Imagine a team of game developers that have been making classical JRPG for consoles for all their life. Boss comes in and tells them they have to do a mobile game with maximum monetization now, because management wants to make as much money as the competition does with Genshin Impact or Diablo Immortal. But the team has no clue how mobile game exploitative monetization works, and so they end up making a classical JRPG on a mobile platform, with just a very thin veneer of monetization options that aren't exploitative at all. Now that is probably pure fiction, but Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent (COTC) sure feels like this.

At the core, COTC plays very much like the console Octopath Traveler. You gather travelers of eight different classes, and explore their individual stories by going through lots of dialogue and doing turn-based battles with an interesting "weakness" and battle point system. Only now there are 8 (I believe) times more characters, which you get in a Gacha system of random draws. And whether it is by not understanding Gacha systems, or by Square Enix just being nice to us, the Gacha system in COTC is so generous with free currency, and it is so unnecessary to have 5-star characters, that the game is best played completely for free. Believe me, I spent a bit of money on the game to profit from an offer that was only available for paid rubies, not free ones, to get a guaranteed 5-star character more; and it turned out to be completely unnecessary and basically a waste of money.

COTC in some respects is better than the original Octopath Traveler. And you can, and should, play it completely for free, while the console version on the Nintendo e-shop is still $60. Having said that, both games are for fans of the JRPG genre, and JRPGs are not everybody's cup of tea. There are a lot of dialogues to click through, and a lot of grindy combat, but that is par for the course in this genre. Apart from draining the battery fast, there isn't really much I could complain about in the mobile version. The controls work really great on the touch screen, and the gameplay feels just like a console game, not like a mobile game at all. So, if you like JRPGs, I can only recommend you check COTC out.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:03 AM Permanent Link