Octopath Traveler 1's Language

Well, I may be back to boycotting SquareEnix, and even more enthusiastically than the first time for that matter, but if someone goes and buys 1 of their games and gifts it to me, then the damage is already done and I may as well let myself enjoy the game.  If that’s possible, that is--this is SquareEnix we’re talking about, there’s like a 5% chance of anything they publish being even remotely close to passable.  But Octopath Traveler seems to be that rare roll of a Natural 20, and I’m thankful that the money spent on this generous gift to me was at least in support of an actually good game.

Anyway, enough of my excuses for owning a modern SquareEnix title and my grumpy reticence to give the company its extremely rare due accolades.  On with the rant.



A few years ago, I made a rant about how much I enjoyed Bravely Default’s elegant and smooth use of older, uncommon language.  Well, I figure it’s only fair that I also point out and applaud Octopath Traveler 1 for doing the same, particularly since it might actually be even better than Bravely Default at it!

Octopath Traveler 1 (and probably its sequel, but I’ve only played the first) is a game whose translators clearly delighted in the elaborate and elegant past of the English language.  As with Bravely Default before it, OT1 liberally employs a slew of interesting, extravagant language more at home with centuries’ past than with our own modern age of communication, to the end of better selling its medieval-to-Elizabethan-era settings.  And it’s quite successful at doing so--the skilled, natural way that Octopath Traveler 1 employs its grasp of the old, ornate side of English merges perfectly with its artistic style to draw the player into the olden-style towns and villages.  Additionally, again much the same as Bravely Default, OT1 approaches this linguistic task fully with its modern audience in mind.  It’s not like reading Shakespeare, which requires from a present-day reader some development of reading technique that can decipher the bard’s elaborate but daunting prose and poetry into modern meaning.  It flows easily for a modern reader/listener and the meaning of characters’ words is always clear enough from context, at least as far as I can tell.

Now, the fun thing about Octopath Traveler 1 is that it also goes an extra mile in a couple of ways that I don’t remember Bravely Default doing (although, in fairness, it’s been a few years since I played the only real Final Fantasy game that SquareEnix has allowed to be made in 2 decades).  The first is that OT1 uses a wider social net for its older English terms.  Yeah, you’ve got plenty of characters using the higher-brow language and phrases, your “augurs” “naifs” and “mollycoddles” and verb versions of “warrant” and the like, as seen in BD...but Octopath Traveler 1 also has no qualms whatever about slumming it a bit when the common man is speaking, either.  It’s just as comfortable bandying the cruder vernacular of the peasantry around as it is with the fancy stuff.  And I’m a simple man--I see a game that can casually, authentically throw “summat” around, and it gets my approval.

It’s even got archaic profanity in it!  I let out a squawk of delight when I saw the villain of Olberic’s story exclaim “God’s teeth!” in frustration at Olberic’s unrelenting nobility.  There’s also a “‘swounds” or 2 to be found, too.  Honestly, it’s a damn shame we didn’t have translators this knowledgeable and talented working at Squaresoft back in the 90s, because there’s no way Nintendo’s famously enthusiastic censors of the era would have been able to keep up.

And the other avenue in which Octopath Traveler 1 ups the game from the high standard Bravely Default set is with its regional dialects.  Not satisfied just with showing off their well-earned degrees in English Linguistic History with uniform speech patterns, the writers/translators of OT1 also vary the manner in which characters and NPCs speak by region and town.  Olberic, Cyrus, H’aanit, and Primrose, for example, all clearly have their own distinctive speech patterns, as do the regions of their origins, which stand out as different iterations of older English just as clearly as modern-day accents distinguish themselves as separate versions of the same contemporary language.  I love H’aanit’s heavy Chaucerian olde English especially; the woman is speaking it more thickly and constantly than Frog, Cyan, and Dynaheir all rolled into one.*  I mean, okay, granted, her dialect is, when I look it up, apparently not 100% correct/accurate/consistent, but it’s certainly still pretty solid all the same, and more than convincing and consistent enough for most players to enjoy and find interesting and appealing.  And these regional accents are even appropriately selected for immersion’s sake in some cases--the most noticeably dense dialect of old English is that of H’aanit’s village, and that tracks, because they’re the 1 community of the bunch that’s the most isolated from the rest of Orsterra’s population, so it makes sense that their speech patterns would remain the most unchanged by contact with other communities.

It’s a minor virtue, but Octopath Traveler 1’s skill and creativity in employing earlier terms and conventions of the English language is the kind of characteristic that adds flavor to an RPG, flavor that makes it stand out amongst its peers and develops a distinctive personality for it.  Octopath Traveler 1’s writers and/or translators deserve recognition for their work just as Bravely Default 1’s did, more even, because it elegantly takes what BD did even further.  Well done, Acquire Corp!













* And unlike those 3, the culture of her origins actually also speaks the way she does.  I mean, okay, I think we never actually saw where Baldur’s Gate 1’s Dynaheir came from, and you can maybe pass Chrono Trigger’s Frog off as having intentionally adopted a different manner of speaking to further hide his identity as Glenn (or explain it away as a peculiar side effect of Magus’s curse)...but what the hell was the deal with Final Fantasy 6’s Cyan, at the very least?  “Mr. Thou” indeed.