Maylmilae Wrote:No overarching plot
I mean, there is but you have to play through the whole thing to see it. It's loose in each character's story, but it does come together in some sense (unfortunately as a post-game sort of thing).
I don't think they could have done close interactions very well in Octopath Traveler between the 8 main characters. As the game is (with 8 separate paths) that's a lot of writing to incorporate, especially as the player decides when and how each character's story advances, I just don't see it happening. At best, you'd get stuff along the lines of those bar scene interactions, but just a lot more of them. If it had been just 4 or 5 characters then I could imagine the party having stronger interactions amongst themselves. They definitely could have had more intra-party connections, but I don't know if it could be expanded into something more meaningful than "party banter". That would involve some characters inserting themselves into another character's story somehow, which seems to break what the devs intended (see below).
Personally, my view was to take everything in isolation, looking at each character's entire story as an episode. Admittedly, that requires the player to ignore the other characters as background cast, but I honestly think that's how the developers wanted it, for better or worse.
Although I must agree on one point. I had more fun with both Bravely games (100+ hours on the first, and 80+ hours on the second). There's just so much to experiment with, and even though a couple of game-breaking strategies exist, it's exciting to find one on your own. I'd definitely recommend playing them in Citra for HD glory. They seem to work pretty well in my tests.