Octopath: A song of hope amidst the chaos

 

When the first Octopath game was revealed back in 2017, seeing a comeback to retro gameplay and graphics was thrilling and the expectations were endless. I believe this feeling was specially present due to the past (and current) trend of hyper-realistic games being a vast majority of the games being released. The era of 2D and pixel animation was fading and most popular franchises had moved on to 3D. After centuries of paintings done on paper, on walls, on straight surfaces, I believe grasping and learning to love this new technology of 3D creation is still difficult for us all to face and comprehend, leaving our feelings mixed towards this change. (I wrote a few posts about this recently.)

This is a difficult conversation to have. The possibilities for video games creation are many, and each new step our technology does should not erase its last one. Visionaries believe that the goal is for video games to reach the same visual level of movies and cinema. This idea exists because video games are still not popularly recognized as its own new art form, but as mere entertainment, and therefore needs the validation of an already existent art format. The basis here is that we can’t call video games art, because a number of them don’t have strong, nuanced narratives nor them promote thinking outside it. Following this theory, however, does art even exist?

Back to Octopath…

After its release back in 2018, praise for its presentation, visuals, music and turn-based combat system were everywhere. Not much interest for its characters and stories appeared, however.

Octopath is different from most narratives we’re used to, which usually goes like this: there’s a great evil upon the world, and the heroes must extinguish it. In stories like this, the goal is told from the beginning and the journey itself holds little importance. Evil is externalized into a monstrous creature: an ancient dragon, a fallen god or even a human being; the story tells us there’s no salvation for these creatures of darkness and chaos, and so we, bringers of light and order, must plunge our swords without remorse. Of course, this is a great generalization from my part. Many stories, I believe specially in video games, are carefully curated and very thoughtful, and even when stories are told in black-and-white perspectives like I described before, they are hardly this sophisticated. Not uncommonly, we have stories being told to us from the perspective of an assault rifle’s scope (to quote a review for the game “Beyond Good and Evil”).

When Octopath begins, we have to choose between eight travelers as our first one before we start, each with different talents, ideals, backstories, dreams and hopes: Alfyn, the kind and selfless apothecary; Primrose, the serious and committed dancer; Ophilia, the lovable and devoted cleric, etc. Each character of Octopath have a goal of their own, and the story, no matter how many of the eight travelers you have in your party, is told in individual perspectives; trauma, revenge, knowledge, sanctuary, are all beliefs and/or goals a character may have or pursue. Some of these may be familiar, and therefore, easy to relate to or feel invested in, others, are mundane and common goals, and are quickly called dull and boring. The daily life of the ordinary characters of Octopath is full of complexities, difficulties, challenges and questions, but I believe the expectations were for the usual: belligerent conflicts between gods and mortals, heroes and villains taking the battlefield, swords, axes and pikes clashing, guns firing, magical spells burning down towns and villages, and the hero, us, partaking in this madness. We live in difficult times, where conflict is a constant part of our lives, sometimes bloody, violent ones; our stories will of course reflect this moment of our history, but simplistic narratives of “us versus them” gives us no window for hope and thought, but instead feed even more into the notion that there is no other option besides eliminating a distorted vision of evil. Octopath does not put us into a journey of unquestioned heroism, there’s no established evil to defeat. Antagonism exists, chaos is present and wicked figures are causing harm and catastrophe, but the binary struggle of “good versus evil” is not told in simplistic lines. The heroes, or rather, the protagonists of the story are carrying much fear, questions and even corruption on their hearts and hesitate on taking violent acts. Anyone previously familiar with the games made by this team of developers, sympathetically known as Team Asano (the lead of which usually is Tomoya Asano), already had a warning on the problem of black-and-white visions, and how unrealistic these are. Throughout most of her journey, Edea believes that the world is divided in these two groups: good and evil; only to have her predetermined judgments shaken at each step. At the end of the journey in Bravely Default, we should be encouraged to see that such ideals are not realistic, and the world and all its inhabitants are far from painted in two visions, but drenched in a multitude of stories, groups and beliefs.

Traveling from 2018 back to the present. 2023 saw the release of a new entry for – now a series – Octopath, namely: Octopath Traveler II. The world is new, and so are the characters. This new world, called Solistia, is set in a period of industrialization, different from its predecessor, Osterra. We can see technology is fast advancing in this world, the concepts of commodities and mass-production are highly emphasized, and of course, the devils called capitalism and inequality saps the world. Although a new entry, Octopath Traveler II maintains the core ideas from its predecessor: the pixel art mixed with highly-defined environments and effects (named HD-2D) and a cast of eight travelers with the exact same jobs and talents, the development team is also largely the same. I finished Octopath Traveler II; the visuals remain beautiful, even more so, everything is lush and rich in colors, there’s much more depth and lore to the world and its characters, which are in return multifaceted, full of personality and charisma. The previous Octopath gave us eight divinities/gods, each representing one of the jobs for the main characters (apothecary, scholar, merchant, etc.), but never gave us more information on this mythology. How the gods came to be? Octopath II enlightened us. The music is once again composed by the brilliant Yasunori Nishiki, whose once again proved his mastery in the art of video game music composition, a soundtrack to which I believe no words I say can do justice at expressing its majesty. The combat remains turn-based, with the “boost and break” system, the boost part of it directly inspired by its spiritual predecessor series: Bravely Default. New gimmicks are also introduced, such as new sub-jobs, speeding-up battles (thank you!) and cross-stories, where two travelers explore certain parts of the story together directly. The original Octopath never gave much effort into telling the stories of the travelers together, this one however, does so with these crossed paths and an epilogue that involves all of them.

(From here onward, I'll be discussing spoilers. Be aware!)

The stories are more diversified and bring much more complex questions than before. Agnea, the dancer, is on a quest to stardom, she believes her dancing can bring smiles to people's faces all around the realm, and so she leaves her small, cozy village and enters the world. However, nothing is so simple for her. She plans to dance for the world, but the current biggest star of the realm only dances to the most fortunate few: the wealthy and aristocrats. Partitio, the merchant, after suffering years of poverty with his townspeople, decides to set out on a quest to make sure this “devil called poverty” does not befall at anyone else. Questions surrounding what brings value to a product, about how the means of production should belong to the workers and the equal distribution of wealth accumulated are raised throughout his journey. Hikari, the warrior, a prince in the land of Hinoema, is determined to bring an end to the long history of warfare and bloodshed his family has brought through the ages, but has to deal with the opposition of his brother's unshakable belief that the strong should conquer and command. Hikari's path is one of my favorites, he is a wise and kind young man and his concerns about the well-being of everyone are sincere. He finds antagonism and opposition on the road, but never does his blade strike in a folly delusion of heroic acts, he loathes his own acts of violence and his wishes for a less bloody outcome are genuine. After the end of Hikari's journey, we get a really touching moment alongside Agnea: the battle has been won, and one of Hikari's friends asks that he holds a celebration for the victory, Hikari refuses to do so, saying there's no reason for celebration, as many have perished after the war. After some events, Hikari and Agnea decide to gather everyone in the city to, instead, pay respects to the ones whose passed and reflect upon all that lead them to that moment. Here we see how the story is never about glorifying death and violence, no joyful feeling can be gained from warfare. I believe Octopath's biggest fault is when it tries to represent the cultures of Indigenous groups, which in the game is represented by Ochette, the hunter, and her people, the Beastlings. The Beastlings are basically mixed human/beast beings, living in the south east of the map, them live humble lives in connection to nature, can listen and speak to animals and them love jerky. In fact, an interesting concept in the game is that, inside the village of the Beastlings, you can't use normal currency to buy items or sleep at their inn, instead, you have to exchange jerky. The idea of different currencies to exchange items and favors is interesting, but badly executed in the game. I'm absolutely sure that diversity in culture is a necessity in stories, when done respectfully, but here it all pile to tropes and are told in a humorous way that could lead to misleading ideas about real people's cultures. At one point in the game, one of the travelers, Temenos, says he would love to teach language to the Beastlings, since them can’t speak words very well. Not giving them a language of their own is a mistake, humans have been creating language since time immemorial. I don't know how much care was given into creating the Beastlings, nor if the developers had actually studied about indigenous cultures around the world, but the problems and errors here are many. The Beastlings are also the only people in the world of Solistia to have brown skin color, everyone else is white. This is Octopath Traveler II at it's worst, unfortunately.

I could continue on to speaking about the other travelers, like Castti, the apothecary, and her journey to recovery disturbing memories of her past; Temenos, the celeric, on his pioneer journey of investigating mysteries surrounding the church, whilst also coercing people he met into not following religion so blindfolded, Osvald, the scholar, on a quest for revenge after early events in the story take his family from him – and Throné, the thief, whose after a life of neglect and abuse, is on a journey to gain freedom. All of these characters have enticing stories, but I want to jump straight to end.

(Spoilers might get even more intense here!)

When all eight individual stories and four crossed-paths are completed, we get an epilogue with all the characters. After some lovely events, all eight characters decide to join forces for one final journey, here, a cliché comes back: a god-like creature is about to bring doomsday. It’s not necessarily a bad cliché, if I can say so, I am guilty for feeling a bit excited about fighting a god, but it surely is not a realist or original idea. After all is decided, we meet with a few new characters and a few familiar ones, as we discover some of them have been secretly plotting much in the shadows. Several events happen, we fight god (and the music is awesome!), an incredibly heartfelt ending happens, the end! I don’t really want to spoil the events or the ending, but rather, dive in the feelings the new antagonists have.

These characters who are plotting against the world are lost in hopelessness, their sentiment is that there is no good future for humanity, as humans are forever tainted with greed, hate, animosity and general malice, almost naturally so. This narrative is not new, and most recently, Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker explored the philosophy of nihilism in much depth, but it’s hard not to feel touched by it. I believe we’re living in dark times, in which the world cry out for change in order to keep existing, and our governments, politicians, does little, much little in the face of climate calamity; I mean, that is... when it does. We’ve been seeing the amount of political figures joking at the face of our calamity, and taking many others, many of us, into their wicked ideals. This same climate catastrophe links to our economic system, designed to transform all that exists in our world into products, commodities, to be sold, used and discarded, meanwhile, a few individuals with immeasurable amounts of wealth to their names, avoid the situation at hand. “If we don’t build society this way, then how?”. The notion here being that capitalism is a natural order, and that humanity are indeed, greedy and duplicitous, so therefore, this is the best economic system for us to realize our malicious acts. This, of course, being a distorted idea invented to maintain the privileges of these very few at the top, while we fight between ourselves, believing this is human nature. Greed is a product of a society built in inequality, if we build another society of equality and end exploitation, history will begin. The feelings of the characters of Octopath echoes with our own, we drown in sorrow and despair at our world, just like them. At these questions, the stories of Octopath shows us alternatives, it open a window of hope. Like Hikari, we should strife for a future without bloodshed, like Partitio and Agnea, we should stand up against inequality, and together built a world where the value of life is not fungible, like Temenos, we should question the world and be more curious. That is the power of art, it gives us hope and ideas, these fictional characters pull us out of the darkness we shut ourselves in, it shows us alternatives to reality. The world isn’t easy, our dilemmas are many, and a simplistic act of killing gods and kings won’t solve our problems. Games are not art because of the “games as mere entertainment” we have, video games are art because of games like Octopath, and so many others that are willing to show us narratives of legends, memories, forgiveness, happiness, truth, equality, freedom and hope.