>>33766458I thought the battle system was pretty shallow in the demo. Unlike the Brave system, there's no risk to it. Sure there were ways to break the battle system in the Bravely games, but the concept and function through at least part of the games was that you'd either be storing or expending turns. You could buff or heal several party members in one turn, use a strong ability, hit an enemy multiple times, etc. However, doing so could get fucked over later due to have party member being inactive. In comparison, the battle system of Octopath Traveler beneits you every turn by giving you a free multiplier point to use in any turn with no negative repercussion. MP was the only somewhat limiting factor.
In addition, the Brave system allowed you to mow down normal enemies in a single turn once you figured out a plan that would work by pushing out several turns of actions all at once. In the OT demo, you can't kill even the most basic enemies in a single turn because of their relatively high HP (or low damage from your characters) and the system making you wait to build up points. Also, the stun mechanic makes battles take longer with little strategic value outside of enemies who telegraph their big attack or enemy pairs you could stunlock in an alternating pattern. In the case of the latter, it's effective but very slow. It's basically a turn based version of Final Fantasy XIII's battle system without the paradigms and that game also had a problem with some easy enemies just being tanky as fuck for the sake of it.
However, I do acknowledge only having access to two characters (or three if you count an allured NPC) and I doubt the skills they had were all they are going to have. I expect the full game to have more complexity to battles, but I really hope ever battle isn't a drawn out slog just because of having to stun every enemy.
