Gallophilic Cultural Posturing: A Case Study

A final boss preview as a prologue. Either it will be completely unwinnable, or there's going to be some ridiculous strategy allowing you to beat the game right here that someone will figure out within a day of release. Cue a dozen YouTube videos crying that Nintendo made us pay 80USD for a game that can be beaten in five minutes, the games industry is finished, etc.

Following a meeting with Fortuna, you pick a faction to start. You go through the introduction to their story and characters and assemble the starting party on the way to or in Dagsion. Once that's done you'll do some tutorial stuff to get familiar with the hub facilities as well as meet the members of the other three factions. Possibly you'll enter the qualifying matches here where you have the other faction characters as green units.

Either before or after the qualifying matches you're introduced to the Pale Raven's Perch and taught about switching between stories. If the game wants to be convenient it will include a feature like Octopath Traveler II where you can choose to skip the other factions' intro segments and start with them in Dagsion. However, FE stories are less neatly split up compared to Octopath chapters, so this may not be an option since going back and playing the introductions later would feel extremely weird.

For the remainder of the approximate calendar year not taken up by the intros (and maybe the qualifying matches), the factions progress through the tournament while pursuing their separate goals on the side. Each story will be in its own timeline, so the factions won't compete for time on the calendar. The matches will be the only substantial content shared between them; how repetitive that will be will depend on if there are enough NPC factions such that you're not fighting the same opponents four times. Some recruitable characters, ex. Benditz, are known to be fought first as enemies in the games. If each faction does have its own separate list of opponents, then you may have to advance to a certain stage in a faction's story in order to have these characters available to recruit for anyone. That would be another incentive to play through all the stories at once.

Outside Dagsion, everybody's got their own goals. Cai is trying to help his dad, Leda's working through her hit list, Theodora's doing something about her obviously evil rival for the throne, and Dietrich's...roaming the continent looking for strong opponents to fight and kill. It sure would be nice if Dietrich got a sympathetic motivation at some point, because I highly doubt IS is bold enough to go full-on villain protagonist with him. No idea yet if each story will explore different parts of Dagda in its own order, but that would be more impressive than contriving a linear progression through the continent for all four.

In the tournament finals the four playable factions will square off against each other. Either you'll have to actually win here against the other three, or somebody triggers the zombie apocalypse and the games are interrupted.

Cut to five years later, and Dagda now resembles the Final Story from OT2: everything's dark, all the enemies on the map have been upgraded to endgame levels, and various hub and NPC features are unavailable. There will no longer be a calendar system so you'll be able to grind up your units infinitely if you choose, but most/all of it's going to have to be in combat.

Similar to the Dominion of Hate from Live A Live (i.e. proto-Octopath), Eshmel will have to travel around the continent recruiting the factions whose stories you cleared - possibly helping them with something related to their individual arcs before they'll join the endgame team. Then final boss, happy(ish) ending for everyone, hopefully paired endings, hopefully some of them gay. Maybe, again like OT2, the faction you started with will get some additional focus over the others, but Eshmel's unifying presence probably renders that unnecessary.

This version of the map, with the continent's three kingdoms colored separately from the Dagdan Empire, comes from the game's Japanese site.

The most interesting thing here to me is that the provinces/regions of Dagda do not align neatly with national borders, ex. Thaleia is split between Arago and Dagda. Just some extra worldbuilding flavor, or is this going to factor into the plot?

Helpfully we already know that advanced classes recommend level 35.

This is higher than Three Houses's master classes which require level 30, but note the verb difference. It seems that rather than a hard limit on each tier, in Fortune's Weave level seems to be just another factor that affects the chance a character will successfully certify for a class, alongside skill ranks and renown (probably analogous to professor level).

With that in mind I went back through all the combat clips we have so far. Based on those -

Beginner tier is probably recommended level 10. Gladiator!Mu and (in Fabio's clip) Gladiator!Mikaela are seen at level 8 and 9 respectively, but all other characters in beginner classes are 11 or higher - sometimes quite a bit higher. Meanwhile all the commoners and nobles we've seen have been ~8-9. This makes sense if these level thresholds aren't hard limits.

Specialty tier is probably recommended level 20. All the characters in specialty classes have been in their 20s, so this tracks.

It's probably all the ones who got intros with specific factions, so four each for Ribeira Winds and House Lamine and five each for Megaira's Beacon and Rose Tempest. It seems like each story opens with the protagonist making their way to Dagsion and picking up their core group along the way, so it would make sense that those characters wouldn't be available for other factions to recruit once they're all in the city. Not only would that potentially create story issues, but you'd be weakening a different faction by poaching a unit from them. In Three Houses that doesn't matter because you're not playing as the other two houses in the same save file, but here you could be and will probably be encouraged to.

Very bold indeed.

Immediately after I posted that screenshot of possible cavalry magic users I had an awful thought: what if this is like Elibe and the only mounted mages are female-exclusive valkyries? Except if class lists are individualized and not every female character gets it, ditto wing soldier etc., then you could say that it's technically not genderlocked.

In the Direct clip of Io showing off cataphract, his other party members can be seen on the map.

Happy Octopath Day!

I'm indirectly aware of the thing with Nettles despite not having read the book; however, I'll be honest and say that Daemon and Rhaena have never interested me much, nor the Blacks in general really. That sort of character consolidation is common in adaptations, and I can see the value in adding a bit of extra punch to Jacaerys's death. Since then though the subplot has felt rather aimless.

What I'd want to see in an Octopath Traveler III:

another non-medieval setting; either move the timeline forward from Solistia, like between the world wars, or go backwards to antiquity

the gender/job combos we haven't seen yet outside OT0/CotC, so a male hunter and dancer and a female warrior and scholar

another "old" man that gets gay ship tease, because that's an established trend at this point

more gay content in general, since OT2 was a big step up from OT1 in that regard and the series should keep up that momentum

From what I can tell this is a right wing ragebait channel, so it's not terribly surprising that they jumped on the Eshmel customization "controversy."

(First time for Cyrus and for myself writing the ship, that is.)

Are yukata supposed to be sexy? Because they just look like shapeless bathrobes to me. If there's supposed to be an erotic element here it has to be something like Victorians being aroused by ankles or what the average modern Anglo-American thinks is too spicy for public viewing.

For context, New Orleans follows in the classical tradition of all-male nude bathing that's mostly an excuse for casual semi-anonymous gay sex. I can say with certainty that I've never gone to a bathhouse without being prepared to take dick.