nintendo switch octopath traveler ( english zone 1 )

or a certain set of role
-playing fans, the Super NES era represents the golden standard of RPG design. That’s nostalgia speaking to a certain degree; after all, many people encountered menu
-based battles with teams of magic
-slinging warriors through the likes of Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger. It’s only natural that those would be their touchstones. But it’s also true that RPGs of the 16
-bit era genuinely did possess a certain je ne sais quoi. They ran on hardware just powerful enough to allow game makers to express their bold narrative ideas, yet not so powerful as to make development too expensive for devil
-may
-care experimentation. With Square Enix’s Octopath Traveler, we have the latest modern
-day RPG whose creators hope to recapture a little of that 16
-bit magic.This actually isn’t Square Enix’s first attempt to rekindle the Super NES fires in
2018. Happily, Octopath Traveler comes a lot closer to realizing that dream than the hopelessly cluttered Lost Sphear and painfully clumsy Secret of Mana did. While the endearing whimsy of vintage classics like Chrono Trigger continues to elude Square Enix’s writers — Octopath Traveler is nothing if not self
-serious — this latest effort comes closer to recapturing bygone days than perhaps any retro
-chasing RPG to date.The first thing you’ll notice about Octopath Traveler is its striking graphical style. It looks, quite simply, like no other game before it. Square Enix has applied Unreal Engine 4 tech to vintage sprite work, creating a world that blends modern polygons with old
-school bitmap graphics. The developers have created a storybook world that extrudes the dungeon maps of 16
-bit console RPGs into three dimensions, then soaks everything in atmospheric lighting and shadow effects.Octopath Traveler
- character standing in a cemetery Square Enix/Nintendo The look doesn’t always work; character sprites often appear haloed by ugly dark outlines, and the blurry filtering on certain environmental details will remind you of Nintendo 64 graphics, in a bad way. However, aside from those small aesthetic flaws, Octopath Traveler’s 2D sprite diorama style can be absolutely striking. In dressing up polygons as sprites and presenting them with fixed camera angles, Square Enix ended up with something like an interactive pop
-up book. This dev team previously aimed for a similar effect with Bravely Default, but Octopath Traveler does a far better job of it, thanks to more advanced tech tricks like depth
-of
-field blur.These techniques aren’t simply a gimmick, though. Take, for example, the low camera angles. They create natural hidden pathways that hide treasures and secret areas behind raised foreground elements. It’s reminiscent of, say, the little invisible passageways that appeared throughout Final Fantasy 4 — but here, the use of scenery to obscure these secret paths makes for more intuitive exploration than you saw in the older game. Octopath Traveler’s level design does an excellent job of teasing you with seemingly inaccessible treasure boxes, then allowing you to figure out how to reach them. It turns nearly every town and overworld path into a sort of spatial puzzle to be unraveled.OCTOPATH TRAVELER DRAWS UPON CLASSIC RPG ELEMENTS IN A UNIQUE WAY WHILE ALSO ADDING SOMETHING NEW TO THE MIX Square Enix/Nintendo Still, even if Octopath Traveler does ultimately