If you’d asked me a few months ago, I would have said I was absolutely getting Octopath Traveler. I even planned to pre-order it.

After all, it was one of my most-anticipated games of the year.

I figured there were three possibilities:

1. You play as each of the 8 characters, and then they team up for an overarching plot.
2. There is no overarching plot, but all 8 characters help one another with their personal stories.
3. All 8 stories are completely separate.

#1 was always what I wanted the most, but after they revealed that you could recruit the other characters and see all eight stories in a single playthrough, I figured #2 was the most likely option.

What I hadn’t imagined was that all 8 characters would team up and still somehow have separate stories.

Now that Octopath Traveler has been out for a bit, the mystery of its overarching story has been solved: there is lore and worldbuilding shared across the stories, and there is a post-game dungeon that brings that together.

There is not a larger plot once you complete all eight stories, like some people thought there might be.

And that’s okay. However, what really bugs me from discussions and feedback about the game is that the story cutscenes pretend your party members don’t exist – to the point where some scenes refer to the character being alone even if you have companions with you.

You can recruit Octopath Traveler characters in any order and even skip them if you want, but I’m not asking for the game to have a unique scene for every possible party combination. Even acknowledging that the character has allies with them would be good. But it’s jarring to have multiple characters for combat and banter conversations, then switch to story scenes where the party members suddenly don’t exist.

But let’s forget about that for a minute. All right, so it’s effectively 8 individual stories, but you have a party for gameplay reasons. Okay. How are the stories?

When I played the first Octopath Traveler demo, the stories for Primrose and Olberic both had me interested. Unfortunately, it seems like there’s a general consensus that the story/writing is the weakest part of Octopath Traveler. People who love it praise the gameplay, but I’ve seen enough comments about the story being weak to make me worry.

I love a good turn-based JRPG, but the story and characters are what really keep me invested. Bravely Default has been heralded was one of the greatest returns to traditional JRPG gameplay, but I was so uninterested in the story and characters that I couldn’t stick with it.

What do you think? Octopath Traveler was one of my most-anticipated games of 2018, but mainly for the story. Should I give it a chance? Or is this one I should pass on after all?