Hands On: Octopath Traveler II Looks Incredible, But Can It Forge Its Own Identity?

Boosting the original without breaking anything.

Not every sequel needs to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes simple refinement does the job just fine. For every game that mixes things up, like Breath of the Wild, there’s another like A Link Between Worlds that takes a more subtly iterative approach to the standard formula. After playing through the first few hours of Octopath Traveler II, it’s quite clear to us that Square Enix's latest HD-2D project is more in line with the latter. Everything that you loved about 2018's original Octopath Traveler is here and arguably better than ever, while some of the things that you didn’t like about it may have been tweaked or adjusted.

All of the original eight classes have made their return again, but they’ve each been lightly reworked both narratively and mechanically to give you something that feels new. For example, the Scholar class still stars a magic-casting professor, but where Cyrus was a suave academic on a quest to track down a missing library book, Osvald is a bitter and broken prison convict on a single-minded mission to avenge his family’s murder. Here and there, you can see some similarities between the two, but Osvald is a whole different beast.

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