For all of its flaws, I adored the primary Octopath Traveler. Its braid story was as bold because it was redundant, following eight playable characters round a round continent on which quests have been thrilling till they grew to become hopelessly rote. Though it started on a notice of promise, with gripping origin tales for every character, and ramped up as these plots gained steam alongside each other, it fell aside down the stretch. The tales grew repetitive. The braid got here unfastened.
Nonetheless, it represented one of the best of what I contemplate a compelling however painfully neglected format: the “quick story assortment” online game. Whereas most releases stay and die by a singular plot informed in a single storytelling style (Cyberpunk! Norse mythology! Greek epics!), Octopath Traveler threw warning to the wind and dabbled in practically all of them. Positive, its design conceits fell right into a neat style — the turn-based JRPG — however its narrative ambitions have been all around the map. Messy? Positive. Enjoyable as hell? Completely.
Picture: Purchase, Sq. Enix/Sq. Enix by way of Polygon
I’ve solely recruited 5 playable characters in Octopath Traveler 2, but it surely’s already clear that developer Purchase needed to push this selection additional within the sequel. I selected Osvald the scholar as my beginning character, and his prison-break-meets-revenge-tale of a primary chapter is principally Alexandre Dumas’ The Rely of Monte Cristo if it occurred within the frozen north. Nonetheless, as soon as I traveled south, I met the cleric Temenos, whose function as a courier of the “Sacred Flame” has Darkish Souls written throughout it. (As an inquisitor, he units off to research the homicide of a church official whose dying was tied to rituals involving outdated gods, hulking demonic beasts, and a plot to extinguish mentioned sacred flame.) Turning southwest, I entered town of New Delstra, a doppelganger of Paris, full with catacombs and a jazzy soundtrack, simply as a heist has gone sideways. Throné, the potential successor to the leaders of a murderous thieves guild, encounters no fewer than 5 betrayals within the first 20 minutes of her story.
Regardless of the array of storytelling genres at play, the entire plot already feels tighter than that of its predecessor. Every character is investigating their very own thriller, or escaping their very own debacle, or pursing their very own act of revenge, however every subsequent chapter of their tales feels brisker than the one which got here earlier than. Purchase isn’t simply leaping between gameplay conceits (Temenos’ quests usually contain investigations, whereas Throné’s are extra about infiltration), it’s additionally deftly balancing storytelling genres. It’s solely doable that Octopath 2, like the primary sport, will ultimately develop stale. However I’m utterly dedicated to discovering out.
I want this format wasn’t so uncommon. Final 12 months’s remake of the 1994 JRPG Dwell a Dwell, regardless of the stumbles in its ultimate chapters, nimbly leapt from Imperial China to Edo Japan to the American Wild West. The time-hopping epic Chrono Set off was a important and industrial success all the best way again in 1995, additional cementing the statuses of Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yuji Horii, and Akira Toriyama. Even the first-person shooter sequence TimeSplitters mined the short-story method for 3 video games, with a brand new entry reportedly on the best way.
All of which is to say that, as with literary short-story collections, the format offers builders with sufficient constraints to maintain issues centered, however sufficient malleability to get bizarre. I’m heartened to see the method already evolving in Octopath Traveler 2. And right here’s hoping extra builders brush up on their Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Karen Russell, George Saunders, Jennifer Egan, and Denis Johnson within the meantime.
