It'd be easier to name ways it is the same, barring the art style and broad strokes of the combat. A lot of mechanical changes add up. I'd be fine with that, generally speaking, but the writing seems significantly worse so far and that reduces my tolerance for the other bits.

Feeling slightly better physically than yesterday.

Love this, the pose especially.

That's my take after ~12 hours. It could be the game vastly improves later, and I intend to find out out of sheer curiosity, but I don't feel like most people need to rush to play this. #blutoid

6. I'm not an audiophile so I can't say I noticed outside of the occasional odd line, but the recording quality of the audio has been widely criticized.

In exchange all characters can unlock active / passive battle slots for high amounts of JP, and gain skills for these slots by finding them in chests, beating unique enemies, or winning in combat against NPCs.

This could have been an interesting change, but feels limiting compared to series norm.

4. The party members have few establishing characteristics, making them feel less like people and more like weapons types with faces.
5. Secondary jobs do not exist for the party members.
6. They do not exist for the protagonist either, though they can switch main job among the paths.

Now for the bad:
1. Denuvo.
2. The villains, at least the initial set of three, are all moustache-twirlingly evil. The game tries to give them some depth and complexity beyond that, but doesn't nail the landing. At first I thought this was kinda fun, but I soured on it over time.
3. Stingy JP gain.

Neutral:
The map is shared with Octopath 1, to be expected from a prequel.

5. The story of the mobile game being accessible in a full single player RPG is better than it becoming lost media over time.

Starting with the good.
1. The Town Rebuilding is simplistic but cute and feels rewarding.
2. The graphics are still polished as expected for the series.
3. The battle system, while not quite the same as prior games, still has decent depth.
4. The party members are varied visually.

Three is more than one. Can't argue with that.

How many have you tasted? Not empirical evidence with a small sample size.

Seeing how crazy it got so fast moved it several places up the anime watch list priority, mitigated somewhat by anything over like 24 episodes getting slightly decreased priority.

Fair, glad you're even at that point.

That was faster than expected, you feeling alright already?

Sorry you're dealing with this bullshit Pat.

Plans for the weekend are mostly based around reading and Octopath 0, with some anime and toku if I need a change of pace from either of those.

Honestly I'd pay for this headache to go away for good if the price is reasonable, yeah. Is this the correct website so I don't run some random .exe? www.xreveal.com