What you should know before playing this game:

1) NPCs either usually don't or never sell you items that you can sell back to merchants for a profit(in contrast to OT1 and OT2). Therefor if you see an item the description of which implies that its only use is for selling, don't bother buying it unless you're just curious to see how the NPC responds to you when you do that. They will have a different response depending on which NPC it is, and sometimes it's interesting, but usually it's not.

1.1) You can listen to various voice lines from your exploration leader when you use path actions with NPCs.

1.2) Your exploration leader is whoever is in the front of your front row, IOW the top left of your battle party of 1-8 characters.

1.3) the game repeatedly calls your 2 columns rows. This complicates us trying to explain the terminology to you. Usually we say back row and front row but in a list, sometimes vertical presentation is used instead of horizontal. What's critical here is there are 2 columns and 4 rows, or 2 rows and 4 columns, depending on your perspective. The point is that each character that is currently able to perform actions during battle is considered to be in the front, and each of them has a partner in the back. This means you actually have 2 groups but also 4 groups depending on how you look at it. Characters in the back row cannot just replace any character in the front row, this means that the game has its own custom formation, clearly determined by you(the character that is intended to represent you)!

2) You are Stia's best friend and nothing you CHOOSE TO say to anyone matters. You can respond A or B to various queries, but nothing is impactful. If you ever answer incorrectly, the game will give you another opportunity to answer correctly. Answers that have wrong answers are not marked, so you may want to play the game twice to find out which those are or consult a documentarian.

3) Stia is the actual main character, but there are many moments where other characters substitute for her, and sometimes that character is you. You are allowed to take her out of your party if you want to, but I found her to be a very effective battle participant. I think every character is viable, but some seem to be better than others. I think the huge number of playable characters may give the game some replayability for players that want to experience the game again and again and again.

4) Mystic Shot is my favorite move in this game. It might not be flashy but it's a great way to get SP back for your party. Put it on a high strength character and watch the SP stay up. It requires a Bow.

5) No character in this game can use 2 different jobs. However, they all have access to 'materia' or rather an apprenticeship of other characters. Sometimes this apprenticeship comes from a NPC, but it may also come from your own playable characters. Keep this in mind as you develop your battle party.

6) Sometimes characters will not be able to teach others how to get their skills, whether it's a move or a passive.

7) Skills under the apprenticeship(the game calls it mastery) system can be 'forgotten' by unequipping them. This is why I call such things 'materia'. This means each character has 'skill equipment slots' that put a ceiling on their flexibility in battle.

8) Even though no character can technically have 2 jobs+, you can transform and take on completely new jobs, this is even acknowledged in skits with other playable characters. It is regarded by them as you being flexible and learning how to do new things, but I prefer to think of it as transformation. 'Learning a new job' will not let you keep your old weapons or moves associated with those weapons, so it feels like transformation to me from a functionality standpoint.

9) If you are curious about all the other jobs that you can transform for, you may want to pick Merchant for your first job. This will give you access to my favorite move Mystic Shot which you can then convert into a 'materia' for other Bow users and maintain high SP levels throughout many battles. Furthermore, you will have access to Arrow of Fortune, which will increase JP gain for your whole party, and accelerate your ability to generate materia as well as let you check out the rest of your versions of the various standard jobs.

10) Try to avoid buying equipment from shop merchants, their stuff is often a ripoff. Path action characters seem to have fair prices and it's often better stuff. Later on, you can buy from your own city's shop instead and get some good stuff from the random rolls.

11) Your city has 2 kinds of residents, those that are employed and those that are not. The employed residents will change how the building looks that they are in. Unemployed residents live in some 'invisible houses' is how I like to think of it. I'm not going to overanalyze this, that's enough of that.

12) If you go to your pause menu and the quests submenu, you might not be able to see your city's current objectives for leveling up. Sometimes in order to get a new quest/mission for your city, you need to level it up first. This means you might be missing out on an alternative mission like I was doing if you forget to check out what the current city objective is and don't bother to complete it. You can also retroactively complete objectives sometimes, so don't worry about wasting effort on developing your city.

13) This one might be obvious, but just in case: don't forget to fast travel. It saves a lot of time.

14)There are a lot of fun surprises in this game that you can look forward to, and although I don't like this game as much as OT1 or OT2, I think if this game looks fun to you, then you will not be disappointed if you decide to play it. I for one was not disappointed by the game, just by my inability to play the game properly my first time run through it. I hope that by reading all of this I will have sufficiently provided a means for you to prepare yourself for your own run through this game.

I rated the OT1 game as follows:

Exploration: 5/5

Story: 5/5

Progression: 4/5

Art: 5/5

Battle: 4/5

And OT2 was 5/5 in each of those 5 categories.

Now that I have been rating difficulty in my SMM2 courses and have played OT0, I want to stop using the 5 stars rating system. I want to rate by 9 stars instead(not 10).

So I'm going to rerate OT1 and OT2 and then present my ratings for OT0.

Octopath Traveler Category Ratings

Exploration: 9/9

Story: 8/9

Progression: 7/9

Art: 8/9

Battle: 7/9

Octopath Traveler II Category Ratings

Exploration: 8/9

Story: 9/9

Progression: 9/9

Art: 8/9

Battle: 9/9

Octopath Traveler 0 Category Ratings

Exploration: 3/9

Story: 7/9

Progression: 6/9

Art: 7/9

Battle: 7/9

Thanks to the 9-star rating system, we can readily see the truth of my opinion, that OT1 has better exploration than OT2, but other than that, OT2 was the same/better rated game. And with that, thanks for reading.