![]() You’ll seldom watch the future turn order as closely as in Octopath Traveler 2, as you consider where to direct attacks, which order to attempt to Break your enemies in, when to drop in healing, buffing, and debuffing, when to deploy Boost, and when to use Break to nullify strong boss attacks. An oft-neglected element of turn-based combat, characters’ speed determines the order in which they make their moves each turn. Squad composition, for one: When putting together your team of four from the eight available characters, you need to consider not just character levels and their traditional roles of caster, healer, or tank, but also a good spread of weapon types and elemental attacks that will cover enemy weaknesses, to get you those crucial Breaks in the most efficient way possible.Īnother is turn order. Beyond that, it brings so many of the game’s other design elements into focus. There’s a simple, immensely satisfying rhythm to this process of banking BP and spending them at the right moment, enhanced by the game’s punchy visual and sound effects. This is, essentially, it: Break and Boost. You can spend BP to quickly break an enemy, or save them to maximize the power of your attacks against a broken enemy. Up to three of these can be spent at once to multiply the number or power of the character’s attacks and skills. Meanwhile, player characters in your party of four acquire Boost Points with every turn, up to a maximum of five. Once their defense level reaches zero, you Break them, stunning them for a turn and dramatically increasing damage done against them. They also have a defense level, which you can break down by exploiting their weaknesses. It works like this: Every enemy has a set of specific weaknesses, either to elemental magic attacks or to physical attacks from certain weapons. 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. 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. 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.īut, as comforting as it is, Octopath 2 also has a surprising amount of bite where it counts. ![]() ![]() ![]() 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. It’s expansive, but simple and streamlined, changing virtually nothing that made the original game work. Octopath Traveler 2 is quintessential gaming comfort food. ![]()
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