BurpDoodle: Ophilia and Cyrus / Octopath Traveler

I played the demo and started off with Ophilia the Cleric as my main character and Cyrus the Scholar before my 3 hours were up. I like boosting my attacks/magic attacks! Feels super awesome! Really interesting mechanics ^o^

And it’s coming out this Friday :0

RPG ramble where I have no patience in playing them:

Personally it’s not a game I’d play in full. I felt done with the game at certain points. I got bored at times. So please keep that in mind that it’s not a game for me. I just wanted to give it a go. :’)

Picked Ophilia first because I see myself as a support person anyway ;P

She is super goody, submissive and prioritises everything for her generous foster family so I don’t know if there’s anything beyond that yet. It also annoys me how her family is focused on being a family yet her sister keeps saying “MY father” but not “our” father. Same with the father, even though he expresses pride in both his girls. And Ophilia keeps calling him “your Excellency” too which didn’t help. They keep going back and forth in being a family with Ophilia and then their wording does the opposite. So if I was Ophilia, I would feel alienated and might as well take the sister’s role/job and leave. :<

They keep joking together and she’s being left out of it. She doesn’t participate or dare include herself with the jokes. Was she their servant for her whole life growing up??

And then she just takes her sister’s place for this ritual and journey despite the sister training whole life preparing for it? This is so the sister can take care of their sick, dying father…because she probably loves him more and he needs her more because she’s biological to him and Ophelia is not?? Apparently blood is the stronger bond than anything else. And then the father goes, he sensed this would happen?? That Ophilia would do the dangerous journey instead of his own biological daughter? There’s no conflict or drama, let alone emotional investment about this. Why is Ophilia okay with all this. AAAH.

The sister doesn’t even get angry but was relieved that she doesn’t need to do the ritual. They’re too best of friends to have any drama. There’s also the cultural “keep your feelings to yourself for the family/community” deal that I know extremely well. It brings out my personal “I don’t feel good enough for this family” feelings out of me and the “bottling up emotions/issues” family dynamics and that’s not great. This feels too real for me personally as I’m tolerating my family too to a similar degree. So definitely there’s my bias here.

But unlike my family, Ophilia’s family is super duper generous and kind to their community who can do no wrong :’)

Eventually I skipped dialogue especially for Cyrus…it didn’t feel interesting to me I suppose. I stumbled upon him because I was struggling to switch between characters but couldn’t, once I was done with Ophilia’s Chapter 1.

Cyrus is the intelligent, investigative, handsome professor who only has 2 female students in his classes [one of which is a princess] and highly values reading, writing and sharing knowledge, rather than hording them. Of course he’s the out of reach good looking one ;P He’s super oblivious to differing values and perspectives of other people and is he supposed to be funny…I’m not feeling it. I like the investigation side of things though the first case was super obvious and easy :0

My eyes kept rolling at two of these predictable backstories so far. Nothing is resonating with me yet this early on.
But hey it’s too early to judge! I’m happy to be proven wrong from these initial impressions of mine.

Fighting the Chapter 1 boss alone as Ophilia was hard in that I needed to know what I was doing and actually learn the mechanics and it was a challenging kind of fun. Died a lot because I thought I could brute force it. What a silly assumption! It felt good when it finally died, super satisfying.

Random battles was most annoying for me. Nope. I don’t want to experience them when I just want to go from point A to B. It’s one of my biggest gripes with JRPGs. Let me go to the next town and don’t force me to fight things I can’t see arghhh :<

Super aware I needed to grind when I came across the overworld…not my idea of fun. I like talking with townspeople slightly more to help them out. But I know some of them are just quest givers towards more battles in the wild. I can’t really say too much about side quests with the townsfolk since I didn’t go deep into that for the demo. Items and armouring up felt straightforward.

The bosses were the fun challenging parts for me really.

I was annoyed that I have to go out of my way to meet up with Cyrus and completely forget Ophelia’s quest for the time being. I don’t see why she would party up with him at all, narrative wise. Why she would drop her own quest to help a stranger immediately. Plus I was wondering the whole time if I could switch between characters and between their storylines so it makes more sense but nope.

Mechanics wise, battles were more manageable with a party of people rather than solo though. But for some reason a scholar like Cyrus has ice and fire attacks. Huh?! How did he get those moves as a professor?! I must have skipped too much exposition for him haha

Yeah this game isn’t for me, I don’t have the RPG patience and I don’t find the two characters I’ve experienced so far compelling. RPGs in general are a huge commitment [50 -100+ hours] and I don’t have the interest to invest that much time! At least not for this game :0

Regardless, cool looking art and it’s a promising good game if this is your thing though (:

Edit: I love Dunkey’s video on this.

His view is completely biased though as I personally found the combat an interesting challenge but only with the bosses. Yep it’s not my cup of tea. But I’ve been watching it anyway just for the stories.

With this piece, I was playing with Sketchbook…and I’m not used to it yet. I don’t have a range of control as I would have like or I don’t know how to do it  yet. :S