When you're choosing your character, you can see their sprite, official art, and a summary of their backstory/personality, so you should be able to pick a superficial favorite pretty easily.
https://octopathtraveler.nintendo.com/characters/#
I hear you about the locking being a little arbitrary, but it's essentially for roleplaying purposes, so everyone has a different journey.
It's less of an issue in practice, with Caits allowing you to very easily grind levels.
That'd go against the entire inspiration for the game revolving around storytelling, firstly, but more importantly it wouldn't jive with the job/character building systems, or the path action systems... the game's entire core gameplay, essentially. To say nothing of the expenses involved in creating sprites for X number of supporting party members for every story.
It'd be an entirely different game than what they set out to create—one requiring a ridiculous budget—and I don't think the gameplay-story segregating suspense of disbelief is so much more difficult to swallow here than any other JRPG. Think it'll be a relative non-issue when we're actually playing the game, rather than discussing abstractly.
I can't agree that locking "main" characters is essential for roleplaying beyond the start of the game. How is it essential for roleplaying that during Person B's story, I'm stuck playing Person A? Person A's not even
supposed to be there, story-wise, so what exactly am I roleplaying at that point? Rather, I'm obviously roleplaying the character the chapter is about, so... why do I still have a "main" then? There's no "different journey" here; that's basically just marketing speak for "you pick a starting character and some stuff is optional". Like... I don't know about you, but if I do start with H'annit I'm not going to be thinking "this is the story of H'annit, all of this is the journey of H'annit, I am roleplaying H'annit at all times, I am H'annit, and so she absolutely has to be here" when I have the other 7 characters, I'm doing their stories (where she technically doesn't
exist if I'm not in a tavern) and not hers, and I'm using their path actions to do quests and not hers. (And of course then I could say- why does someone roleplaying against that structure, who still acts as that that semi-extent first character at all times, take priority of my roleplaying of the entire group as the structure would actually support...?)
And I wasn't saying they should actually do the 8 different parties thing here, mind; my point is that they're trying to do many things at once conceptually without committing to any of them. If it's supposed to be about the group of 8 travelers traveling together, then the game's story should account for that and not act like they're doing everything alone (or, not having seen it, possibly doing everything with some generic support from unnamed people). If it's supposed to be about 8 travelers traveling separately and interacting at inns, then the gameplay should reflect that instead of acting like they're fighting alongside each other. If you have it both ways, as they seem to be doing, you're just asking me to pretend that they're traveling together, but also they don't ever interact at all during important events, but also that they totally fought alongside each other during important events.
That's... not roleplaying, or asking me to use my imagination to fill in the blanks? That's asking me to pretend that a different thing happened than what game had play out. They can't just say "the inspiration is storytelling", etc. to justify some parts (assuming what you're saying is what they did say), but then have the rest of the structure directly contradict it, and still expect me to be fine with that justification.
...so, uh. just to be clear, I
am excited for the game still. I think I'm going to enjoy it a lot! But a thing I really enjoy about RPGs is their story and their characters, and how the characters play off of each other. And as I said I don't play many RPGs, but off the top of my head (so maybe I'm forgetting something obvious) I really can't think of any other modern one I've played that didn't have a focus on the party and them bonding and growing together. It's just disappointing to hear about this, and though I can get some of the arguments involved, there are just parts that I can only see as contradictory and flawed.