When the original Octopath Traveler came out in 2018, fans and critics were blown away by the tribute to old-school RPGs while also making things modern in terms of look and scope. You could play as eight main characters, each with a unique and profound story that would take them across the continent they all lived on. Through your journeys, you’d connect them all and build up your party, giving you many options when you wanted to do combat. However, while many loved the game and its depth, there was one thing that they really didn’t like: the lack of communication between the characters. Thankfully, Octopath Traveler II will fix that.
If you’re confused, while the original game did have eight different stories, it didn’t connect the main characters through that content. Instead, they would only talk via “internal chats,” and the way the story played out made it seem like each character was “on their own” when that wasn’t close to being the case. In contrast, something like Live A Live also had different storylines, but they wove a narrative that brought them all together, in the end, to help one another out.
With Octopath Traveler II, Square Enix has confirmed that the characters will interact with one another more through “Crossed Paths” storylines. In the tweet below, we get an example concerning two characters we saw recently via Osvald and Partitio:
As you can see, the Crossed Paths storylines will flesh out the characters more while allowing interaction between them. At present, we can’t say how many of these storylines we’ll get. Given all the combinations we could have between the eight characters, there’s likely not to be a story for each combination. But, even if we get a good amount of them between the eight, that’s extra content to flesh out the title.
Hopefully, Square Enix will drop more tweets like that in the future so we can glimpse how many more side stories we’ll receive. We also have yet to hear more about six of the eight characters, so fans of the franchise can expect more character trailers soon.
We know from the most recent one that the abilities of the eight characters will be expanded upon in the sequel. Plus, you’ll be able to travel the world more profoundly, including sailing on the seas and going on unique adventures there!
Octopath Traveler II arrives on February 24th, 2023.
Source: Twitter
