I was so excited about the first Octopath traveler game way back when it came out. It was completely and utterly mid but it was so refereshin to play something that was really not trying to be anything other than an homage. Take the bravely default battle system, stick with HD 3D 2D pixel art and slap a classic Final Fantasy Job system on and BAM! Literally what else could you ask for. I completed the first one, got the extra end game jobs and made it to that crazy like evil spawn entity boss battle. It was totally exactly what I wanted. Then came 2, which was more of the same. The gimmick began to ware off pretty qucik. No change in the UI, how the battles worked at all, or even new classes. It was literally just more. Which was fine, but I guess that nostalgia itch had been scratched sufficiently by the previous one. I never made it more than 20 hours into the Octopath 2, and I tried a couple times.
Now I'm 24 hours into Octopath Traveler 0, and I gotta say that some itch is being scratched. The big thing is the 8 charaacter combat does a great job of making battles feel brand new. Everybody is squishier and has less mana pool since you can be swapping between rows and recovering whoever is not actively in the front row. The characters in the back are also still charging up BP (Brave Points is what it was called in Bravely default, I actually don't know if its the same thing here) which means while you are wailing on enemies with a party of 4, there is an entire other party of 4 charging up and getting ready to tag in. This fundamentally transforms what was such a conventional, clean battle system into something much more frantic. I was so worried about not having a dedicated healer when I first started the game, but I quickly realized once I had a full party of 8 that the switch out system is the main way to heal. You don't need a healy necessarily, you can just switch out the character near death for a couple turn and let them recover in the back row. The best part is how natural this all feels to do. It seems like there's so much going on on screen. But you get into a kind of rhytem. Weaving people in and out, breaking enemies and then bringing people up to dish out massive damage. Or taking a brutal attack and being forced to switch a character who was building up BP to the back to catch their breath, while the new character keeps ticking away at the break or does suplimental damage. It turns what was a classic waltz into something like Jazz. It will be impossible to go back to the battle system of other games after this, and I really hope that Octopath 3 retains this multi-row combat system to some extent. Oh Also there are new weapon types FINALLY.
The story in all of these games thus far has been meh at best. The core cast never interact in each other's "paths" and its such a waste of a premise. In an effort to gave more control to the player, they really narrow the experience of what could have been. So, instead of focusing on individual charachters, what octopath traveler 0 does is focus on the WORLD. The original set up is pretty generic with saturday morning/edge lord villians that are hard to take seriously, but then it shifts to be about the other half of the continent and it starts to take on a more of Game of Thrones type of narrative (that is my only reference for fantasy and I havent even read the books or like the tv show sorry). You are a nobody who just happens to be witnissing a lot of crazy political drama happening. I am only a few chapters into this new arc but it is definetely already a lot more intereting than anything either of the previous games did...