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![]() ![]() The game communicates the necessity of gear (over even levels) much better this time around than the first game did, and gives you more opportunities to come by stronger gear for your characters too, in turn helping make sure you never feel underpowered in combat.Even when running (which is where the encounter rate is supposed to double in this) it never gets anywhere close to as obnoxious as it did in regular contexts in the first game The encounter rate in Octopath 2 is far less insane than it was in the first game.The passives, latent abilities, and job system in this game make experimenting with battles a lot more fun (I'll come back to this point in a bit).The unique character powers in each battle add another great mechanic and layer of strategy to battles that also keeps them feeling dynamics.The battle speed up option is a godsend (even longer boss battles feel quick and snappy, and short ones are over before I even know it).But Octopath 2 actually makes some smart changes that make battles a lot more funfor me to the point I am actively going out of my way find battles and engage in them: The funny thing is, all of those criticisms actually still hold true here: you still don't have inactive party members get EXP, you still have restrictions on what characters you have to have in your party at all times, and so on. More than anything else, me not enjoying the battles after a while may have caused me to fall off. The need of having to grind to keep my party members on the same level was killer, because inactive ones don't earn EXP, and you always need the character whose story you are doing in your party at the time, and you can't swap out your starting character, and after a while it felt like even trash mob battles went forever. In the first game, I got really tired of battles after a while.I am constantly invested in these characters and their stories, and I never get the time to get bored or weary of any of it, because every story and character is so different, and everything is structured and paced so differently from one another. ![]() The subversion on character tropes, along with the variety in genres, is already great and you also get some of the more traditional JRPG stores with Agnea (the starry eyed dancer who wants to make it big) and Casti (the apothecary who has lost her memory and plays the JRPG amnesiac protagonist trope). For example: Temenos the cleric's story is a detective noir murder mystery (and it's done really well) Throne's story is an underworld crime drama revenge story the frontier settling cowboy Partitio is a socialist, and his story is about spreading the wealth! Osvald the scholar is a convicted murderer, and his story is a prison break. They end up being totally different genres. And this is important, but the stories are also different aesthetically. The stories across all characters are structured differently and paced differently, with unpredictability and dynamism in structure that helps stop the malaise of repetition from ever setting in. While the story is still split across characters, it is no longer four straight chapters per character of going to town -> using path action -> doing a short, linear, bland dungeon -> fighting boss -> repeat.
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