I have the evasive maneuvers skill equipped and they random encounters still feel frequent lol. I imagine they might be a bit much without that.
Yeah, the default rate seems borderline broken to me. In an age where there are many alternatives to random encounters, or systems for allowing players to control them to taste if you do still want to use them, it was a bit jarring to hit a game that feels like it lifted that part of the design from one of the old NES JRPGs.
Octopath Traveler 2 Left Me Absolutely SHOCKED... | Review
I've only had a chance to play a few hours, but I was delighted to find that pressing the shoulder buttons allows you to auto-advance the dialogue in cut scenes. I love it when a story heavy RPG does that.
I played the first chapter of Ochette and I am wondering if I should play the other characters or move on. In the first one you met the other characters and could optionally do their chapter 1 (I believe) is that still how it works?
Yeah, when you reach another character's location, they'll join you immediately (if you want) and then you can either do their Chapter 1 right on the spot or do it at a Tavern in the correct town (indicated on your World Map) later.
I cleared away some tasks, events, and yes games, finally picked this up, and am quite enjoying it. I started with Ochette and then stumbled into Osvald, which was a bit of a jarring tonal shift, but I think a solid progression--Ochette seems to basically be free resources, which Osvald's opening chapters showed me he desperately needs. I just barely picked up Throne, and may pick up someone from the west and then proceed.
How spoilery is this spoiler-cast? I am sure I want to play OT2 at some point in the next year.
So, Chained Echoes is in the bag and there's still about a month to go before Sea of Stars. Octopath Traveller, you're up!
However, I'd love to have some thoughts on one important topic before I start:
Are there standout performances in the English voice cast? Any characters that really come alive thanks to the voice work?
Or is this a game where I'm better off using the Japanese voices from the start and never looking back?
Oh man, it's absurd the degree to which Ochette's beast taming lets you sequence break in this game.
Haven’t played it, but I was curious if I’d recognize any of the voice cast. Looks like the A character is a big name: Xanthe Huynh, played Haru in P5, Marianne in FE 3 Houses, and Altina in the Cold Steel series, among many other roles.
I ended up going with the Japanese voices, for what it's worth. The English wasn't bad, but it's definitely in the territory where I'm more happy with the game's native language.
And, done!
I decided I'd better take a quick break from Baldur's Gate today and wrap up the last bits I had left before I lost track of where I was. Turns out I maybe had a bit more left than I expected, plus that final encouter
caught me by surprise. Basically, I got WAY ahead of the difficulty curve of the game quite early and generally stayed there, so I was expecting the final fight to be just as much a cakewalk as a good portion of the later game already had been.
Wrong!
I was not prepared for that wrinkle. Thankfully I WAS prepared enough to not have to go all the way back to before the forever night section started, but man, I really had to put some effort into making sure all eight of my characters were set up and ready to go, and then had to stay on my toes to the very end of the fight.
Quite fun!
And actually, all around quite good -- very glad I gave it a chance, and very glad I didn't let Baldur's Gate keep me from wrapping it up.
(Very cool credits sequence too!)
I've reached the later levels, what would probably be considered the end game, and these later areas are really getting to be a slog--random encounters dragging because of the high shield points that must be broken, but also the weaknesses tend to be non-congruent, and many of these random monsters also have entire party attacks that can easily put even over-leveled characters at critical from full. I just fought a side boss in an area my main character was 20 levels above the recommendation, and I risked using an item that revived and fully healed my entire party, and its next action was an attack that hit everyone and killed a party member (who, admittedly, was 3 levels above the recommendation).
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