The first thing you’ll notice about Octopath Traveler is its striking graphical style. While the endearing whimsy of vintage classics like Chrono Trigger continues to elude Square Enix’s writers - Octopath Traveler is nothing if not self-serious - this latest effort comes closer to recapturing bygone days than perhaps any retro-chasing RPG to date. Happily, Octopath Traveler comes a lot closer to realizing that dream than the hopelessly cluttered Lost Sphear and painfully clumsy Secret of Mana did. This actually isn’t Square Enix’s first attempt to rekindle the Super NES fires in 2018. With Square Enix’s Octopath Traveler, we have the latest modern-day RPG whose creators hope to recapture a little of that 16-bit magic. They ran on hardware just powerful enough to allow game makers to express their bold narrative ideas, yet not so powerful as to make development too expensive for devil-may-care experimentation. But it’s also true that RPGs of the 16-bit era genuinely did possess a certain je ne sais quoi.
It’s only natural that those would be their touchstones. That’s nostalgia speaking to a certain degree after all, many people encountered menu-based battles with teams of magic-slinging warriors through the likes of Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger. For a certain set of role-playing fans, the Super NES era represents the golden standard of RPG design.
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