When Square Enix and Team Asano set out to make Octopath Traveler 2, they had a difficult task ahead. The design team wanted to elevate the sequel, making it bigger and better than the first game. That meant addressing criticisms levied against it, including complaints that the stories, exploration, and action quickly grew monotonous. However, the team knew that fan dedication to the original was the only reason they could make a sequel at all, and they tell GLHF that they had to innovate carefully.
Director Keisuke Miyauchi said he started the process with two goals: to improve the world and to make each character’s story feel like a standalone RPG.
On the art and world design front, Miyauchi said the team created roughly 200 maps and lavished attention on detail and scale in a bid to create more interesting locations.
“One thing I was very mindful of was ‘the excitement of exploring the map,’” Miyauchi tells us. “So I felt I needed to supervise this myself, so that we can maintain consistency while making sure the areas don’t all look similar.”
Miyauchi said the goal wasn’t just designing interesting environments. He wanted them to look beautiful at any angle to such a degree that players could take a screenshot anywhere, and it would turn out as “a gorgeous piece of pixel artwork.”
“It was quite the undertaking, but I was very satisfied with the results, including the consistency with the story and the balance of how each area looked,” he said.
Rather than creating a new set of eight jobs for a new cast, the team introduced subtle changes to help balance the familiar and new. Some of these changes are more obvious than others. Partitio is a merchant like Tressa in the first Octopath Traveler, but his story centers on the actual wheeling and dealing of trade, and he even has side chapters devoted to finding business opportunities. Ochette is another hunter like H’aanit, though her tale and battle prowess change slightly depending on which animal partner you befriend when her journey begins.
Not every character has these marked differences from their Octopath 1 counterparts. Character designer Naoki Ikushima used these characters’ appearances to help distinguish them from their predecessors in the first game and even lay the groundwork for their actions in battle.
“You may recognize the same jobs, but I’ve differentiated the characters so they fit the world and lore,” Ikushima said “The Warrior from the previous installment, Olberic, had a rugged physique and focused more on power, whereas in [Octopath Traveler 2], Hikari has a smaller frame and focuses more on his skill than brute strength. The previous Dancer, Primrose, was a woman with a dark past, whereas in this title, Agnea has a sunny personality.”
Though he later grew confident in Octopath Traveler 2’s designs, Ikushima said fans’ strong reception to the previous cast initially gave him concerns that a new set of travelers wouldn’t meet with the same warm reception.
“Despite those fears, I kept drawing, and I came to love all eight of them,” Ikushima said. “The package art was the first opportunity to draw the eight of them together, [and] I felt that was the time I got a good grasp of the distance and camaraderie between each of the characters, which helped me get on a roll.”
Not everyone grew as comfortable with the cast in the same way, though. Scenario writer Kakunoshin Futsuzawa said Ochette presented some difficulties and was a departure from the team’s usual creative standards.
“I had the opportunity and creative freedom to write just about everything that pertains to our eight characters–from their stories to their families, their friends, and even about dogs, [but] My biggest challenge was Ochette,” Futsuzawa said.
“Since Octopath Traveler operates under the motto of ‘a grounded world,’ the idea of depicting a character that was not human evoked some opinions urging me to tread more carefully. That said, I thought since we’re advancing to a new stage, lifting our feet half a step off the ground was necessary. If players come to love her, then I will deem that as my moment of success.”
Composer Yasunori Nishiki followed a similar philosophy and broadened his horizons to find the sounds of Octopath Traveler 2. Nishiki said he looked to the past and the “foundation of musical presentation” the team’s predecessors had established in the RPG genre to help root it in the expectations fans of the first game might still have. That freed him up to experiment in other ways.
“With the evolution of the visuals, I wanted the music to also feel a bit more expansive,” Nishiki said. “We recorded some of the songs–including the main theme–with an international orchestra. That was so that we can incorporate the fuller sound we get from a larger studio outside of Japan.”
“I didn’t make all of the songs like that, though, because I figured I shouldn’t take away parts that players may have enjoyed in the first title for the sake of my experiment. The challenge with a sequel like this is appropriately determining what should be changed and what should not.”
Part of Nishiki’s experiment included dabbling with different sounds and styles to give Solistia’s various regions their own personality, as opposed to the first Octopath’s uniform medieval western European style. Partitio’s neck of the woods, for example, includes a plucky segment of strings and harmonica in keeping with the Wild West nature of his background and story. In Hikari’s nation of Ku, however, you’ll hear instruments that fit with the team’s goal of making it resemble an Asian nation.
Nishiki also said Octopath 2’s day and night system gave him a chance to experiment more subtly, filling the night with softer, quieter variations of the themes he created for daytime exploration.
“Whether or not my choices to toss or keep an idea were correct will all depend on how the players take it,” Nishiki said. “So right now, I’m waiting for that result with apprehension.”
It seems that Nishiki’s apprehension was unfounded, though. Octopath Traveler 2 may have initially sold fewer copies in Japan compared to the first game, but it launched on PlayStation, Switch, and PC to largely positive reviews from critics and consumers alike.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
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