Square Enix has been making role-playing games since well before the advent of 3D graphics. Pixelated RPGs are among the most beloved video games in history, and in recent years Square has returned to its roots with the trademark HD-2D art style. The first title to kick off this trend was 2018’s Octopath Traveler, and now that ambitious little RPG has a sequel to call its own.

Octopath Traveler II takes everything that made the original game great and improves on it in at least some way. From combat mechanics to exploration to storytelling, Octopath Traveler II streamlines its predecessor’s systems to make for an engaging, surprising, and endlessly enjoyable RPG that will keep gamers entranced for easily over a hundred hours.

Story

As with the original game, Octopath Traveler II is less of a cohesive story and more of a sprawling series of side quests. Each of the eight protagonists has their own adventure filled with narrative twists and side characters, and each of these stories is entirely divorced from the other seven actively happening to the rest of the party.

It’s a novel approach to narrative design, one that the first game also implemented to varying degrees of success. It helps that the entire cast of characters in Octopath Traveler II is relatable and engaging, so no individual chapter feels too drawn out or tedious. Every protagonist has a redeeming characteristic and the winding path they each follow inevitably leads somewhere interesting.

While it is jarring that your party members largely don’t interact with one another, Octopath Traveler II has a few systems to ease the disjointed nature of its storytelling. Travel Banter provides small snippets of conversation between party members within each chapter, though these brief moments would have been more impactful with full voice acting.

There are also new side quests called Crossed Paths, a novel addition to the series that pairs party members off for more robust adventures together. These are full scenarios that are comparable in scope to an actual story chapter, and my only complaint about them is that they weren’t more ingrained in the actual storytelling.

As for the characters and their stories, each one follows a particular throughline that varies between narrative tropes and some delightfully unexpected twists. While Temenos seeks to uncover the dark mystery behind his mentor’s murder and Ochette seeks to reunite beats of legend to prevent a calamity, Agnia is on a quest to become a world-renowned dancer and Partitio is just trying to spread prosperity through noble mercantile pursuits.

Within each of these tales (and the four others I didn’t mention) there’s plenty of heart, tragedy, and humor to fill a traditional RPG story. It’s a testament to solid writing and a staggering amount of dialogue that all eight paths feel like fully fleshed-out adventures. And for fans of more traditional narrative design, the reward at the end is more than worth the time sink.

Gameplay

Octopath Traveler II is an elevation of an already fantastic gameplay experience, bringing everything that worked from its predecessor while improving and evolving systems that didn’t quite sing. Combat plays out in very much the same way as the first game, with turn-based rounds that alternate between each character based on their speed.

Enemies all have weaknesses and an armor counter that, when reduced to zero, breaks, leaving them unable to attack and vulnerable. Weaknesses can be either specific weapons or elements, so balancing a team to tackle every type of damage is key to whittling enemies down. This gets more tactical in later stages as you unlock secondary classes and start building out specific team lineups.

To aid in taking down enemies, characters accrue Battle Points, which allows them to either add additional attacks to their turn or boost the power of special abilities. There are even late-game techniques that require a character to be at max boost before they’re even available to use. Mastering the Battle Point system can be tricky, but once you have it down it enables you to dish out massive amounts of damage in a single turn.

Add on to that the fact that every character has unique abilities all their own and the game just becomes a feast of role-playing goodness. Hikari can learn special attacks by defeating NPCs out in the world, while Castti can concoct potions in battle to aid the party or damage enemies. This is in addition to the Latent Power system that utterly transforms the game, making previously unusable skills much more prevalent.

Castti’s Latent Power allows her to concoct without using up ingredients, making her a powerful healer that can restore both health and magic to the entire party in a single turn. Agnea’s Latent Power allows her to spread single-target abilities to entire groups, a technique that’s especially useful for boosting the entire party’s stats.

Finding the right secondary classes for each character and how to balance their weapons, accessories, and support skills opens up a seemingly endless number of possibilities. I spent the majority of the game with my thief, Throne, throwing elemental spells at enemies as a Sorcerer. Giving Agnea access to the Cleric class allows her to boost the entire party’s defense in a single turn, and her Dancer support skill adds extra time to those buffs.

The one odd holdover from the original Octopath Traveler is that you can’t swap out your starting character for the majority of the game. This means that one character will always be in your party, leading them to become extremely overpowered after a certain point. This made many of the game’s middle chapters much easier than they were supposed to be, as my Hikari was easily able to dispatch some of those chapters’ bosses with just a few hits.

Audio and Visual

I didn’t think it was possible, but Octopath Traveler II has blown other HD-2D games away with its art design. Square Enix did state during the run-up to the game’s release that they’d spent time improving this game engine, but their teases didn’t do it justice. Octopath Traveler II is stunning and makes full use of its aesthetic with sweeping vistas, vibrant colors, and inventive camera angles that show off even more of its breathtaking world. It looks especially amazing on a Switch OLED.

Not to be outdone, though, is the game’s audio design. The voice acting for the core cast is great, if a little hokey at times, but some of the secondary characters do have a slightly amateurish quality. It’s never outright bad, but at times it can sound a bit like a community theater production. But the soundtrack is where this game really shines.

The background music in every region is simply superb, swinging between grand, bombastic adventure scores to more sinister, suspenseful chords for dank caves and shadowy dungeons. Every composition is an earworm, landing squarely among the likes of Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts in terms of majesty and grandeur.

What Could Be Better

The game does have a bit of a slow start as you begin accumulating your team. The initial chapters aren’t the most exciting as you’re introduced to each character, and these chapters have a significant amount of dialogue that will be reminiscent of watching a prestige TV show. You can skip these opening chapters for each character if you like, but blending a little more action into them might have made for more energetic opening hours.

While I loved the Crossed Paths stories as a way of bringing these characters together more intimately, I still think it would be better if the game had more of that throughout. Even if each character’s chapter had just one other party member tagging along, it would make the party feel like more of a team as opposed to a caravan of strangers.

Verdict

Octopath Traveler II is an incredible RPG that takes an already stellar franchise and expands on it in just about every way. It’s more accessible, tactical, and enjoyable on every front, from revamped combat mechanics to novel systems to more engrossing characters and side stories. Octopath Traveler II is both an homage to the RPG classics and a reinvention of the genre, and it overwhelmingly succeeds in both respects.

Octopath Traveler II is available now for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC via Steam.