One of the great RPG battle systems returns in Octopath Traveler 2
Octopath Traveler 2 is quintessential gaming comfort food. It’s expansive, but simple and streamlined, changing virtually nothing that made the original game work. It’s nostalgic and figurative; it boils big, adult melodramas down into the visual language of the games of our childhood — a few frames of animation here, a few winking pixels there. And it’s luxurious, too, wrapping its retro look in lavish visual effects and accompanying it with an all-timer of an epic, orchestral score by Yasunori Nishiki.
But, as comforting as it is, Octopath 2 also has a surprising amount of bite where it counts. Its turn-based battle system, returning from the first Octopath, is one of the most refined and strategic iterations on the design of classic Japanese RPGs you can find. It has an eye on tradition and doesn’t overwhelm the player with complexity, but through a few simple rules sets up a web of cause and effect that will keep you constantly on your toes, even during the most mundane moments of grind.
It works like this: Every enemy has a set of specific weaknesses, either to elemental magic attacks or to physical attacks from certain weapons. They also have a defense level, which you can break down by exploiting their weaknesses. Once their defense level reaches zero, you Break them, stunning them for a turn and dramatically increasing damage done against them.
Meanwhile, player characters in your party of four acquire Boost Points with every turn, up to a maximum of five. Up to three of these can be spent at once to multiply the number or power of the character’s attacks and skills. You can spend BP to quickly break an enemy, or save them to maximize the power of your attacks against a broken enemy.
This is, essentially, it:
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