Octopath Traveler II’s Playtime Revealed

Octopath Traveler II’s own developers have revealed the potential playtimes for the sequel to Square Enix’s sprawling RPG.

As reported by Noisy Pixel, Square Enix producer Masashi Takashi revealed these potential playtimes himself, based on the experience of the studio making the game as well as their testers.

If you rush through the main story as quickly as possible, skipping optional tasks along the way, you could do it in around 60 hours. That’s the short way.

The expected average playtime, assuming you play for the first time, or don’t play at a regular pace, you will finish Octopath Traveler II in about 70 hours.

For the completists who try to see everything and complete every task, it can take as much as 100 hours.

As RPGs come and go, I’m sure that Octopath Traveler II isn’t even close to the hardest or longest of them. It isn’t even that much longer compared to many games in other genres, such as open world games.

What that playtime does demonstrate is that Octopath Traveler II should prove to be a satisfying experience. The game gets its title from the fact that you play as eight distinct characters, each one with their own story, abilities, and objectives. It will feel like eight different smaller RPGs, combined into one.

The Octopath Traveler games are certainly not the first to meddle in this type of game design. The long forgotten but recently rereleased Live A Live, available to play in English for the first time only now, is famous for taking it a step further. In 1994, this Square Enix game tried to tell the story of seven characters, with each character offering a completely different gameplay experience.

Of course, I brought up Live A Live here as the first Octopath Traveler’s success convinced Square Enix that they could remake Live A Live using the HD 2D-3D art style that Square Enix had popularized in their remakes of the original Final Fantasy games.

It’s been quite a route for Octopath Traveler studio Acquire, which itself was not originally known for turn based RPGs, but action games like Shinobido and Akiba’s Trip. Acquire started out as the developers of Tenchu on the PlayStation, as far away from dense RPG design as one can imagine. But then, those who are really in the know would recognize that Octopath Traveler demonstrates all the things that Acquire has learned from all these years of making video games.

Octopath Traveler II will be releasing on February 24, 2023, on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and Windows via Steam.