Square Enix just gave us 20 minutes of Octopath Traveler 2 footage

destructoid.com:

While Octopath Traveler 2 is slated for release on February 23, 2023, on PC, PS4, PS5, and Switch, we can catch a chunk of it now. If you wanted some Octopath Traveler 2 footage following the recent Nintendo Direct reveal, you got it! Square Enix just gave us 20 minutes of it thanks to a TGS stream. Don’t worry though! Although the stream was done for TGS, there’s a full live English translation baked in as audio commentary.

Kicking off at roughly 25:00 in the below video, we get a full 20-minute walkthrough of the game, and some of the aesthetic and design changes in the sequel. One big element that the team showcases is elevation, which brings “height and depth” to the maps. There’s a bit of variation involved with the game’s designs, with footage of a forest village and an “old west-like town.”

Based on this Octopath Traveler 2 footage, natural time progression is in, too, and there will be “drastically different music” in some day/night cycles, including tracks that sound unique compared to the original. The team wanted to ensure that there wasn’t a sense of repetition between playing the original and the sequel, and it gave them a good excuse to “explore different genres” of music to boot. The developers mused on how much of an undertaking it was, having to design day/night music for all of the locations in the game, only a portion of which were shown off via a brief look at the world map (31:00 in).

Ideally, Octopath Traveler 2 will address some of the common complaints of the original (including how things homogenize after the individual character stories are completed): because so far, they’re still nailing the aesthetic.