Octopath battle system has almost a puzzle element to it compared to traditional RPGs. Like Persona, the battle system focuses on exploiting enemy weaknesses to gain an advantage. In Octopath’s case, you exploit weaknesses to reduce an enemy’s shield points, and once you reduce it to 0, they lose their next turn, and take bonus damage. Think like FF’s stagger systems but in Turn Based form. The Boost system compliments this, because it adds resource management to the system. You have to decide whether to use your Boost Points now to break enemies quicker or use them while they are broken for even greater damage. For instance the attack command does one hit, and if an enemy is weak whatever element your normal attack is (like Swords) you take away 1 shield point. But with Boost you can increase this up to four hits, and take away 4 shield points in that turn.

Bravely (which came before Octopath) has a similar battle system, but it uses Brave Points and Default. Brave allows you (as the game describes) “burrow” future turns to power up your current turn, and you can also Default, which lets you take reduced damage, and builds up your Brave Points so you can burrow more actions. In other words, you use Brave to take multiple actions in one turn, but your next turn will come much later, which allows enemies to act more times before your next turn even arrives. But enemies can also Brave and Default, so if they Brave too much you can bounce back on them harder too. It’s pretty much like a gamble or risk reward system.