In most games, this wouldn’t be an issue you’d collect your characters and naturally play through the rest of the game, their stories unfolding as you progressed. Like the game’s title suggests, Octopath has eight paths available to the player, and eight characters whose stories need to be told. As mentioned above, the game employs a “choose your own adventure” style of storytelling, and it’s going to be divisive. Octopath’s approach to storytelling is a little trickier. Throw in some gorgeous lighting effects, dazzling environmental effects (like blowing sand in the desert and running water in the riverlands), and some fancy particle effects in battle, and you’re left with a game that looks utterly incredible in both handheld and docked modes - a good thing too, since you’ll be spending 60 odd hours in the game just on the story missions alone. The result is a surprisingly coherent art style that is strangely reminiscent of a pop-up book, all the while digging at the threads of nostalgia for decades past. The 2D-HD art style is unlike anything I’ve seen before it’s built on the back of old SNES-era games, using pixel art sprites and textures, but instead of being flat and tiled, Octopath Traveler takes these textures and applies them to 3D objects. Octopath Traveler is a game with two immediately unique features: its “2D-HD” art style, and its “choose your own adventure” approach to storytelling. How successful is that attempt? Well, as it turns out, Square Enix really knows their stuff.īut let’s start with the basics. Octopath Traveler is the company’s latest Switch-exclusive experiment in the genre, an ambitious game that attempts to marry retro-style graphics with modern game design and storytelling.
From beloved retro classics such as Final Fantasy VI to more modern experiences like Bravely Default, Square Enix has been at the forefront of the genre for decades. Square Enix is known for their rich history of games in the JRPG genre.