Microsoft has announced a string of titles from top Japanese developers coming to Xbox and/or Xbox Game Pass over the next few months.
Square Enix’s closer relationship with Xbox continues with the launch of Octopath Traveler 2 on Xbox in early 2024, following its launch for PC, PlayStation and Switch in February.
Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name and Like a Dragon: Ishin! will both be coming to Xbox Game Pass, with the former joining on its day of release on 9th November, and the latter coming sometime “this year”.
Is it better than the first one? I struggle to play it for too long. The break mechanic is just too much for every single battle. And the stories are super basic boring fairytales without the weird parts of fairytales.
Except for the dancer, when one of her friends randomly yells out of nowhere “Yes, I became A WHORE!” lol
I don’t know how far you got into the first one but they are pretty similar games in my opinion. Everything that was good in Octopath 1, got better in Octopath 2. So: music and sound design, still amazing. Art, it’s the same HD-2D style that’s popular nowadays and Square is good at it. Character storylines are still mostly separate and not extremely complicated. The endgame scenario of Octopath 2 is more fleshed out than the hidden/True Last Boss of Octopath 1. I had a lot of fun in the endgame but in my opinion it was still too short.
The battle system is even more broken than Octopath 1 and largely revolves around setting up a team that can generate lots of BP, stack all your buffs onto a single character and maybe a debuff on the boss, then break it and deal 10k or 100k damage in a single round with your strongest attack. I think with certain setups it would be possible to deal 2 million damage in a single break. No boss has that much HP, though.
You still get powerful by exploring the map for gear and stealing/path-actioning good items from the end game cities. Grinding isn’t really necessary to beat the game but there are multiple setups that can turn trash encounters into 1-button wins.
The sub-job system is more flexible in Octopath 2. In addition to Break, characters have unique Latent Power “limit break” skills. There are so many ways to build a team that works well and part of the fun is figuring out what skills you can spec onto your characters and combine in order to win the game. That was also the case in Octopath 1.
Thank you. Yeah I’m playing FF9 right now and the battle system is just so much better it’s ridiculous.
Some day I’ll finish Octopath 1, it sounds like I’ll be even more bored with 2 so I’ll skip that one.