Switch Exclusive Project Octopath Traveler’s New Screenshots Show Colorful Spells, Features, and More

Giuseppe Nelva February 4, 2018 4:01 PM EST

Square Enix shows a large batch of new screenshots of Project Octopath Traveler for Nintendo Switch, providing a look at newly-implemented features.

Today Square Enix released a batch of screenshots of its upcoming JRPG code-named Project Octopath Traveler.

The screenshots highlight the visual style of the game, which the team named “HD-2D” mixing traditional pixel art and a 3D effect.

More interestingly, we get to see the already mentioned improvements that the team is working on following fan-feedback from the demo.

These include a fast-travel option that lets you instantly move to towns you have already visited, on top of a change to movement speed.

Not only characters’ speed will change from walking to running as you press further on the stick, but by pressing B you can increase the pace even beyond running speed.

A minimap featured showing the current destination has been added, on top of various visibility adjustments in dungeons to help players find their way around more comfortably.

A setting that will let players change brightness and intensity of the screen shading effect will also be added, and in the gallery, you can see a comparison between normal screen shading and the reduced setting.

More changes involve the ability to skip event scenes, alongside a setting to change the speed of text display.

A minor but welcome change is the default position of the cursor on the save screen. Apparently, since it defaulted on “save” in the demo, many overwritten their current games by mistake, so it’ll default on “load” instead. Slots will be increased to ten, on top of an autosave one.

While there were many comments that asked to make battles more interesting, players have not experienced combat with four characters yet, and there are unannounced features that we don’t yet know about.

You can enjoy all the images below. If you want to see more, you can also check out a video with the same focus, another recent trailer featuring the soundtrack, an earlier batch of screenshots and artwork, an earlier trailer, and the original announcement. In case you missed it, you should also read our hands-on preview.

Project Octopath Traveler will release exclusively for Nintendo Switch sometime in 2018.