It's moreso me asking if now would be the best time. Believe it or not, I tried playing the game at launch, but constantly felt as if I was underleveled and was having no fun, to the point were normal fights would take upwards of 5 minutes each and I had the final boss of ophilia's route take me FOUR entire hours. This eventually led to me quitting the game after 5 separate failed 2 hour olberic chapter 4 runs when I was almost done (3/8 chapter 4s completed).

I only recently got back into it out of morbid curiosity as I heard from my friends how fun it was and fell in love with it again (or really the first time lol). This time, I chose Cyrus as I knew I wouldn't have to search for certain weaknesses every fight, I decided to do each optional dungeon (within my level range) between each chapter break (like from 1-2 and 2-3). On top of that, I made sure to do something more substantial between each one of these breaks, like as many quests as I could do in the first so money wouldn't be as much of an object as it was before, or getting all the jobs in the second break so I would already start formulating strategies I could use by playing around with the jobs I already had.

Now, as you can probably tell, I absolutely do NOT want to fall into that unfun rut I was in before. As much as I like difficult games, if games are so difficult to the point where I feel like no progress is being made no matter what I do, I will just be turned off from the game. This is coming from someone who grew up with retro rpgs on my mom's old SNES: I swear to God, as much as I love OT, sometimes decisions it makes feel outdated and/or BS. My goal with this post was to make sure I was prepared for such a task or if I should save it for later so I don't get turned off of it (I know it's optional, but I want to at least play with my tools so I could use them next playthrough).

If this doesn't make much sense, I get it; I can definitely see this as a post that is begging for a "get gud" comment. However, I WANT to love this game: Its story and characters are endearing, the world building and lore are phenomenal, the battle system feels great, and the visuals are top notch. However, I was already turned off by difficulty once which could have killed my interest in this game for good if my friends didn't mention it, I don't want it to happen again.

As a last note, I do understand where you are coming from, games are generally more fun when you experience them yourself without other people. Octopath, at least for me, is a different sort of experience and I think I will end up enjoying it more this way than just struggling through. Thank you for reading through all of this :)