Question for those who are playing through Octopath after having played Bravely Default.

[LMU Uncle Alfred]

Mar1217 said:

LMU Uncle Alfred said:
I have my eye on the game, but a flaw that can turn into a really big problem and seems to be just kind of swept under the rug by reviewers or gamers is the grinding. Also, I don't know anything about the encounter rate but it looked kind of high relatively speaking from what I have seen in some gameplay. Can we control the encounter rate like in BD? Because that should be considered a make or break for many gamers not willing to go through a potential slog fest of a jrpg like the olden days. Does anybody know if there is at least an item or something that turns off the encounter rate? I am overall ok with random battles if the rate and necessity to grind is done half way decently. I have slogged through many old school jrpgs, but the ones with high encounter rates have always been a huge pain for the vast majority of JRPGs save for maybe a few FF games that did it right in terms of the rate and exp/gil reward rate per battle.

I have no desire to go back to that flawed game design to be honest; even if the story is great.

1) If you just go exploring every dungeons (not just the main ones, there's also extra ones to explore) then you shouldn't be in a position to go grind. Actually your protagonist will probably be overleveled if you try to do everything before going into the 2nd Chapters section of the game. Though you must be willing to deviate from the path , if you go into a linear fashion, then yeah, you'll probably grind for no more than an hour.

2) There's no direct mean to do that, but you can unlock a character skill that permits to heavily decrease the encounter rate. I won't tell you which one :P

 

That's what excessive grinding is though on your first point. Optional dungeons should remain optional. It's a huge game breaker now that we have reached 2018.  This kind of archaic game design should have died out in the NES era.  I just wish Japanese rpg game developers realized by now of all times that maybe people don't want to spend every waking hour playing the game walking 5 steps encounter, walking 5 steps encounter etc.  Yeah there might be a way to reduce the encounter rate, but if it's necessary to grind to get past certain areas then why bother reducing the encounter rate?