Octopath Traveler

I am 50 hours into my journey and have completed 6 stories. First of all, the visuals and the music are a treat. There have been 3D JRPGs with 2D sprites before, but Octopath really looks like a 2D game viewed through a 3D lens.

The battle system is really fun as well. There are a lot of characters and a lot of different ways to mix/match party combinations, support jobs, and advanced jobs. I would probably say though that the battle system is the only reason I keep playing this game.

The 8 stories have some of the most pretentious writing I've ever seen and virtually none of them thus far have been any sort of memorable. I was dieing to skip cutscenes during Primerose's chapter 4. I actually think my dog sat on my pro controller during her finale, and he skipped it for me (good dog!).

The bosses, in particular those in chapter 4, are extremely annoying. I had to level to 55 just to kill H'annit's final boss because I kept getting killed by its mass AOE stun that lasted multiple turns.

Primerose's final boss literally AOE silences my party, and would do so every single turn. I didn't have any anti-silence items, but my party by that point was level 60 (aside from Primerose who was 30), so I just killed the boss via AOE healing items and physical attacks.

The boss battles for your second group of characters can almost be cheesed through just because 3 out of the 4 characters in your party are overleveled.

In fact, when you can do this, you realize how shallow the game is as there's no need for level grinding. You can literally just go from one chapter to the next.

If there was an overarching storyline that you felt like you were making progress in alongside the chapter-based character stories, this game would've been amazing, but it just feels like the JRPG equivalent of Mass Effect 2's companion missions as the whole game. There's not much of anything to do in the game to get you to the appropriate level to start a character's chapter beyond playing through the other characters' chapters first, and given that the end credits rolled after I finished my starting characters story (the second chapter 4 I finished), I'm just not sure what the point of it all is.

I am also playing Tales of Vesperia Definitive Edition and find it superior in every way