2 was such an amazing game to me that I was pretty excited to find out that there was already a sequel on the market that was available right when I finished the 2nd installment. Although technically a prequel, I was pretty stoked about some changes that they made to the game. Unfortunately some of those changes are a big part of the reason why I don't really care for 0 and I am going to explain why

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Instead of 4 we now have 8 characters in our combat lineup and this was only something that was done just briefly at the end of OT2. As it turns out this is too many people and remembering who the hell anyone is and what their skills are is just too daunting to remember. Any one of your toons is going to have a dozen skills or so and it all just starts to blur together for the most part. This is compounded by the fact that a majority of the skills that a character has are pretty damn useless and there isn't much reason to ever use them.

Common skills like healing are of course important, but some of the "critical hit" attacks don't really do enough additional damage to warrant going through a menu when the standard attack, which only takes one button press, is going to do 90% of the same damage anyway.

Also, when you first encounter mastery skills you get pretty excited about how customized you can make a character, but then quickly get a bit uncaring about the existance of this at all because there is just too many of them. Once again, a majority of these skills are pretty damn useless and it just isn't worth the time necessary to bother to equip them.

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As is often the case when games make things so complicated there are so many options that it all just starts to blur together and you just assign them willy nilly. This can be really convoluted when you accidentally equip a mastery, such as spear, for a character that can't even use spears.

Honestly, it shouldn't allow you to do this but it does.

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Town building is something I tend to enjoy in games so I was really stoked to find out that this was part of the new game but after getting up to level 4 I have started to just feel as though the addition of this is just filler that doesn't really power up your crew enough to make it worthwhile. You also can farm produce and animals to create food items but once again, the benefit that your receive by using these items is so slight that it just doesn't seem to be worth the effort and the multiple places you have to walk to in order to make any of this happen.

I think my biggest complaint is the character selection screen, which you can change at most points in the game, and how they don't give you some really critical information on the selection screen.

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one of the most critical elements of team selection and even where you put them in order on your team, is what that characters' available weapons are. This is a huge part of battle strategy because the main thing you want to do to enemies is use weapons that they are weak against. So you don't want to have a bunch of people that all use the same weapons in your party, especially not in the same line.

The process of determining which character uses which weapons should be IMO, "front and center" and very obvious from all menus but for whatever reason, it just isn't. To find out what weapons a particular character can use you either have to put them in the party and figure it out, or go to an extensive and convoluted party screen and scroll through each individual person, then remember that and their name.

There are a total of 35 damn characters that you can unlock in this game and only 8 of them are in your party at the same time. I am sure there are some people out there that enjoy this sort of variety and opportunity to mix things up, but how the heck is anyone going to remember the skills and benefits of 35 friggin characters? That sounds like a college project, not a game.

For me, I normally just throw random characters into a party and hit the "auto optimize" button as far as equipment is concerned and believe me, this option existing is likely the only reason why anyone bothers to change party members at all.

I think the devs kind of realized this when they were making the game because at the end of it all it doesn't really matter all that much who is in your group as long as you have a couple of healers in there somewhere. Once you do that and you are of a sufficient level for almost any area or encounter, you are likely going to win and this is a real shame.

Other problems that are really in a lot of games (too many) that are problematic are here as well.

• Sleep/paralysis/confusion spells or abilities only seem to ever work on enemies that you do not really need to use these skills on, on bosses it will almost always miss
• An overabundance of weapons to the point of not really checking the stats really closely
• a game that is meant to be "open world" but honestly is extremely linear
• a convoluted story with too many characters to the point where I don't really even know what the story is. It's pretty generic in that you and your ragtag group of pals are preventing an empire of sorts from taking over the world

To me, this game is something that I will return to when I don't have an internet connection and not much more. There isn't any real strategy necessary to advance and that is a damn shame. In the previous title, strategy was absolutely necessary whereas in this one the only real strategy is to be several levels above any areas' requirements, have a couple of healers in your party, and then just use standard attacks.

This is so disappointing to me because I was the one singing the praises of the previous one so much. By attempting to alter the gameplay too much they ended up kind of breaking the game.

Pity.