BurningBeard posted:

What exactly would you want them to do for the next game? This is such a quality jump that it’s hard for me to not give this post a little side eye. The intraparty conversations and cross path chapters were a decent compromise. The only other thing based on your post, that they could do is have a bunch of triggers for possible included characters, which would be profoundly time inefficient for the end result. What you’d get in practice would be a lot of “Yeah! Let’s do that!” and “No milord, I have doubts,” and on and on. It would both be transparent as a mechanic and obnoxious once you’ve got all eight characters.

The only way to appease people who want intraparty dialogue, as I see it, is to add a lot more cross path quests. But that’s probably even more work than the wedging dialogue into every possible permutation of a chapter. More satisfying, too, obviously.

I think as long as we get an Octopath III we’ll be in good shape.

Something I’d considered also is what if you went down to four characters with eight or even sixteen jobs, as well as path actions attached to those jobs. They’d have to do something with the name of the game, but at least you’d get a manageable party size to work with and could do a more traditional story. But at this point, the anthology style of Octopath helps distinguish it from its peers, imho.

As it stands, this is a game that succeeds because it knows what it is, knows what it can reasonably get away with, and knows how its ancestors succeeded and failed. In other words, straight craft top to bottom.

Well bummer. It’s a fair compromise considering the structure of the game, but I admit to being a wee bit bummed this is the case. I figure smart play can get you through it, but it’s such a blunt method.