Octopath Traveler in 3 hours: The Endless Eight

If you’ve ever been around any anime forums, you might have heard of the infamous “three episode rule”, which is a guideline that some anime fans use to judge whether a show is worth their time. The idea is to watch three episodes of an anime series, and if the anime is able to make a strong impression on you by the end of those three episodes, then it’s worth continuing on, otherwise, move on to something else.

The same rule can also be generally applied for games. And it’s especially important for them because unlike TV and anime, games actively ask for the player’s commitment. And with so many games nowadays, it’s often much easier for a gamer to lose interest in a game if they don’t find it immediately engaging to play with. Therefore, a game’s opening is paramount in determining its success, and designers over the years have used many techniques to hook players in. Whether that be the prospect of an enticing narrative, an interesting setting, or simply fun gameplay.

And so with that in mind, this is Octopath Traveler in 3 hours, a series on video game openings, how they draw players in, how they keep them interested, and sometimes, how they scare them away.

Cause there are eight paths, GET IT!?

Today I’ll be talking about the opening of a JRPG again. I know, seems like JRPG’s are all I talk about in this series but hear me out. You see I find Octopath Traveler to be a very…interesting game. There’s a lot of different aspects that I want to delve into, but one specific detail that I think is the most intriguing was the way it handles its narrative. It’s puzzling in that this design decision despite being consistent throughout the game, actually exhibits different levels of impact on the player’s experience based on their progression. Now, this is only my personal experience, but I’d like to wager that a lot of people also felt the same way.

So this is probably the point where you go “Dude, just tell us what you mean. Well first, for those who aren’t familiar. In Octopath Traveler, you get to play with a total of 8 different protagonists, each with their own unique storylines to go through. The developers, wanting to give them each of them their own equal chance at the spotlight, designed the game such that you are heavily encouraged (I would say forced, but people always find a way) to progress through each of the character’s stories at around the same pace. For example, if you just finished a character’s 2nd chapter in their story, then the next step is for you to play the 2nd chapter of another one of the characters’ story. Rinse and repeat, until you’ve finished the all of the character’s 2nd chapters, and move on to chapter 3.

On paper, this sounds pretty simple and fair. If you’re a developer and you spent a lot of time and care to develop these stories, you’ll naturally want players to experience all the stories if you can. Give each of them a fair share of love and attention. So you design the game as such, knowing that if you don’t, there’s a possibility that players will simply play through the stories that they like, then drop the rest. Pretty reasonably wouldn’t you say?

However, as you can probably tell with the way this post is going, it’s not as simple as it just that. So what really happened?

Not this again…

Since this is  about video game openings, you can probably guess that it’s going to be something related to that. So what ends up actually happening is that you effectively…have to play through the same opening eight times. Because you see, since the eight stories in this game are largely independent of each other. It means that with the narrative structure of this game, once you finish one character’s prologue, you have to move on to the next character’s prologue, so on and so forth. I’m sure by this point you can see how this could be quite problematic. In a way, your story progression kind of resets whenever you move on to a new chapter.

This is made worse by the unfortunate fact that since players can choose which character’s story they want to go to next. The beginning chapters all have to function effectively as a tutorial level. Meaning that it also gets stale gameplay-wise, since the can’t give you any new tools yet unless they go against their own design decision. This isn’t a totally bad thing once you’re later into the game, and get rolling in everyone’s stories. But in the beginning, it can feel like really sluggish going through each character’s prologues. Because of this, I find this phenomenon pretty interesting. So from now on, I’m going to give it a special name, like the “Endless Eight” effect.

Conclusion

So The “Endless Eight” is there pretty much throughout your entire experience with Octopath Traveler. There is some leeway during the later parts of the game, however. Depending on your gameplay progression, you could break the mold a little and complete a character’s chapters back to back, since all you need to do is be around a certain level requirement to proceed. And as I said earlier, you could do this too during the prologue chapters of the game. However, the game really doesn’t want you doing it that way, since you’ll have to go out of your way to mega-grind out your levels to make it possible. As a result, it’s a task that is only for those who are completely dedicated to completing the task, and NOT for your typical casual gamer.

Personally, I wasn’t a big fan of the “Endless Eight” effect. It really made an already kinda lackluster opening of the game to be much longer than it needed to be. On the contrary, however, I find it absolutely fascinating how something so simple as this could have such a drastic effect on your gameplay experience once you get past a certain point.

Because truth be told, once you finish each of the prologues chapters, the game immediately opens up to a wealth of new combat options and character interactions that was sorely missing before. It ultimately feels like the game had a sudden spike in progression, almost as if you are now playing a completely different game; rather than the slow and steady progression that almost all other games have. So although I really didn’t like my initial experience with the game, I can appreciate for what it tried to bring to the table.

But these are just my own personal thoughts about the beginning of Octopath Traveler. What do you think of the “Endless Eight” effect? If you’ve played the game, did you find it enjoyable? And If you didn’t play it, what do you think of it regardless? Would it be something you would be down for in other games as well? Feel free to let me know!

Anyways that’s all I got for today, I’m sorry for being away for so long, my next project will probably be my full review of Octopath Traveler, so look forward to that! Other than that you can follow me on my social media if you want. Otherwise, I hope you have a great day and I’ll see you next time!