It didn't help that the random battles were entirely made up of damage sponges that took as long to kill as bosses in most other JRPGs. And then the bosses were just repetitive slogs that took forever and ever.
It's a shame, too. The game might have been good if they just slashed enemy health down to about 20% and hired me to punch up the dialog.
It is incredibly easy to burst down random battles in Octopath unless your team is god awful, I one to two turned most of the combat once I understood I can just burst immediately and I found the weaknesses of the enemies instead of just pressing the attack action. The bosses are also not too long in my opinion except the optional ones except maybe the very first one due to you having only one party member to work with.
I quite liked Octopath until it became too easy around act 3 for most stories, only for it to suddenly ramp up at the very last second with its technically optional final boss. The combat is fun when you get it, but the story is a little bit unconventional given the anthology feel and some of the stories are pretty so-so overall.
I do often wonder if this is a translation issue or if Japanese developers really ARE that po-faced and bound by convention. There's no fun, there's no life, there's no levity, there's no forward momentum. Nothing ever feels genuine or organic - even character development moments can only happen in pre-approved, signed-in-triplicate "NOW THIS CHARACTER WILL REVEAL HIS ENTIRE LIFE STORY AND MOTIVATIONS" sections of JRPGs.
I don't get this in particular with Japanese writing. I find JRPGs full of plenty of life and levity to them, even the ultra serious ones like say Xenoblade 3's existential world at war feel has levity of the little mascots and character at least attempting humor especially if we count the little bits of dialogue between story segments. I'd swear you were talking about Berserk or something instead, but most JRPGs have attempts at levity and fun to them with their premises. More then most western crap I've played or observe in its narratives where it feels like constant bleakness and seriousness within most common crap that gets peddled around these days.
If anything the biggest thing I see people bitch about is that JRPGs "Don't take themselves seriously enough" because of stylistic choices or, "This premise is way too stupid and unrelatable" because people feel like they have no imagination beyond intense drama GoT, some mystery box baiting crap to give them a fake mystery to solve, or something that is meant to talk about real life bullshit.
Like the moment some weird mecha thing, or some other weird anime trope happens like fusing, or some turning point in character development leads to a power up moment, suddenly that is just impossible to get into. Like the moment you show anime hair or fat anime tits casually suddenly you can't possibly take anything seriously because their is color beyond grey, black, brown, and whatever else is in something like Last of Us 2. Or whatever the fuck was going on in the Witcher 3, which was fine as a plot even if I thought the game sucked ass to play.
Most western writing these days feels like either references to real life with some strawman of the writer's dislike for something, bleak bullshit because life sucks and we need to know this for the 500th time, or stories with big central conflicts that exist solely for the game to happen without much to really cling onto. Like no one actually gives a shit about writing this except to espouse some political belief, have some pretty much self insert story, or just "Its a video game" which is at least respectable enough to not waste my time by pretending its deeper and bigger then it is.
Also you might just be noticing the writing patterns, and by extension not like them, similar to how you can notice the three act structure to a lot of things in western writing. Frankly the vast vast majority of writing, especially in games, is pretty easy to read and parse in terms of structure once you engage with this stuff enough. Once you see the veils you can put together roughly when something is going to happen with little exception, you may not fully guess what but you can guess when because we need to have the rising action, the climax, the inciting incident, the reversal of fortune, or whatever part of the plot we're at right now based on where we are in the run time.
So at that point it feels more like a matter of taste in what you're fine with seeing done again and again, because in my opinion nothing is original anymore and that's not inherently a bad thing. It is more an observation that things have been written before and will be written again.
