I tried taking a break from Ghosts to try Octopath again.
It's permanently dead to me at this point. I don't remember what I was doing, the old timey speech - which I really fucking hate for a myriad of reasons - annoyed me in less than 5 minutes and I just didn't want to play it while Ghosts of Tsushima or Paper Mario were sitting there being like "You want a good time?"
The old timey speech is literally one character.
Wait, so I've made the game as painful as possible by picking this one terribly written character?!?!
Edit: Or have I missed an optional thing to change the dialog style somewhere to something actually bearable?
It's only H'aanit and her village that talk the powerfully affected old-timey way. Everyone else talks normally.
THE HELL!?!?!?
I'll try getting to another character and see then!
I tried taking a break from Ghosts to try Octopath again.
It's permanently dead to me at this point. I don't remember what I was doing, the old timey speech - which I really fucking hate for a myriad of reasons - annoyed me in less than 5 minutes and I just didn't want to play it while Ghosts of Tsushima or Paper Mario were sitting there being like "You want a good time?"
The old timey speech is literally one character.
Wait, so I've made the game as painful as possible by picking this one terribly written character?!?!
Edit: Or have I missed an optional thing to change the dialog style somewhere to something actually bearable?
Only the huntress talks like that.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
I tried taking a break from Ghosts to try Octopath again.
It's permanently dead to me at this point. I don't remember what I was doing, the old timey speech - which I really fucking hate for a myriad of reasons - annoyed me in less than 5 minutes and I just didn't want to play it while Ghosts of Tsushima or Paper Mario were sitting there being like "You want a good time?"
The old timey speech is literally one character.
Wait, so I've made the game as painful as possible by picking this one terribly written character?!?!
Edit: Or have I missed an optional thing to change the dialog style somewhere to something actually bearable?
It's only H'aanit and her village that talk the powerfully affected old-timey way. Everyone else talks normally.
THE HELL!?!?!?
I'll try getting to another character and see then!
Edit: This is who I started with incidentally.
Lol damn it I've only messed with the demo and I did the same thing and hated it
I tried taking a break from Ghosts to try Octopath again.
It's permanently dead to me at this point. I don't remember what I was doing, the old timey speech - which I really fucking hate for a myriad of reasons - annoyed me in less than 5 minutes and I just didn't want to play it while Ghosts of Tsushima or Paper Mario were sitting there being like "You want a good time?"
The old timey speech is literally one character.
Wait, so I've made the game as painful as possible by picking this one terribly written character?!?!
Edit: Or have I missed an optional thing to change the dialog style somewhere to something actually bearable?
It's only H'aanit and her village that talk the powerfully affected old-timey way. Everyone else talks normally.
THE HELL!?!?!?
I'll try getting to another character and see then!
Edit: This is who I started with incidentally.
She's stuck in your party til you beat her chapter four story then. So if you hate the way she talks I would restart with someone else. Cyrus and Therion are probably the two most useful to have in your party at all times.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
I tried taking a break from Ghosts to try Octopath again.
It's permanently dead to me at this point. I don't remember what I was doing, the old timey speech - which I really fucking hate for a myriad of reasons - annoyed me in less than 5 minutes and I just didn't want to play it while Ghosts of Tsushima or Paper Mario were sitting there being like "You want a good time?"
The old timey speech is literally one character.
Wait, so I've made the game as painful as possible by picking this one terribly written character?!?!
Edit: Or have I missed an optional thing to change the dialog style somewhere to something actually bearable?
It's only H'aanit and her village that talk the powerfully affected old-timey way. Everyone else talks normally.
THE HELL!?!?!?
I'll try getting to another character and see then!
Edit: This is who I started with incidentally.
She's stuck in your party til you beat her chapter four story then. So if you hate the way she talks I would restart with someone else. Cyrus and Therion are probably the two most useful to have in your party at all times.
Yeah I'd restart the game and just not recruit her if it bothers you that much. I didn't find her to be very useful (though the capture is a fun mechanic).
I know I'm slow (depression and exhaustion is killing me) but I just finished the Red Streamer last night on Paper Mario. Holy shit these boss fights are great but hard. They use a completely different part of your brain than the regular fights.
+1
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Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
You aren’t slow. I’m only just into blue.
I was holding off because my wife loves the paper Mario games and was going to just watch and help her play through. But we are busy doing some house remodeling and she only likes to st down and play on the tv.
I am enjoying the hell out of it still. The battles are still way ahead of color splash in quality.
I ended up being ok on the bosses. Didn’t get the second mechanic for the red streamer boss but the note told me what it was. I was really impressed with my 6 year old son though. He barely can read but managed to beat the boss. I have no idea what his methods were cause he did it when I couldn’t see, but he did it.
Okay. So, the Lego NES and the TV that you crank to play world 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. It's got a pretty big secret that you shouldn't read if you don't have $230 to spare:
The inside of the TV has a rendering of world 1-2, complete with lifts and the warp zone.
Okay. So, the Lego NES and the TV that you crank to play world 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. It's got a pretty big secret that you shouldn't read if you don't have $230 to spare:
The inside of the TV has a rendering of world 1-2, complete with lifts and the warp zone.
Goddamn, Lego.
Correction:
The inside of the console, so says the article. The TV's too full of 1-1.
I was holding off because my wife loves the paper Mario games and was going to just watch and help her play through. But we are busy doing some house remodeling and she only likes to st down and play on the tv.
I am enjoying the hell out of it still. The battles are still way ahead of color splash in quality.
I ended up being ok on the bosses. Didn’t get the second mechanic for the red streamer boss but the note told me what it was. I was really impressed with my 6 year old son though. He barely can read but managed to beat the boss. I have no idea what his methods were cause he did it when I couldn’t see, but he did it.
I think kids are way better at pattern recognition than we give them credit for.
I tried taking a break from Ghosts to try Octopath again.
It's permanently dead to me at this point. I don't remember what I was doing, the old timey speech - which I really fucking hate for a myriad of reasons - annoyed me in less than 5 minutes and I just didn't want to play it while Ghosts of Tsushima or Paper Mario were sitting there being like "You want a good time?"
The old timey speech is literally one character.
Wait, so I've made the game as painful as possible by picking this one terribly written character?!?!
Edit: Or have I missed an optional thing to change the dialog style somewhere to something actually bearable?
It's only H'aanit and her village that talk the powerfully affected old-timey way. Everyone else talks normally.
THE HELL!?!?!?
I'll try getting to another character and see then!
Edit: This is who I started with incidentally.
She's stuck in your party til you beat her chapter four story then. So if you hate the way she talks I would restart with someone else. Cyrus and Therion are probably the two most useful to have in your party at all times.
I mean other games deal with characters being there and not being there. You can have alternate interactions in various places based on who is there. It's not like this is something unprecedented. If they chose to make a game using this set up they really should have taken the extra step have the narrative actually make sense with the various characters.
Here's the thing though. Travel banter is already in the game with party members commenting on events, and there's actually a lot of it. It already checks for who is present and offers scenes based on that. So if that's not sufficient for tying characters to each other and making them feel like they're aware of each others' goals and working together, then you're asking for a completely different sort of game writing.
In practice the way the story was written, Tressa has nothing to do with Therion's story. People asking for more of a central theme and characters interacting with each other want a more traditional storyline like other JRPGs, which necessitates reduced player choice in where to go and which party members to pick up.
Think of a game like FF7: you're pursuing Sephiroth across the world due to Cloud and Tifa's personal history with him, and in the course of that journey you end up visiting Corel where Barrett is vilified by the townspeople, everyone has a discussion about that and what it means. You end up confronting his story as part of someone else's.
So the Octopath equivalent would be something along the lines of, Tressa is the central character, she's following the writings in her notebook and learns the person who wrote it once visited a certain town, and that aligns with Primrose's goals because it turns out a man with a crow tattoo was seen there, so the two of them convince others to join them there. But Therion seems uncomfortable, because it turns out that's the town where his old thieving buddy and he used to live and train, and they talk about how they need to go there in spite of his objections, etc. etc. And as this particular story was written, visiting this town might prompt a plothole if Olberic were to visit it, so he's written to not be part of the party yet at this point.
This is traditional JRPG writing where all the characters have similar goals and confront their pasts along the way. Instead, the way Octopath was put together, multiple characters tend to not need to go to the same town at the same time. There isn't strong motivation for everyone to help Ophilia solve her problems before they can work on Primrose's. If you want there to be that type of motivation, you're talking about a completely differently-written story and a different game. The game we got has a lot of player freedom and I appreciate that.
The characters doing interesting things together as a group motivated by their personalities and backstories is the only kind of story I'd like to see. The one in Octopath is... not that.
I tried taking a break from Ghosts to try Octopath again.
It's permanently dead to me at this point. I don't remember what I was doing, the old timey speech - which I really fucking hate for a myriad of reasons - annoyed me in less than 5 minutes and I just didn't want to play it while Ghosts of Tsushima or Paper Mario were sitting there being like "You want a good time?"
The old timey speech is literally one character.
Wait, so I've made the game as painful as possible by picking this one terribly written character?!?!
Edit: Or have I missed an optional thing to change the dialog style somewhere to something actually bearable?
It's only H'aanit and her village that talk the powerfully affected old-timey way. Everyone else talks normally.
THE HELL!?!?!?
I'll try getting to another character and see then!
Edit: This is who I started with incidentally.
She's stuck in your party til you beat her chapter four story then. So if you hate the way she talks I would restart with someone else. Cyrus and Therion are probably the two most useful to have in your party at all times.
Why Cyrus? I love Therion though.
Strongest mage in the game and his advanced spells absolutely wreck.
The characters doing interesting things together as a group motivated by their personalities and backstories is the only kind of story I'd like to see. The one in Octopath is... not that.
Yeah I'm convinced that Square Enix wanted to do something like this but opted for the more shallow experience to save development time. Obviously I've got no facts to back that up.
e: Not that it excuses it.
urahonky on
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
The characters doing interesting things together as a group motivated by their personalities and backstories is the only kind of story I'd like to see. The one in Octopath is... not that.
And player freedom to assemble the party as they see fit and go wherever they feel like is at odds with that.
It's like asking for...I dunno...a pokemon where every pokemon you happen to catch has a rich backstory and the pikachu talks to the vulpix about how his father was murdered outside of saffron city and the vulpix confides that he doesn't trust the poliwhirl because he once saw him sneaking around in the same area. And this whole dialogue doesn't happen at all if you decided not to catch pikachu, vulpix and poliwhirl. It's too much.
Can you name a game that you wish it was? What game offers you this level of freedom but also has sufficiently complex story weave?
I tried taking a break from Ghosts to try Octopath again.
It's permanently dead to me at this point. I don't remember what I was doing, the old timey speech - which I really fucking hate for a myriad of reasons - annoyed me in less than 5 minutes and I just didn't want to play it while Ghosts of Tsushima or Paper Mario were sitting there being like "You want a good time?"
The old timey speech is literally one character.
Wait, so I've made the game as painful as possible by picking this one terribly written character?!?!
Edit: Or have I missed an optional thing to change the dialog style somewhere to something actually bearable?
It's only H'aanit and her village that talk the powerfully affected old-timey way. Everyone else talks normally.
THE HELL!?!?!?
I'll try getting to another character and see then!
Edit: This is who I started with incidentally.
She's stuck in your party til you beat her chapter four story then. So if you hate the way she talks I would restart with someone else. Cyrus and Therion are probably the two most useful to have in your party at all times.
Why Cyrus? I love Therion though.
Strongest mage in the game and his advanced spells absolutely wreck.
Ah good to know. I'm slowboating through the game at the moment.
I tried taking a break from Ghosts to try Octopath again.
It's permanently dead to me at this point. I don't remember what I was doing, the old timey speech - which I really fucking hate for a myriad of reasons - annoyed me in less than 5 minutes and I just didn't want to play it while Ghosts of Tsushima or Paper Mario were sitting there being like "You want a good time?"
The old timey speech is literally one character.
Wait, so I've made the game as painful as possible by picking this one terribly written character?!?!
Edit: Or have I missed an optional thing to change the dialog style somewhere to something actually bearable?
It's only H'aanit and her village that talk the powerfully affected old-timey way. Everyone else talks normally.
THE HELL!?!?!?
I'll try getting to another character and see then!
Edit: This is who I started with incidentally.
She's stuck in your party til you beat her chapter four story then. So if you hate the way she talks I would restart with someone else. Cyrus and Therion are probably the two most useful to have in your party at all times.
Why Cyrus? I love Therion though.
Strongest mage in the game and his advanced spells absolutely wreck.
Ah good to know. I'm slowboating through the game at the moment.
I started with Therion and it was the right move. He's the only person that can pick locked chests in the game. The OCD in me would not be okay with just leaving a chest to come back later.
The characters doing interesting things together as a group motivated by their personalities and backstories is the only kind of story I'd like to see. The one in Octopath is... not that.
And player freedom to assemble the party as they see fit and go wherever they feel like is at odds with that.
It's like asking for...I dunno...a pokemon where every pokemon you happen to catch has a rich backstory and the pikachu talks to the vulpix about how his father was murdered outside of saffron city and the vulpix confides that he doesn't trust the poliwhirl because he once saw him sneaking around in the same area. And this whole dialogue doesn't happen at all if you decided not to catch pikachu, vulpix and poliwhirl. It's too much.
Can you name a game that you wish it was? What game offers you this level of freedom but also has sufficiently complex story weave?
I'm really curious about why you envision this as such an intractable problem. Like, having 8 characters banter - even having 8 characters' life stories intersect in engaging ways - is substantially, like substantially different from having 150 characters banter, so I'm not sure this particular comparison is very fitting. A player deciding not to put a certain character into their party means that they won't get to see that character's banter with the other characters, won't find out the thrilling revelation that the Construction Worker and the Spy went to school together, won't fight the mini-boss who pushed the Hot Dog Vendor into the fountain at the start of the game, etc. What about this is inconceivable?
Incidentally, having 150 characters banter just means that the writers have to write a lot of text, and the programmer has to do a lookup into a hashtable using a (current_poketman_1, current_poketman_2) pair as the key, which is absolutely very time-consuming for the writers, but not particularly challenging to implement. I guess you'd have to figure out an efficient way to load the text into memory? Of course if bants only happen rarely, or at pre-determined points, you probably don't even need to load the whole hashtable into memory - bants are probably not very time-critical, so even the slowest storage would be fine.
EDIT: Maybe I'm misunderstanding the point of contention?
i bought Kingdom Rush the fourth time because i love it, i'll play it again and the devs live in the neighbor country of Uruguay and deserve all my moneys. The switch version is also free of MTX as far as I can tell.
The only characters I'd stay away from as a starter in Octopath are Ophelia because as good as having a healer around is you'll rarely want 2 so getting cleric skills on the rest of your group is going to be a pain. And Tressa because as a support character there's no real benefit to get having the most exp in the group.
Alphyn and Primrose could cause a little friction when they don't quite fit the group you want but are still reasonable picks. The rest are all strong leads. I'm partial to Olberic as he can function well in just about any group.
The characters doing interesting things together as a group motivated by their personalities and backstories is the only kind of story I'd like to see. The one in Octopath is... not that.
And player freedom to assemble the party as they see fit and go wherever they feel like is at odds with that.
It's like asking for...I dunno...a pokemon where every pokemon you happen to catch has a rich backstory and the pikachu talks to the vulpix about how his father was murdered outside of saffron city and the vulpix confides that he doesn't trust the poliwhirl because he once saw him sneaking around in the same area. And this whole dialogue doesn't happen at all if you decided not to catch pikachu, vulpix and poliwhirl. It's too much.
Can you name a game that you wish it was? What game offers you this level of freedom but also has sufficiently complex story weave?
I mean... it'd be nice if the other Octopathers at least chimed in once in a while and not just disappeared entirely from the narrative except for a few side conversations that take place in some strange, isolated otherworld.
Like, I'm sure the other Travellers would have something to say before fighting any of Primrose's bosses for instance.
The other selling point for Cyrus as a party lead is that his unique trait of identifying a weakness at the start of every battle is going to help you throughout the entire game. Like, no matter your party composition, less guesswork about weaknesses is better.
Regarding dialog, speaking as someone who's tried (and failed) to write RPGs on multiple occasions, do not discount the human inability to comprehend what large numbers actually mean combined with how fast geometric progressions can get very large. "Its only eight characters being combined in every possible configuration at four different points in eight different plotlines" quickly becomes an absolute shitload of text to have to write. I'm not surprised they went with a siloed approach.
(For what it's worth, I would consider a "pyramid" shape... like, Chapter 1 is individual characters, Chapter 2 involves two characters chasing the same guy (e.g. one of Primrose's Ravens made off with one of Therion's Dragonstones), and likewise for further converging spheres of influence to the final boss.)
My favorite musical instrument is the air-raid siren.
I'm really curious about why you envision this as such an intractable problem.
[...]
EDIT: Maybe I'm misunderstanding the point of contention?
I don't think conditional dialogue is an intractable problem because Octopath already does that. But given that people are complaining about the game, then what it's doing is apparently not sufficient. To me that leads me to believe they want it to be a completely different game than the creators designed it to be, but that might not be true.
People also say they want an overarching story that connects everyone, but every game I know of that does that has at least one or two lynchpin characters the game can assume is in your party, to keep the plot going. Never fully open like Octopath.
That's why I think the first step is identifying a game similar to Octopath but better. Like, should it have been more like Final Fantasy 12? Bravely Default? Suikoden? That helps identify what others see as the problem. If Octopath should've been Bravely Default, that means it should've had a set party toward the beginning who are guaranteed to be together for the whole story, etc.
For me, like I said I found the level of freedom a bit unique among JRPGs and I don't know if I would've had it any other way.
The other selling point for Cyrus as a party lead is that his unique trait of identifying a weakness at the start of every battle is going to help you throughout the entire game. Like, no matter your party composition, less guesswork about weaknesses is better.
Regarding dialog, speaking as someone who's tried (and failed) to write RPGs on multiple occasions, do not discount the human inability to comprehend what large numbers actually mean combined with how fast geometric progressions can get very large. "Its only eight characters being combined in every possible configuration at four different points in eight different plotlines" quickly becomes an absolute shitload of text to have to write. I'm not surprised they went with a siloed approach.
(For what it's worth, I would consider a "pyramid" shape... like, Chapter 1 is individual characters, Chapter 2 involves two characters chasing the same guy (e.g. one of Primrose's Ravens made off with one of Therion's Dragonstones), and likewise for further converging spheres of influence to the final boss.)
Eh, that assumes going like Prim -> Olberic -> Tressa would be totally different from going Olberic -> Prim -> Tressa would be totally different from going Prim -> Alfyn -> Tressa when in actuality, even in a "EVERY CHOICE MATTERS" deal, everybody is expecting it to be 99% the same. All you really need is the approach that RPGs like Chrono Trigger take. Whoever's in your party comments on the ongoing events with generic fluff dialogue to shows they're there and connect it to their own stuff (or complain that it doesn't connect to their stuff), with perhaps some special handling for the early chapters before you have a full roster. Like, that's how most RPGs with a zillion characters who all run on screen for every cutscene operate anyway. Looking at fucking you, Tales series, but especially Vesperia DC. Christ, was that a game where the writers were clearly paid by the word.
That just makes me think of Xenoblade, where every quest you accept has generic unconvincing dialogue that makes it obvious it's generic. I forget the worst offenders, but something like Shulk: "You can count on me!" Sharla: "We should help them!" repeated for nearly every quest you accept.
If you think this is some kind of intractable design problem you need to play Baldur's Gate 2. This square team may not have had the budget or experience to write that kind of thing but it's completely doable. Yeah its less interaction than you would see in FF7R but its enough to make you feel like you have actual party members along for all of your main battles and side quests, while still giving you a large amount of freedom as to who those members are.
Just something super basic like actually showing your generic other 3 party members watching most of the cutcenes would be like 50% of the effect.
If you think this is some kind of intractable design problem you need to play Baldur's Gate 2. This square team may not have had the budget or experience to write that kind of thing but it's completely doable. Yeah its less interaction than you would see in FF7R but its enough to make you feel like you have actual party members along for all of your main battles and side quests, while still giving you a large amount of freedom as to who those members are.
Just something super basic like actually showing your generic other 3 party members watching most of the cutcenes would be like 50% of the effect.
I don't think that's the best comparison because unlike Octopath you can't begin the game slumming it as Jan Jansen and expect the rest of the story to reveal itself as you recruit other characters, eventually getting around to Gorion's ward.
You still have a lynchpin character that the game can always assume is present in order to circle everything back to the main plot.
If you think this is some kind of intractable design problem you need to play Baldur's Gate 2. This square team may not have had the budget or experience to write that kind of thing but it's completely doable. Yeah its less interaction than you would see in FF7R but its enough to make you feel like you have actual party members along for all of your main battles and side quests, while still giving you a large amount of freedom as to who those members are.
Just something super basic like actually showing your generic other 3 party members watching most of the cutcenes would be like 50% of the effect.
I don't think that's the best comparison because unlike Octopath you can't begin the game slumming it as Jan Jansen and expect the rest of the story to reveal itself as you recruit other characters, eventually getting around to Gorion's ward.
You still have a lynchpin character that the game can always assume is present in order to circle everything back to the main plot.
Does that really hold when the lynchpin character is a mute mcguffin?
Oh, hey! 40 new posts in the Switch thread, what happened!?!? Mario Galaxy confirmed, or may Metroid Prime 4 news? DID THE PRIME TRILOGY DROP!?!? Oh. No. Octopath discussion. Didn't we already do that?
By the way, Kingdom Rush Frontier's been out on Switch for, like, a year. I'd thought it was the better game? I dunno, I now own both either way.
Does that really hold when the lynchpin character is a mute mcguffin?
Absolutely. Imagine how different the game would be if you could decide to start as Jan, or Yoshimo, and never had to go meet that mute mcguffin. They don't exactly have complete stories you can play through on their own solo, like in Octopath.
I tried taking a break from Ghosts to try Octopath again.
It's permanently dead to me at this point. I don't remember what I was doing, the old timey speech - which I really fucking hate for a myriad of reasons - annoyed me in less than 5 minutes and I just didn't want to play it while Ghosts of Tsushima or Paper Mario were sitting there being like "You want a good time?"
The old timey speech is literally one character.
Wait, so I've made the game as painful as possible by picking this one terribly written character?!?!
Edit: Or have I missed an optional thing to change the dialog style somewhere to something actually bearable?
It's only H'aanit and her village that talk the powerfully affected old-timey way. Everyone else talks normally.
THE HELL!?!?!?
I'll try getting to another character and see then!
Edit: This is who I started with incidentally.
She's stuck in your party til you beat her chapter four story then. So if you hate the way she talks I would restart with someone else. Cyrus and Therion are probably the two most useful to have in your party at all times.
Yeah I'd restart the game and just not recruit her if it bothers you that much. I didn't find her to be very useful (though the capture is a fun mechanic).
Leghold trap is vital for a lot of late game boss fights.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Oh, hey! 40 new posts in the Switch thread, what happened!?!? Mario Galaxy confirmed, or may Metroid Prime 4 news? DID THE PRIME TRILOGY DROP!?!? Oh. No. Octopath discussion. Didn't we already do that?
By the way, Kingdom Rush Frontier's been out on Switch for, like, a year. I'd thought it was the better game? I dunno, I now own both either way.
Sorry man. I always talk about silly things for longer than necessary. Based in too deep of an interest in game design. Sometimes I got other issues going on in my life too and doing a deep dive is an escape. We don't have to keep talking about it.
Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
Octopath was basically a saga game in disguise. They always had character choosing with almost no character interaction. They worked it out most of the time by just having a solid main story and your characters were along for the ride.
It seems like it was more acceptable back then though to have party members just for the sake of having them, and not needing a reason for them to be there or interaction from them at all.
Posts
THE HELL!?!?!?
I'll try getting to another character and see then!
Edit: This is who I started with incidentally.
Only the huntress talks like that.
Lol damn it I've only messed with the demo and I did the same thing and hated it
She's stuck in your party til you beat her chapter four story then. So if you hate the way she talks I would restart with someone else. Cyrus and Therion are probably the two most useful to have in your party at all times.
Yeah I'd restart the game and just not recruit her if it bothers you that much. I didn't find her to be very useful (though the capture is a fun mechanic).
I was holding off because my wife loves the paper Mario games and was going to just watch and help her play through. But we are busy doing some house remodeling and she only likes to st down and play on the tv.
I am enjoying the hell out of it still. The battles are still way ahead of color splash in quality.
I ended up being ok on the bosses. Didn’t get the second mechanic for the red streamer boss but the note told me what it was. I was really impressed with my 6 year old son though. He barely can read but managed to beat the boss. I have no idea what his methods were cause he did it when I couldn’t see, but he did it.
Goddamn, Lego.
Correction:
Steam | XBL
I think kids are way better at pattern recognition than we give them credit for.
Why Cyrus? I love Therion though.
Selling Board Games for Medical Bills
Here's the thing though. Travel banter is already in the game with party members commenting on events, and there's actually a lot of it. It already checks for who is present and offers scenes based on that. So if that's not sufficient for tying characters to each other and making them feel like they're aware of each others' goals and working together, then you're asking for a completely different sort of game writing.
In practice the way the story was written, Tressa has nothing to do with Therion's story. People asking for more of a central theme and characters interacting with each other want a more traditional storyline like other JRPGs, which necessitates reduced player choice in where to go and which party members to pick up.
Think of a game like FF7: you're pursuing Sephiroth across the world due to Cloud and Tifa's personal history with him, and in the course of that journey you end up visiting Corel where Barrett is vilified by the townspeople, everyone has a discussion about that and what it means. You end up confronting his story as part of someone else's.
So the Octopath equivalent would be something along the lines of, Tressa is the central character, she's following the writings in her notebook and learns the person who wrote it once visited a certain town, and that aligns with Primrose's goals because it turns out a man with a crow tattoo was seen there, so the two of them convince others to join them there. But Therion seems uncomfortable, because it turns out that's the town where his old thieving buddy and he used to live and train, and they talk about how they need to go there in spite of his objections, etc. etc. And as this particular story was written, visiting this town might prompt a plothole if Olberic were to visit it, so he's written to not be part of the party yet at this point.
This is traditional JRPG writing where all the characters have similar goals and confront their pasts along the way. Instead, the way Octopath was put together, multiple characters tend to not need to go to the same town at the same time. There isn't strong motivation for everyone to help Ophilia solve her problems before they can work on Primrose's. If you want there to be that type of motivation, you're talking about a completely differently-written story and a different game. The game we got has a lot of player freedom and I appreciate that.
Strongest mage in the game and his advanced spells absolutely wreck.
Yeah I'm convinced that Square Enix wanted to do something like this but opted for the more shallow experience to save development time. Obviously I've got no facts to back that up.
e: Not that it excuses it.
And player freedom to assemble the party as they see fit and go wherever they feel like is at odds with that.
It's like asking for...I dunno...a pokemon where every pokemon you happen to catch has a rich backstory and the pikachu talks to the vulpix about how his father was murdered outside of saffron city and the vulpix confides that he doesn't trust the poliwhirl because he once saw him sneaking around in the same area. And this whole dialogue doesn't happen at all if you decided not to catch pikachu, vulpix and poliwhirl. It's too much.
Can you name a game that you wish it was? What game offers you this level of freedom but also has sufficiently complex story weave?
Ah good to know. I'm slowboating through the game at the moment.
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I started with Therion and it was the right move. He's the only person that can pick locked chests in the game. The OCD in me would not be okay with just leaving a chest to come back later.
Of course, being on Switch, it's $9.99, so if you're looking for a cheaper alternative, your mobile device or Steam might be better.
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Incidentally, having 150 characters banter just means that the writers have to write a lot of text, and the programmer has to do a lookup into a hashtable using a (current_poketman_1, current_poketman_2) pair as the key, which is absolutely very time-consuming for the writers, but not particularly challenging to implement. I guess you'd have to figure out an efficient way to load the text into memory? Of course if bants only happen rarely, or at pre-determined points, you probably don't even need to load the whole hashtable into memory - bants are probably not very time-critical, so even the slowest storage would be fine.
EDIT: Maybe I'm misunderstanding the point of contention?
Alphyn and Primrose could cause a little friction when they don't quite fit the group you want but are still reasonable picks. The rest are all strong leads. I'm partial to Olberic as he can function well in just about any group.
I mean... it'd be nice if the other Octopathers at least chimed in once in a while and not just disappeared entirely from the narrative except for a few side conversations that take place in some strange, isolated otherworld.
Like, I'm sure the other Travellers would have something to say before fighting any of Primrose's bosses for instance.
Regarding dialog, speaking as someone who's tried (and failed) to write RPGs on multiple occasions, do not discount the human inability to comprehend what large numbers actually mean combined with how fast geometric progressions can get very large. "Its only eight characters being combined in every possible configuration at four different points in eight different plotlines" quickly becomes an absolute shitload of text to have to write. I'm not surprised they went with a siloed approach.
(For what it's worth, I would consider a "pyramid" shape... like, Chapter 1 is individual characters, Chapter 2 involves two characters chasing the same guy (e.g. one of Primrose's Ravens made off with one of Therion's Dragonstones), and likewise for further converging spheres of influence to the final boss.)
I don't think conditional dialogue is an intractable problem because Octopath already does that. But given that people are complaining about the game, then what it's doing is apparently not sufficient. To me that leads me to believe they want it to be a completely different game than the creators designed it to be, but that might not be true.
People also say they want an overarching story that connects everyone, but every game I know of that does that has at least one or two lynchpin characters the game can assume is in your party, to keep the plot going. Never fully open like Octopath.
That's why I think the first step is identifying a game similar to Octopath but better. Like, should it have been more like Final Fantasy 12? Bravely Default? Suikoden? That helps identify what others see as the problem. If Octopath should've been Bravely Default, that means it should've had a set party toward the beginning who are guaranteed to be together for the whole story, etc.
For me, like I said I found the level of freedom a bit unique among JRPGs and I don't know if I would've had it any other way.
Eh, that assumes going like Prim -> Olberic -> Tressa would be totally different from going Olberic -> Prim -> Tressa would be totally different from going Prim -> Alfyn -> Tressa when in actuality, even in a "EVERY CHOICE MATTERS" deal, everybody is expecting it to be 99% the same. All you really need is the approach that RPGs like Chrono Trigger take. Whoever's in your party comments on the ongoing events with generic fluff dialogue to shows they're there and connect it to their own stuff (or complain that it doesn't connect to their stuff), with perhaps some special handling for the early chapters before you have a full roster. Like, that's how most RPGs with a zillion characters who all run on screen for every cutscene operate anyway. Looking at fucking you, Tales series, but especially Vesperia DC. Christ, was that a game where the writers were clearly paid by the word.
Just something super basic like actually showing your generic other 3 party members watching most of the cutcenes would be like 50% of the effect.
I don't think that's the best comparison because unlike Octopath you can't begin the game slumming it as Jan Jansen and expect the rest of the story to reveal itself as you recruit other characters, eventually getting around to Gorion's ward.
You still have a lynchpin character that the game can always assume is present in order to circle everything back to the main plot.
Does that really hold when the lynchpin character is a mute mcguffin?
By the way, Kingdom Rush Frontier's been out on Switch for, like, a year. I'd thought it was the better game? I dunno, I now own both either way.
Thanks for the recommendation - I just purchased using coins and am one of those 7 people so excited to check it out!
Absolutely. Imagine how different the game would be if you could decide to start as Jan, or Yoshimo, and never had to go meet that mute mcguffin. They don't exactly have complete stories you can play through on their own solo, like in Octopath.
Leghold trap is vital for a lot of late game boss fights.
Sorry man. I always talk about silly things for longer than necessary.
It seems like it was more acceptable back then though to have party members just for the sake of having them, and not needing a reason for them to be there or interaction from them at all.
Also Alfyn is overpowered because he has Mix (Concoct) and Mix is always overpowered in a Square Enix rpg.
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