OT2 is my favorite JRPG of the last 10 years, but I can't help but be a little restrained on my excitement for this new one.

My biggest concerns are the 30 characters + 8 player battles.

The main thing with the Octopath games is having 8 unique stories for 8 main characters, but with 30 characters, it seems like everyone is just going to all be involved in 1 main story together. "Octopath" - it's in the name, so changing that up would have me a bit bummed out.

I'm sure some of the characters they highlighted will have their own little moments with your custom character (something else that I'm a bit lukewarm on), but there's no way they'll have unique stories for all 30, nor will many of them get a lot any real story interactions with each other.

That was one of the best improvements made to OT2. The fact your party interacts with each other & has shared paths to explore was great. But with 30 characters, it'll end up being more like Suikoden or Triangle Strategy, where you recruit them, get a small cutscene & 1 time interaction with them, then they have no real story for the rest of the game.

Then when it comes to 8 player combat... I guess it could be fine, but the current system worked so well. Usually with RPGs that do something like this, it results in characters being heavily simplified. Less path actions, less moves & abilities, less depth for each class, less weapon/armor/accessory slots per character so they can spread them thin among many characters.

It can also have the balancing side effect of lowering the power level of each character so that you don't defeat enemies too fast, allowing everyone time to act each encounter.

Just imagine being able to use all 8 characters in OT2 during a fight. It would be ridiculous what you could pull off. So in order to prevent that, they lower the power level or beef up HP of all enemies to pad things out.

They can still balance it so battles don't take forever, but they will almost certainly still take longer by default of having to select 2 x as many choices each turn.

That being said, I'm not "out" on the game either. I'm still very interested, though I'm keeping my expectations in check & waiting for reviews first. I was also skeptical leading into OT2, as I didn't really find OT1 particularly fun, but it blew my expectations away & became one of my favorite JRPGs ever.

Hopefully, Octopath Zero will prove my worries a non-issue just like OT2.