Octopath Traveler is getting decent reviews. That said, the one guy I really wanted to hear on the game, Jason Schreier at Kotaku, seemed to be the main dissenting voice.
https://kotaku.com/octopath-traveler-the-kotaku-review-1827537100Some quotes:
Some of these stories are entertaining, others trite, but they’re always independent. They never intersect or share common ground. To buy that these eight adventurers would team up, putting aside their own motives to help each other out, requires a suspension of disbelief well beyond what most video games ask of the people who play them. Why would a hardened thief spend so much of his time hanging out with a goody-two-shoes healer? It’s never quite explained.
Octopath Traveler feels disparate and unsettling, like someone took out pieces from eight different Lego sets and stuck them all together. The game is not elegant enough to make up for that.
And:
The developers of Octopath Traveler clearly looked to role-playing games of the 1990s for inspiration. I wish they’d taken a closer look at SaGa Frontier, the game that appears to have inspired them most. Whereas that game also told a compilation of unrelated stories (seven instead of eight), it did a far better job, in large part because they all felt different. You’d play one at a time rather than zipping around, and they were diverse enough to avoid too much repetition. Lute’s open world quest to avenge his parents felt drastically different than Red’s linear superhero journey, even though you’d visit many of the same locations, because SaGa Frontier constantly switched up its structure. In Octopath Traveler, all eight stories are so repetitive that they blend together, forming one big bland stew.
I think I'm glad I passed, despite everyone else seeming to enjoy it. There's some talk about a second half to the game that puts everything together that is easily missable, but that seems odd. Monster Hunter: World it is, then.
