This time around, each character has a pair of special abilities: one for the day and one for the night. You're just going to have to trust me to avoid spoilers, but it’s too bad it ends up feeling like a deceptive choice. I liked that it gives you the choice, since I prefer powering my way through games and asking questions later, but what I didn't like was discovering fairly late in the campaign how important it is to actually play through each chapter yourself. Upon meeting a new character you're given the option to play through their first chapter or just add them to your party. Once you do begin wandering in your level-appropriate areas, you’ll come across new towns with new characters. If the area says it's 16, you best have a party of characters at or above level 16. You might think to yourself 'Ah, but I am a seasoned JRPG veteran, I know a thing or two about how to approach high-level zones,' but I'm here to tell you you're wrong. For example, if you enter an area with a 'Danger Level 16' and you're at level five, you're going to be murdered pretty much instantly upon your first encounter. You're then free to wander the beautiful tilt-shift world, but areas are more or less locked out by their difficulty level.

You can choose to start with any of them, and after playing through the first hour-long chapter of their story you're stuck with that character for the rest of the campaign – meaning you can't remove them from your party. But the stories aren’t directly connected either, so if you are considering starting the journey here, you should know that once again the name ”Octopath” refers to the eight playable characters and the paths they follow through the world. Because Octopath Traveler 2 is so similar to its excellent predecessor, there’s no reason not to go back and play the original first.

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