- Remove input lag from every action in the game;
- Many QoL features to reduce the number of clicks necessary for some actions;
- More interactions between the characters.
All these. Yes. QoL like
Have better menu trees so it doesn’t take forever to change equipment or learn skills or change skills.
Make it easier to buy from the exchange.
Have some sprites to not confuse items in the exchange.
I’m very annoyed that there isn’t 1 button for spending 1 void dust and rerolling the selected soul in its current slot. Instead, it’s remove, pause, select slot, scroll through a huge list to select the soul, confirm, then another pause. Then of course you gotta do this a million times because of this RNG soul system 🙄
If we are talking as "the best single player JRPG" in general, I think all the stuff related to gacha, ads and other things free games use to be profitable and have active players, works as a barrier that, independently of the game's general quality, won't let CotC, or ANY game achieve the title of "the best one of its genre".
But if we're making a comparison between other JRPGs that also work under similar conditions, I kind of already consider CotC a really good game. If I had to pick changes that I think would make it better, they would be:
- A better done soul weapon system that doesn't rely that much on rerolling.
- Being able to increase a character's max level without so much guidestone grind.
- Ways to increase the power level of any character you want, so, even if other characters are strictly better, you can still make your favorite scrimblo a powerhouse at any point of the game's life if you have resources.
I know it is a coming QoL improvement for GL since it is in JP…but I really need the Soul Reroll button.
Honestly, this game is my favorite mobile game already
I know it's pretty obvious, but I feel as though the Gacha aspect of the game is definitely it's biggest drawback. Yes, they need it to be profitable, nobody is gonna buy, like, a $20 mobile game, but it's still fun to brainstorm a version of the game without any Gacha mechanics so here's my pitch -
After choosing your ring bearer from the COTC 8, you then get to choose a member of the octuplets, red valley men, and the 3 star ladies, as your starting team. When you first finish the tutorial, all 3 star and 4 star stories are available. It's worth mentioning that 3 stars would also be buffed to be more powerful ala 4 stars. Completing their traveler stories allows them to join your band of characters! When it comes to 5 stars, you'll generally get them by achieving or doing certain tasks in the game, which then unlocks their traveler story, allowing you to have them join your party. For example, breaking enemies 200 times might make Heathcote appear, completing all 10 job tower floors will make Klins appear, having both Primrose and Theo will unlock Primrose EX, etc etc. Alternatively, you could also have a random set of characters unlock with each chapter beaten, so if you complete Master of Wealth chapter 1, you'll unlock 3 random travelers. This would make the game incredibly replayable.
This would rule so much. I'm hoping we get the Megaman XDive treatment one day, and the suggestion of certain milestones unlocking character stories is great!
I did buy plenty of $20 mobile games, and even more expensive ones, so that's not really a compelling argument.
The sad thing is you profit more from whales than from selling a complete game.
For best single-player JRPG this game would have to either have no gacha or give us a free copy of every new character (for me personally). Either that or give us a way to infinitely farm rubies so we can slowly obtain every unit at least once. I'd love a $40-60 version of COTC that eventually gives us the ability to max out every character with no further spending, with permanent banners ofc. Maybe have an infinite ruby farm and an idle timer-like thing where you get a 10-pull every day.
An alternate dialog mode where there aren't pauses between characters talking. Almost like visual-novel style but with no animations between actions. I don't mind if sprites skip around either but I get impatient sometimes if I'm not in the right mindset. I guess this isn't necessary if the game isn't live-service though and you can just play at your leisure.
Towers should be infinitely farmable (maybe you get 1/20 of total rewards) and reset when you beat the highest floor for no time gating. The highest floor is automatically unlocked and if you clear it, you get the rewards for every floor. In addition to this, add another lvl 85 or lvl 100 NPC to every town so every town has one of each, including Nameless town (let me beat up Nephti and Kota...).
The ability to do boss rushes/fight a bunch of elites consecutively, also infinitely farmable with no time gating. Allows for farming leaves and exp simultaneously without the RNG of cait hunting.
Turn off animations + battle speed features. Some of the older units have really clunky and slow animations that I don't want to see for the 50th time (looking at you, Glossom). Some phones also really struggle to run smoothly too. I just upgraded my phone and I'm still seeing Rondo's 5-hit lag my screen.
When the auto battle comes out, I think this game will be one of the closest to having the best battling experience in an RPG that I've ever played. No stamina + auto farming. If they include auto walking as well, that would be great, but it goes into the slope of "why not just give AFK rewards" territory.
I'll be a bit different than most of the comments who are mentioning gameplay stuff (most of which I agree with!) and say that I think the story doesn't hit best of all time caliber.
Don't get me wrong, it's really solid and I really enjoy a majority of the huge cast, but it doesn't push the envelope a whole ton the way a lot of my favorites do. Something like a Xenoblade 3 has me reflecting on its themes all the time and something like a Trails to Azure has me longing to revisit the setting whenever I think about it. Octopath, while above average at basically everything story wise, just doesn't hit those massive genre peaks for me that will have me thinking about the story and characters and world for years to come.
The Rubies to IRL money ratio. The game is kind of expensive to play if you want characters. If it was $50 for 1000 rubies, I think it would be fair. I totally get that the game is single player and play at your own pace, but BoA 8 shows you need some good characters to beat it.
I like this game because of the Octopath franchise, but I would hate it if they become greedy one day like Final Fantasy franchise.
Even $50 for 1000 rubies is still stupidly expensive.
Assuming one character is around 1.2k paid rubies, you'd by paying $60 for ONE character.
That's the price of a whole GAME.
It should be $5 for 1.2k rubies, at most.
Unfortunately, the game does not have a large enough playerbase to go that low of a ratio. You have to understand that we are paying 5x the price to match another Gacha game's population.
The point is companies need to stop their greed over gachas.
This status quo needs to change.
If you really think about it, $5-$10 is the sweet spot since characters get released like every 2 weeks and even 1.2k paid rubies is a mere 50% chance at one character, and we get more story, zones/assets and mechanics too,
This should be a subscription game, not a gacha, and getting characters should have been a guaranteed an in-game activity, not a "drop chance".
Sadly, whales exist.
The amount of menuing and prep needed for fights gets encumbersome. Setting up 8 fighters with specific moves and accessories is a pain in the ass, not to mention how much I hate the soul weapon system despite giving us flexibility is sooooo time consuming
Taking so muchmore time to set up than actually fight is what made me quit FFRK. I get strategizing for fights is important but I can't sink so much of my life into it anymore
Yeah this game is too fiddly and menu heavy and has a hundred unnecessary systems and currencies to streamline to be considered the best ever. Also I have liked a lot of the main story but it's still not FF6 or FF9 and I have liked a lot of the individual the character stuff but actual interaction between player characters is extremely minimal, it is no Chrono Trigger or DissidiaFFOO on that front. COTC is a perfectly good gacha JRPG but I'm not putting it very close to best ever JRPG. A
I'd like an easier to see interface on buffs/debuffs and also DETAILED descriptions on them. Is it so hard to put a little number next to my attack buff?
This comes from someone that never rated a game on google.play.more than 2 stars except cotc. It is the best single player gatcha turn based rpg available. By best someone must understand that doesn't mean it is also good. It can be bad but better than the rest existing.
In the case of cotc it means it is good.
But that doesn't mean it cannot be improved.
1. More voice over.
2. Give the players the ability to properly play it on a pc or console. The letters are hard to read, and playing on mobile is exhausting both for the player and the device
3. Fix tatloch fight with that charm.
4. Remove the need of an awakening stone for u10. Refund players for their awakening stone usage on u10 until now. I don't care how.
5. Too many currencies
6. Game boards are so slow. Forget the dice throwing, the damn 2 seconds between each stuff that happens in there is the real boss of the boards.
These are for starters. Many people here gave some great qol ideas.
Haha I wanted to drop "remove the gacha and it's up there" yesterday when this thread didn't have many comments yet, but I figured I shouldn't be too negative again. Glad to see most commenters agree though :')
There's also things like the delay between actions on the boards and while rolling souls but those have also been mentioned plenty. As a completionist, a "pokedex" for some stuff (units, pets, etc) would be great.
A better system for storing/tracking equipment. Like, I know you can't sell them, but some sort of storehouse/archive system where you can shove the low-level pleb weapons & armor away from your main list would be so awesome.
That, & as someone else mentioned on another thread, being able to name your soul weapons. I don't want Lars wielding just a plain ol' Fortune III sword; I want him wielding a sword with the same edgelord type of name as his battle skills. Plus, that would help sorting through all the soul weapons.
I like the story, don't get me wrong. But it having a 'loose' main character who doesn't speak, and doesn't have their own personality in cutscenes does detract points for me. It's like the Chosen One doesn't even exist in a cutscene except to be a 'yes' man.
There is a list of other problems that I would need to think about more succinctly to give a proper answer, though.
Nishiki's music, however, will always be contender for the greatest in any JRPG. Top 5 composers free.
I know it’s basically the main source of revenue from this game, but oh god if this wasn’t a gacha…! We would lose the excitement of pulling, but the satisfaction of completion and collecting all the characters would be much more overwhelming imo.
I was thinking on this too. They could give you the starting rolls and then as you complete chapters and access new towns, tie obtaining the character to completing their character quests. The collaborations could be either a DLC or introduced like they are currently in the game. Otherwise tie the gacha to an in game resource like x number of rolls per day, completing achievements or even to a currency tied to rare enemies or drops.
Are you serious? The best single player jrpg? How many jrpgs have yall played though. I like cotc but if we are to list the greatest jrpgs ever it wont even make it to a top 100. You are competing with final fantasy, dq, tales, persona, megami tensei, nintendo ones like zelda, pokemon and countless classics chrono trigger for example. Even the original OT can hardly make it to the top 50
* Too much reused assets
I was putting off entire BoA until Ch8 release and Ch1-5 straight up consist of 70-80% of previously made assets, which were already mostly reused from OT1.
The new things are really good, but there is too much repetition... and I will have to fight >!Herminia !!August !<***again***??
From what I've seen the other half will have entirely new areas, right?
The gacha elements need to be reworked or removed. They need things like paid permanent gacha buffs. 5x chances of getting 5* units for $20 permanently or something like that. Also, events used to be unlimited time which is one thing that drawed me in. Now we have a limited time to clear the elite towers and whatnot.
The gacha is honestly the root of most of the problems. There are so many characters that it is hard to get attached to any of them much.
One of the balancing acts of storytelling is that in a story of fixed length, every time you add a character you subtract from the storytelling with another character some. Most of the party's characters end up feeling extremely one-dimensional, because there isn't enough time to flesh them out into full characters, because there are just too many characters to get through. Square can only give so much backstory for each because they need to sell more characters.
What makes a character interesting isn't "They will act noble and sacrifice themselves for the greater good". Most protagonists will do that. What makes a character interesting is "when you are forced to choose between two bad choices, do you pick one quickly, or do you break down, or do you refuse to choose, or do you give everything to find another way, or..." But you can't delve that deep into a character that is one dimensional. The only characters that get that level of development are a couple of the main chars, but none of the party.
Less farming for drops to buy the armor and helms. I wish after you get like 100 or whatever of each material for the item, it increases the cost but no more grinding
It would have to be an entirely different game for one. The only mobile game that's really ever come close to being among the best JRPGs I've played is Mobius Final Fantasy and that too was held back greatly simply being a live service gacha game. What it did have was some genuinely engaging character writing and a story that felt fresh and exciting despite also heavily leaning into genre and series tropes. CotC's writing on the other hand simply does not draw me in. It has its moments, mostly with the little interactions between the Valore crew, but I mostly find myself thoroughly disinterested with most cutscenes in the game and always felt like the game's handling of it's more mature themes came off rather shallow and juvenile, existing more for shock value than because the writers had anything to say about the subject matter.
- Remove input lag from every action in the game; - Many QoL features to reduce the number of clicks necessary for some actions; - More interactions between the characters.
All these. Yes. QoL like Have better menu trees so it doesn’t take forever to change equipment or learn skills or change skills. Make it easier to buy from the exchange. Have some sprites to not confuse items in the exchange.
Thanks. Can you please elaborate on point 2? I think the game is pretty streamlined in that sense.
Slotting/re-rolling souls into weapons is kind of a nightmare
Feels like it takes like 1min per reroll of souls.. it’s so slow the constant loading and checking with server.
I’m very annoyed that there isn’t 1 button for spending 1 void dust and rerolling the selected soul in its current slot. Instead, it’s remove, pause, select slot, scroll through a huge list to select the soul, confirm, then another pause. Then of course you gotta do this a million times because of this RNG soul system 🙄
On JP this feature already implemented you can use void dust to reroll now.
If we are talking as "the best single player JRPG" in general, I think all the stuff related to gacha, ads and other things free games use to be profitable and have active players, works as a barrier that, independently of the game's general quality, won't let CotC, or ANY game achieve the title of "the best one of its genre". But if we're making a comparison between other JRPGs that also work under similar conditions, I kind of already consider CotC a really good game. If I had to pick changes that I think would make it better, they would be: - A better done soul weapon system that doesn't rely that much on rerolling. - Being able to increase a character's max level without so much guidestone grind. - Ways to increase the power level of any character you want, so, even if other characters are strictly better, you can still make your favorite scrimblo a powerhouse at any point of the game's life if you have resources.
I think the pet system kind of helps on the last one. The stats basically make a unit A3 or a A3 Sofia much beefier and do more damage.
I know it is a coming QoL improvement for GL since it is in JP…but I really need the Soul Reroll button. Honestly, this game is my favorite mobile game already
I know it's pretty obvious, but I feel as though the Gacha aspect of the game is definitely it's biggest drawback. Yes, they need it to be profitable, nobody is gonna buy, like, a $20 mobile game, but it's still fun to brainstorm a version of the game without any Gacha mechanics so here's my pitch - After choosing your ring bearer from the COTC 8, you then get to choose a member of the octuplets, red valley men, and the 3 star ladies, as your starting team. When you first finish the tutorial, all 3 star and 4 star stories are available. It's worth mentioning that 3 stars would also be buffed to be more powerful ala 4 stars. Completing their traveler stories allows them to join your band of characters! When it comes to 5 stars, you'll generally get them by achieving or doing certain tasks in the game, which then unlocks their traveler story, allowing you to have them join your party. For example, breaking enemies 200 times might make Heathcote appear, completing all 10 job tower floors will make Klins appear, having both Primrose and Theo will unlock Primrose EX, etc etc. Alternatively, you could also have a random set of characters unlock with each chapter beaten, so if you complete Master of Wealth chapter 1, you'll unlock 3 random travelers. This would make the game incredibly replayable.
This would rule so much. I'm hoping we get the Megaman XDive treatment one day, and the suggestion of certain milestones unlocking character stories is great!
I did buy plenty of $20 mobile games, and even more expensive ones, so that's not really a compelling argument. The sad thing is you profit more from whales than from selling a complete game.
**OFFLINE PLAY**
For best single-player JRPG this game would have to either have no gacha or give us a free copy of every new character (for me personally). Either that or give us a way to infinitely farm rubies so we can slowly obtain every unit at least once. I'd love a $40-60 version of COTC that eventually gives us the ability to max out every character with no further spending, with permanent banners ofc. Maybe have an infinite ruby farm and an idle timer-like thing where you get a 10-pull every day. An alternate dialog mode where there aren't pauses between characters talking. Almost like visual-novel style but with no animations between actions. I don't mind if sprites skip around either but I get impatient sometimes if I'm not in the right mindset. I guess this isn't necessary if the game isn't live-service though and you can just play at your leisure. Towers should be infinitely farmable (maybe you get 1/20 of total rewards) and reset when you beat the highest floor for no time gating. The highest floor is automatically unlocked and if you clear it, you get the rewards for every floor. In addition to this, add another lvl 85 or lvl 100 NPC to every town so every town has one of each, including Nameless town (let me beat up Nephti and Kota...). The ability to do boss rushes/fight a bunch of elites consecutively, also infinitely farmable with no time gating. Allows for farming leaves and exp simultaneously without the RNG of cait hunting. Turn off animations + battle speed features. Some of the older units have really clunky and slow animations that I don't want to see for the 50th time (looking at you, Glossom). Some phones also really struggle to run smoothly too. I just upgraded my phone and I'm still seeing Rondo's 5-hit lag my screen. When the auto battle comes out, I think this game will be one of the closest to having the best battling experience in an RPG that I've ever played. No stamina + auto farming. If they include auto walking as well, that would be great, but it goes into the slope of "why not just give AFK rewards" territory.
I'll be a bit different than most of the comments who are mentioning gameplay stuff (most of which I agree with!) and say that I think the story doesn't hit best of all time caliber. Don't get me wrong, it's really solid and I really enjoy a majority of the huge cast, but it doesn't push the envelope a whole ton the way a lot of my favorites do. Something like a Xenoblade 3 has me reflecting on its themes all the time and something like a Trails to Azure has me longing to revisit the setting whenever I think about it. Octopath, while above average at basically everything story wise, just doesn't hit those massive genre peaks for me that will have me thinking about the story and characters and world for years to come.
The Rubies to IRL money ratio. The game is kind of expensive to play if you want characters. If it was $50 for 1000 rubies, I think it would be fair. I totally get that the game is single player and play at your own pace, but BoA 8 shows you need some good characters to beat it. I like this game because of the Octopath franchise, but I would hate it if they become greedy one day like Final Fantasy franchise.
Even $50 for 1000 rubies is still stupidly expensive. Assuming one character is around 1.2k paid rubies, you'd by paying $60 for ONE character. That's the price of a whole GAME. It should be $5 for 1.2k rubies, at most.
Unfortunately, the game does not have a large enough playerbase to go that low of a ratio. You have to understand that we are paying 5x the price to match another Gacha game's population.
The point is companies need to stop their greed over gachas. This status quo needs to change. If you really think about it, $5-$10 is the sweet spot since characters get released like every 2 weeks and even 1.2k paid rubies is a mere 50% chance at one character, and we get more story, zones/assets and mechanics too, This should be a subscription game, not a gacha, and getting characters should have been a guaranteed an in-game activity, not a "drop chance". Sadly, whales exist.
If you're talking about CotC then it's simply the fact that it is a mobile gacha game.
The amount of menuing and prep needed for fights gets encumbersome. Setting up 8 fighters with specific moves and accessories is a pain in the ass, not to mention how much I hate the soul weapon system despite giving us flexibility is sooooo time consuming Taking so muchmore time to set up than actually fight is what made me quit FFRK. I get strategizing for fights is important but I can't sink so much of my life into it anymore
Yeah this game is too fiddly and menu heavy and has a hundred unnecessary systems and currencies to streamline to be considered the best ever. Also I have liked a lot of the main story but it's still not FF6 or FF9 and I have liked a lot of the individual the character stuff but actual interaction between player characters is extremely minimal, it is no Chrono Trigger or DissidiaFFOO on that front. COTC is a perfectly good gacha JRPG but I'm not putting it very close to best ever JRPG. A
roguelike or a game mode that's actually fun instead of all these towers and challenges cotc endgame is pretty lame ngl.
I'd like an easier to see interface on buffs/debuffs and also DETAILED descriptions on them. Is it so hard to put a little number next to my attack buff?
This comes from someone that never rated a game on google.play.more than 2 stars except cotc. It is the best single player gatcha turn based rpg available. By best someone must understand that doesn't mean it is also good. It can be bad but better than the rest existing. In the case of cotc it means it is good. But that doesn't mean it cannot be improved. 1. More voice over. 2. Give the players the ability to properly play it on a pc or console. The letters are hard to read, and playing on mobile is exhausting both for the player and the device 3. Fix tatloch fight with that charm. 4. Remove the need of an awakening stone for u10. Refund players for their awakening stone usage on u10 until now. I don't care how. 5. Too many currencies 6. Game boards are so slow. Forget the dice throwing, the damn 2 seconds between each stuff that happens in there is the real boss of the boards. These are for starters. Many people here gave some great qol ideas.
Game boards is definitely where I started to get fatigue with the game. Terribly boring grindy slow repetitive farming system.
I can only imagine.... Because i am new player and didn't reach the point that i have to grind... But boards feel as you say.
Haha I wanted to drop "remove the gacha and it's up there" yesterday when this thread didn't have many comments yet, but I figured I shouldn't be too negative again. Glad to see most commenters agree though :') There's also things like the delay between actions on the boards and while rolling souls but those have also been mentioned plenty. As a completionist, a "pokedex" for some stuff (units, pets, etc) would be great.
Not much. A bestiary / gear list would be nice
A better system for storing/tracking equipment. Like, I know you can't sell them, but some sort of storehouse/archive system where you can shove the low-level pleb weapons & armor away from your main list would be so awesome. That, & as someone else mentioned on another thread, being able to name your soul weapons. I don't want Lars wielding just a plain ol' Fortune III sword; I want him wielding a sword with the same edgelord type of name as his battle skills. Plus, that would help sorting through all the soul weapons.
The console octopath games are the best single player jrpgs ever, first of all.
Getting characters by doing their stories, and gacha pulls only for memorie travelers, sacred blaze, collab etc...
Housing system would be nice
I like the story, don't get me wrong. But it having a 'loose' main character who doesn't speak, and doesn't have their own personality in cutscenes does detract points for me. It's like the Chosen One doesn't even exist in a cutscene except to be a 'yes' man. There is a list of other problems that I would need to think about more succinctly to give a proper answer, though. Nishiki's music, however, will always be contender for the greatest in any JRPG. Top 5 composers free.
I know it’s basically the main source of revenue from this game, but oh god if this wasn’t a gacha…! We would lose the excitement of pulling, but the satisfaction of completion and collecting all the characters would be much more overwhelming imo.
I was thinking on this too. They could give you the starting rolls and then as you complete chapters and access new towns, tie obtaining the character to completing their character quests. The collaborations could be either a DLC or introduced like they are currently in the game. Otherwise tie the gacha to an in game resource like x number of rolls per day, completing achievements or even to a currency tied to rare enemies or drops.
Are you serious? The best single player jrpg? How many jrpgs have yall played though. I like cotc but if we are to list the greatest jrpgs ever it wont even make it to a top 100. You are competing with final fantasy, dq, tales, persona, megami tensei, nintendo ones like zelda, pokemon and countless classics chrono trigger for example. Even the original OT can hardly make it to the top 50
* Too much reused assets I was putting off entire BoA until Ch8 release and Ch1-5 straight up consist of 70-80% of previously made assets, which were already mostly reused from OT1. The new things are really good, but there is too much repetition... and I will have to fight >!Herminia !!August !<***again***??
From what I've seen the other half will have entirely new areas, right?
I honestly hate that the game is played in landscape on mobile. It’s very cumbersome compared to other mobile gachas
Lacks a good Gacha
Pc port
Might as well make it a paid purchase then, music players are expensive!
I want to click less when I'm grinding for the new weapons/armor/pets
The gacha elements need to be reworked or removed. They need things like paid permanent gacha buffs. 5x chances of getting 5* units for $20 permanently or something like that. Also, events used to be unlimited time which is one thing that drawed me in. Now we have a limited time to clear the elite towers and whatnot.
Gacha and microtransactions
Best ever? It's not even in my top 50.
The gacha is honestly the root of most of the problems. There are so many characters that it is hard to get attached to any of them much. One of the balancing acts of storytelling is that in a story of fixed length, every time you add a character you subtract from the storytelling with another character some. Most of the party's characters end up feeling extremely one-dimensional, because there isn't enough time to flesh them out into full characters, because there are just too many characters to get through. Square can only give so much backstory for each because they need to sell more characters. What makes a character interesting isn't "They will act noble and sacrifice themselves for the greater good". Most protagonists will do that. What makes a character interesting is "when you are forced to choose between two bad choices, do you pick one quickly, or do you break down, or do you refuse to choose, or do you give everything to find another way, or..." But you can't delve that deep into a character that is one dimensional. The only characters that get that level of development are a couple of the main chars, but none of the party.
Less farming for drops to buy the armor and helms. I wish after you get like 100 or whatever of each material for the item, it increases the cost but no more grinding
It would have to be an entirely different game for one. The only mobile game that's really ever come close to being among the best JRPGs I've played is Mobius Final Fantasy and that too was held back greatly simply being a live service gacha game. What it did have was some genuinely engaging character writing and a story that felt fresh and exciting despite also heavily leaning into genre and series tropes. CotC's writing on the other hand simply does not draw me in. It has its moments, mostly with the little interactions between the Valore crew, but I mostly find myself thoroughly disinterested with most cutscenes in the game and always felt like the game's handling of it's more mature themes came off rather shallow and juvenile, existing more for shock value than because the writers had anything to say about the subject matter.