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OT2 is better in almost every single way. The music is a thousand times better. The story is a hundred times better. The battles are ten times better.
Yeah that's overgeneralized and exaggerated but you didn't ask for nuance. You want to know which is the better game? Octopath Traveler 2. There's a reason OT2 is 91-95% positive reviews and ECHH is 75-78%.
ECHH has a problem with balance in it's battle system. The plot is childish. ECHH has a castle and it basically acts like a talent tree you upgrade with items... But OT has personal actions that let you interact with the characters and environment in unique ways (the skills like pickpocket and stuff).
Unless you're a Suikoden fan or hard up for a JRPG this is a painfully mediocre game. I wouldn't have played it if not for Game Pass.
Have you tried the Trails series? The Tales series? Maybe FFX or FFXII? How about Persona or SMT? Because those are better games if you need a JRPG fix.
All this except maybe SMT. SMT is great but very different from a lot of JRPGs.
In a pretty extreme nutshell, OT2 is very good at being the sort of JRPG it wants to be. You've got a fairly small group of characters who stick with you the entire game, who all have fully developed stories and character arcs. It has a job system that's really well developed, and skills and magic that are all useful, with very little redundancy or useless skills. It gives you a lot of freedom for how to accomplish things, both in fights and in the overworld, given how each 'skill' has, for lack of better terms, a good and a bad method depending on the character. It's incredibly well refined and, frankly, beautifully rendered both in its environments and especially in its sprite work.
It's also by Squenix, who really has the money to pump into a project like it. It's important to recognize the difference between a studio like Squenix can do with all of its capital and talent vs. what a small studio can do with just a kickstarter campaign and a largely green development team without a ton of experience in games development. It is, to a degree, somewhat unfair to do a direct comparison between the two without keeping that fact in mind.
Anyway, EC:HH is, by comparison, pretty rough around the edges. Since it has over 100 characters, nobody gets a ton of character development. Many, in fact, get none at all. Most characters get little more than maybe a dozen lines during their recruitment, so there's no character arc or story to really be found there, just a back story and the mechanical characteristics of that character. It's so jam packed, really, that even the main title art characters, Nowa, Seign and Marissa, get very little real development. Nowa, despite rising to the challenges of the game, is basically the same character at the end as at the beginning, as is Marissa. Seign develops more than pretty much anybody else, though I won't spoil it. The writing in general isn't exactly stellar, and most of the game's writers have this game as their one and only professional writing credit. Tone shifts constantly, and it never feels like there are any real stakes. The oh-so-evil empire never actually FEELS evil. They shoehorned in a single story beat about human experimentation, but it comes and goes almost immediately. Beyond that, most of the towns that get invaded see basically no changes after getting invaded. No fewer people walking around, no closed shops, it's not even restricted to the players party, despite the player being the known commander of an opposing army.
Mechanically, it's pretty rough too. The battle system isn't particularly well balanced, even if it's aesthetically very pleasing. Most magic is kind of useless for a vast majority of the game, then 'war' segments have basically no stakes and I'm not even sure they had real lose conditions unless you were just objectively bad at them, and the minigames are, for the most part, really repetitive, random, and not all that fun.
This sounds incredibly critical, but I figure I'll just be open about the state of it. All this said, I DID 100% the game and play through the whole thing start to finish. Every side quest, every mini game, every item and monster. Despite all these rough edges, I did still thoroughly enjoy it, as I can forgive the roughness given where the game was coming from. I wasn't expecting a AAA JRPG title from the likes of Squenix. I was expecting a fairly niche title, from a first time studio, with mostly green developers, running on a kickstarted budget. Anybody who expected EC:HH to be on the same level as Suikoden despite the lack of Konami level funding and talent was kidding themselves.
TL;DR, you can have a lot of fun with EC:HH, so long as you go into it with the right expectations. It is NOT going to be something as good and finely tuned as OT, 1 or 2, and that's okay.
Well, Octopath is fairly unique given its story structure and job system, there aren't many out there that I'd say are similar. That said, Sea of Stars is an excellent JRPG romp. If you really want something more retro, the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters are great, though I'd stick to 5 or 6, as going further back then that is VERY retro and a less guided experience. Chained Echoes is also quite good.
For a light-hearted romp with your best buddy Garl, it's worth the trip.
Only played the first OT, otherwise. I was a little disappointed that the character stories didn't really intersect except for a handful of skits. I'm guessing they added more interactions in OT 2?
Eyuden Chronicles is like "young team makes their first suikoden-like". It's a nice little homage, but like everyone's saying, it's a little old-school in how it plays. You'll wind up backtracking a LOT if you want to recruit everyone.
Recommend Chrono Trigger in every scenario.
If not looking for retro then Trails of Cold Steel, Final Fantasy 10, Like a Dragon is pretty wild for a turn-based game, Persona 3-5 are all some really good turn-based JRPGs.
Action-JRPGs include Tales series (Symphonia and Beseria are fan favorites), Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy 12 is a bit of a hybrid system more similar to Western RPGs...
Turn-based WRPGs like Dragon Age Origins or Divinity Original Sin if you feel like branching out a bit.
There's also Crystal Project which also has a similar job system to Bravely, and is about the most tactical 'enemies on one side party on the other' RPG I've ever seen.
I'm intrigue, I know ECHH has a ton of characters, but can you beat the game with a few of them??? I asssume I can collect characters but I don't want the pain of leveling up every single one of them, just 5 or 7 tops and beat the game, is it possible?
I'm looking a JPRG that's not repetitive and it's not Persona or Like a Dragon. Or Chrono Trigger (i love Chrono trigger).
You can use your favored party yeah. The majority of time you can just put forced characters into the attendant slot (even the main character) though there's a few times you have four forced characters (and one time even five, I think).
The big thing though is that the game works like the Suikoden games in that characters lagging behind catch up really quick, so it's not much of a pain at all.