Octopath Traveler 2 makes the case for more ‘short story’ games

polygon.com:

For all of its flaws, I adored the first Octopath Traveler. Its braid story was as ambitious as it was redundant, following eight playable characters around a circular continent on which quests were thrilling until they became hopelessly rote. Although it began on a note of promise, with gripping origin stories for each character, and ramped up as those plots gained steam alongside one another, it fell apart down the stretch. The stories grew repetitive. The braid came loose.

Still, it represented the best of what I consider a compelling but painfully overlooked format: the “short story collection” video game. While most releases live and die by a singular plot told in one storytelling genre (Cyberpunk! Norse mythology! Greek epics!), Octopath Traveler threw caution to the wind and dabbled in nearly all of them. Sure, its design conceits fell into a neat genre — the turn-based JRPG — but its narrative ambitions were all over the map. Messy? Sure. Fun as hell? Absolutely.

I’ve only recruited five playable characters in Octopath Traveler 2, but it’s already clear that developer Acquire wanted to push this variety further in the sequel. I chose Osvald the scholar as my starting character, and his prison-break-meets-revenge-tale of a first chapter is basically Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo if it took place in the frozen north. However, once I traveled south, I met the cleric Temenos, whose role as a courier of the “Sacred Flame” has Dark Souls written all over it. (As an inquisitor, he sets off to investigate the murder of a church official whose death was tied to rituals involving old gods, hulking demonic beasts, and a plot to extinguish said sacred flame.) Turning southwest, I entered the city of New