got_quiet

I'm about 10 hours in to Octopath Traveler now and it's both good and bad.

The good is pretty much all mechanics. The turn based fighting is decent. So far I haven't hit too many super grindy spots, but according to a lot of reviews it does hit a grind at some point. Basically if I seek out areas that are just hard enough that I scrape by by the skin of my teeth I level up relatively quickly. The bottle neck is starting to be gear I think. And I like how you mix and match 4 out of 8 characters to cover bases or use certain utility abilities well enough. The fights feel relatively fair with preparation. The inventory system isn't to obscene, and so on and so forth.

But the writing so far has been atrocious. It's not just the line by line English translation, which adds the most god awful "accents," possibly the worst I've seen in a game in a very long time (I literally want to just not use the hunter or do her quest because the weird ass not-Middle English shit she had going on actually upset me.) But the broader story is also so far been just one cliche after another, with no emotional heft to anything at all. And it doesn't make much sense either. Exactly how am I supposed to believe that a thief who is all about working alone and whose 15 minute intro is about how he's a lone wolf then turns around and accepts the help of 3 other people after a single conversation? It's incoherent. The greater lore is also non-existent. After ten hours I've gotten no sense of place at all. There's the forest area, the cold mountain area, the plains area, the desert area, and I can't find any real relationship between them. The politics are so shallow that I'm not sure any political relationships exist.