Octopath Traveler

Octopath Traveler looked like a fun enough JRPG with charming pixel art visuals and a decent amount of relatively good reviews on Steam.
It plays like a pretty traditional JRPG, with standard turn-based combat - your team of 4 going against the enemy team, each character taking their action in turn. Unfortunately, the combat is too standard, too basic. There are only two things separating it from being the most basic "I hit you, then you hit me" style combat, and those are that enemies have hidden weaknesses to certain damage types, forcing you to first find those weaknesses by trying different attacks, and then having characters with those types of attacks break the enemies while others pummel them with their best attacks. See, hitting an enemy some amount of times with something they're weak against makes them skip 1-2 turns and take significantly more damage from all sources for the duration. This is the main point of combat. The other unique, but not as interesting, aspect is a boost system, where every turn you don't use a boosted attack, you get 1 point, and can use up to 3 to empower an attack. As the game gives you 8 characters, you can also swap some out depending on the enemies you face, to have access to more suitable skills, but you'll understand in a moment why that's not relevant.

Now, the combat, while basic, isn't that bad. It's fun enough. The problem is that you can't pick your fights. As you run around on the map, you will run into an encounter every few seconds. It's a ridiculous amount of fights, and you earn enough experience from them that it becomes nearly irrelevant what you do. You'll win anyways, the question is only if you'll waste an extra few turns or not.
I would love to tell you more about the rest of the game, but in the 11 hours that I played, I'm not sure if even 2 hours were spent on the story, which is supposed to be the strong suit of this game. The story seemed fine, but it barely had time to pick up, as you're expected to do the stories of all 8 characters at the same time, so I can't really judge the game on this, when all I'm doing in practice is just one pointless fight after another. The bossfights took more skill and thinking, but you only got one every few hours.

So, after a final three hour session, I was finally fed up with the boring loop of going through a pointless combat enocounter, only to get the chance to explore the map for 8 more seconds. The combat just isn't fun enough to make for a standalone game, but that's what it's trying to do. The story might be good enough to warrant going through it, but unless you're willing to spend at least 6 hours of grinding meaningless fights for every 1 hour of story content (and I'm probably being very generous with the ratio here), you won't have the chance to do so. The art, music, and especially the voice acting, even though only the most important parts were fully voiced, are great, but that's not enough to get a recommendation from me.

PS. If you still want to give it a try, then here are the answers to some questions I had:
Does it matter who I start with? Not really, you can and are expected to play through everyone's story.
Can I choose to not play through everyone's story? Kind of. The stories don't interact with each other, but you can't reach the true end without beating them all. Also the balancing will be off, but it's already off even if you play the intended way, so whatever. I also looked up 8 well-written opinion pieces on which stories were the best, and concluded that Olberic's story is by far the most beloved, followed by Primrose, Alfyn, Therion, H'aanit, Cyrus, Tressa, and Ophilia, in that order.