As of February 2021, the game has gone on to sell over 2.5 million copies before arriving on Xbox, a success that Square Enix wouldn’t ignore looking ahead, as the company would go on to plan out spiritual sequels and remakes alike using this exact format. Octopath Traveler is a turn-based RPG, and the genre of Triangle Strategy is in the title itself.
Octopath Traveler was generally well-received, being ported to PC in 2020 and Xbox One in 2021. Many people have joked that a game isn’t really a JRPG unless you start out with simple errands and up fighting god, a throughline that Octopath Traveler delivers through its gargantuan scope.
Players picked a starting point with one particular character but eventually unlocked all of them, with the plot growing from interpersonal struggles to unraveling ancient mysteries. When I first saw the trailer for Square Enix’s new tactical role-playing game Triangle. The narrative focused on eight different characters: Ophilia the Cleric, Cyrus the Scholar, Tressa the Merchant, Olberic the Warrior, Primrose the Dancer, Alfyn the Apothecary, Therion the Thief, and H’aanit the Hunter (note the first letter of every character’s name). Triangle Strategy, the spiritual successor to Octopath Traveler, has already sold 800,000 copies since its release two weeks ago. Despite the Final Fantasy Tactics appearance, Triangle Strategy is exciting for its Octopath roots. Watching the trailer for Octopath Traveler for the first time is, I believe, the closest thing anyone in more recent generations can get to seeing Final Fantasy 6 on the SNES for the first time. I’m not personally as well-versed in JRPGs as many other people are, but the striking graphics immediately caught my eye. Initially launching exclusively for the Nintendo Switch, Octopath Traveler’s graphics and gameplay were praised, with innovations in both even as they were kept faithful to the nature of past titles like the original Final Fantasy games. Octopath Traveler was built using Unreal Engine 4 in a particular style, emulating the top-down perspective of older JRPG titles, while still embracing more modern graphical designs. While Triangle Strategy was developed by a different team called Artdink, there’s no denying where it gets its DNA.