Octopath Traveler Combat - How to Break Enemies, How to Boost Attacks

Octopath Traveler is out now for the PC, having launched on the Switch back in 2018. There's a lot to love about the retro game, especially the turn-based combat. In this Octopath Traveler combat guide, we'll be teaching you the essential information you need to know to conquer the combat system of the turn-based game.

Octopath Traveler Combat

In case you didn’t know it already, Octopath Traveler combat is turn based. Combat encounters out in the open world of the game are entirely random, and you can be sprung upon by a group of enemies out of nowhere whenever you’re out and about exploring (with the obvious exception of when you’re in towns or villages).

As soon as combat kicks off in Octopath Traveler, you’ll be presented with a series of options. Firstly, you can see the order of the combat turns on the row at the top of the screen. This is going to tell you who’s going to attack, both from your own party and the enemy party, and when. You’ll nearly always have the opportunity to go first in this system, unless your party gets jumped by an enemy group while you’re standing still.

When it’s one of your characters’ turn to attack, you’ll firstly need to pick a weapon. There’s the conventional choice of attacks, including bows, swords, spears, and daggers, and then there’s the ‘character skills’ group of attacks. For now though, we’ll focus on the standard group of attacks with conventional weaponry.

Under each enemy on the screen, you’ll see a number within a blue orb. This number indicates how many critical attacks this enemy can take, before it ‘breaks’ and is stunned out of a turn. Whenever it’s your first time fighting an enemy, there’ll be a series of blank question marks just to the right of this number, which hide the type of weapons that this enemy is weak to.

It’s up to you to experiment with different types of weapons from all your different characters, in order to determine which enemies are weak to a particular type of weapon. If you successfully attack with the correct weapon, a ‘Weak’ sign will flash up next to the enemy, with the weapon type filling in one of the blank question marks, and the number in the blue orb ticking down by one.

Once the number within the blue is depleted, the enemy will be stunned, and won’t be able to attack for another turn. At this point, you want to lay into that enemy with all attacks possible, as all damage they receive is now boosted since they can’t properly defend themselves. This is the basic loop of combat in Octopath Traveler, and it’s one that’s not too hard to get to grips with.

As for the special character skill attacks, this is where you find a lot more variety. There’s an SP meter for each of your your characters in Octopath Traveler, and you spend points from this meter to execute special skill attacks. These special attacks are varied in their abilities—they could deliver multiple hits to a single enemy, or deal out elemental damage all across the battlefield. It’s important to remember that these attacks can still damage the Break meter of an enemy, so keep this in mind when selecting which special skill attack to use on which enemies.

Octopath Traveler Boost Mode Attacks

If you want to power up a character’s attacks, then you’ll need to active Boost mode. Next to the name of each character on the battle screen, you’ll see a number of blank orbs, which turn gold when filled in. Each character always begins a battle with one orb filled in, and it’s this currency that you use to Boost your attacks.

Whenever it’s one of your character’s turns, and then have points from the Boost meter to spend, you can press R to Boost their attacks. You can spend a maximum of three Boost points in one turn for one character, and for each point you spend, they perform multiple attacks in one go. For example if you boost Olberic by two points and then have him attack an enemy with his sword, he’ll perform three sword attacks in one go—one as standard, and two from being Boosted.

Not only can you Boost standard attacks, but you can also Boost special character skill attacks in Octopath Traveler. For example you could spend two boost points for H’aanit and then let loose with her True Shot ability, to triple the total damage dealt. This can lead to some devastating attacks, and you should always remember Boost attacks for whenever you want to Break an enemy quickly, or deal huge damage to a boss.

We might be all done with this combat guide on Octopath Traveler, but there's plenty more on the game to cover yet. Head over to our Octopath Traveler map guide for a complete walkthrough of the world of Orsterra, or our Octopath Traveler character skills guide for information on how to unlock new abilities.