New port, olde English
While Octopath Traveler may not be a perfect game by any means, it was an awesome addition to the JRPG genre. As with any game, it’s always a bummer to see something released on a single system – console or PC. While I understand exclusivity from the business side of things, as a human and lover of video games, I always want to see as many people as possible experience quality products.
Luckily, Square Enix seems to be just fine porting its games, especially RPGs, over to the PC. It’s had a pretty good track record so far, and Octopath Traveler continues that trend excellently.
Tested on: Intel i7-4770k 3.50 GHz, 8GB of RAM, Geforce GTX 970, Windows 10. Framerate measured with NVIDIA GeForce Experience
After playing a bunch of Octopath Traveler on Steam, I think the only barrier that people will have when deciding to jump in is the price. The port itself is great with no issues experienced on my end. But dang, $60 for a game that’s almost a year old with no extra features can be a hard sell to many, especially since there is a precedent of cheaper PC ports already in place.
While Octopath Traveler looks beautiful, it’s obvious that it would never be a taxing game. That being said, optimization errors in the past have led to less-than-stellar performance on games that have no business performing poorly on PC. Luckily, Square did a great job here and Octopath Traveler runs at a consistently smooth 60 frames per second.
There are also a handful of graphical options that allow the player to customize the visuals, in case there is any stutter or issues in performance. Textures, shadows, post-processing, and anti-aliasing are all adjustable between four levels and the game will auto-detect what’s best for your rig if you want it to. You can see the entirety of the options menu in this video:
The game also seamlessly switches between keyboard and gamepad prompts when a new input is detected. I can’t tell you how important this is – seeing a keyboard “J” pop up as the intended input while I’m using a controller is not helping at all. And since I usually forget to turn on my controller until after I boot up a game, I’m also glad to report that Octopath will detect a controller regardless of when it is turned on (many games only recognize a controller’s input if it was on before the game was started).
Cloud saves also work very well. I started Octopath Traveler on my laptop and was able to easily continue on my desktop later. Speaking of my laptop, the game didn’t run super well on a Surface Book, but honestly, that’s to be expected given what’s in those things. There are also Steam Trading Cards which means there are also Steam Emoticons! Unfortunately, the Steam Emoticons are garbage and are just some sprites from the game. Womp.
I am disappointed in the lack of some of the extra features that other Square Enix ports have. It’s awesome playing the older Final Fantasy games and just speeding everything up to 2-3x and blowing through the mindless bits. Or even just instantly healing everyone to full because “eh I’m not into the challenging part right now.” Octopath Traveler includes nothing of the sort, though I do hope for them to be added in one day.
I am in love with the trend of Square Enix RPGs being ported to the PC. The price will be a hard swallow for some I’m sure, but hey you know there will be good sales in the future. If you missed this title on the Switch and are a fan of the genre, it is absolutely worth picking up on the PC. There’s no need to double dip though, as this port offers nothing in the way of added content.
[This PC Port Report is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]
