Octopath Traveler and Setup and Payoff

The basic backstory of Primrose’s journey is simple yet effective. As a girl, Primrose saw her father murdered by three men with crow tattoos, and she’s spent the last decade hunting them to get revenge. It’s not the freshest plotline ever written, but a plotline doesn’t have to be new to be compelling. The revenge trope has been used to great effect countless times in all forms of media, including video games. Both Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger have party members who want vengeance for people they’ve lost, and Octopath is nothing if not an homage to those games. The reason that Primrose’s tale doesn’t reach the level of revenge stories that have come before it is because it doesn’t do anything unique with the trope. Instead of using the distinctive elements of her story to say something new, the story spends its screentime reiterating things the player already knows, leaving no time for anything else. 

There’s an adage among writers that says every line on the page should reveal new information about at least one thing: plot, character, setting, or scene. While this is a rigid approach to writing, there’s merit to the idea that every line should be worth reading. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case in Primrose’s story. Starting from the very first chapter, the characters will set up some important element of a scene, then repeat what’s already been established without adding anything new. For example, in Primrose’s earliest scenes, she’s working as a dancer in a desert town, and her employer is a man called Master Helgenish. The first scene sets this up quickly when the other dancers mock Primrose for being their master’s favorite, then remind her that she’s “Nothing but a kept woman, here to flatter the dignity of men who pay for the privilege.” Moments later, when Master Helgenish comes in, he kicks out the other girls for a moment alone with Primrose, only to reiterate the same things the others said. Primrose is indeed his favorite, and she is indeed here to entertain men for payment. The one detail he adds is that he was the one who “groomed” Primrose for the role, which he establishes in a single line and then repeats in new ways for the rest of the scene. Thus, the player learned everything they needed to know in the first minute of the scene; everything after that point is reiteration, setting up what’s already been established. It’s a pattern that continues throughout her entire plotline, leaving no room to develop anything new or interesting. Simply put, it’s setup that can’t pay off. 

While Primrose’s path wastes most of its setup time with reiteration, a few interesting aspects could have been developed and paid off later in the narrative. One aspect is the prevalence of sex workers in the story, an element that could have never been explored in the child-friendly JRPGs of the 90s. At the beginning of Primrose’s tale, it’s all but spelled out that she and the other dancers are forced to have sex with their master to keep him happy, and he’s also not above selling the girls to other men as property. He’s not above killing them, either, which he does to Primrose’s fellow dancer, Yusufa. Later in Primrose’s story, she meets up with one of the women who used to work for her father and discovers the woman now works for a brothel. Like Primrose and the other dancers, she too has used sex to survive difficult circumstances, even though that work continually places her in danger. These parallels act as their own kind of setup, establishing the idea that women using sex work will be an essential element throughout the story—except it isn’t. Once Primrose kills her first target and returns to her childhood home, the relationship between sex and survival ceases to impact the storyline. It doesn’t inform any of Primrose’s decisions, and it doesn’t change the outcome of her story. Despite all that setup, Octopath has nothing to say about women in sex work. In the end, it was just window-dressing: setup with no payoff.