They could as well not be there. They're mostly around so you don't fight alone at the beginning because of how hard the game is.
It doesn't change much what makes the game good.
There is probably much more direct story in Octopath. It's just about one person living their journey.
It still doesn't change the fact that a game is allowed to give a fresh take on story telling. There's no rule saying rpg has to be about a team of people or even that you need interactions between battle members.
I'm not really parsing what parts of what you're saying is about Scarlet Grace vs Octopath here, sorry.
I will say I don't think either of those aspects are "fresh", not how they're implemented here. The relatively fresh aspect is the focus on individual stories in this segmented all-in-one way.
There's no rules saying RPGs have to be about those, but it is inherently weird for people you are fighting with to be people you never talk to because they don't actually exist. This is not an RPG that is about not a team of people; it's an RPG telling stories about individuals but a team of people is still present for some reason. Rather, those aren't rules; being about a team of people is a genre convention that this game still follows, and interactions between party members is a thing because at a bare minimum it is what makes sense in-universe.
Speaking generally and not about Octopath specifically... If you want to tell a story about individuals fighting by themselves, have them be individual then. If you want to not ever have interactions between party members... well, first of all: why? Second, then have them be generic mercaneries you don't respect, or something. There should be some reason why you're fighting alongside people but talk to them 0% of the time and they don't react to anything that happens that they're seeing.
Wait, what? That is not how storytelling works. It's like saying a novel or script or play from the past 4 years is an improvement from 20 or 30 years ago. This isn't the Atari or NES that had very limited space for characters so stories were told in either no words or 5 word sentences. By the time the SNES came out, as evidenced by Chrono Trigger and other rpgs, that was not the case. A good story is a good story. Again, this is 8 individual stories. Not some power band of warriors uniting to take down God or Evil Empire. These are personal. You may not like that style of storytelling, but I think it's great. There are character interactions, just not ins tory specific cut scenes. That part is a bit weird I can admit, but I also understand why considering the party combination you can have, whether you recruit or not, in what order, etc. Small quirk at the end.
I feel like you (and many others) keep conflating criticism of the implementation of the 8 individual stories with criticism of the fact that there are 8 individual stories, and furthermore conflate criticism of the fact that there are 8 individual stories with some imagined criticism that the story isn't some super generic god/army fighting mission. I know, to be fair, that some people dislike that it is 8 stories, but that's not what I'm saying.
I've never had an issue with it being 8 stories. I've never had an issue with them being personal stories either- that's appealing to me for the same reasons you have for finding it appealing yourself (though of course, it bears mentioning that nothing about there being 8 personal stories bars those stories from being just as stereotypical). I think them tying together in the end would probably be satisfying, sure, but I'd likely be happier with a big tavern party together than suddenly coming together for a common fight! (Of course, if the common fight was built up to well, I think that could be very satisfying - with switching in all 8 members to take down a boss together - but I digress.)
My issue is that they're half committing to various concepts. If the main story chapters are 8 individual tales told later in a tavern, have my party be made of other people who were actually with that individual and make their bonds meaningful. If the other characters were actually there, show that. And regardless, it's a little baffling to hear that out in the world you're apparently treated like some generic character who NPCs don't recognize. (So much for what was discussed in here previously, the claimed priority of roleplaying as the character you start as...?)
It's just that in the time since those other games we've had plenty of other games that tackle having multiple potential party members that have different interactions based on whose there, handle the possibility that you never recruited someone, etc. The awkwardness around these things is not a "quirk" or an appealing difference in RPG design; when it's left unaddressed, it's a problem. And these problems are not unsolvable. There's an extra effort involved with solving them, yes. And to be 100% perfectly clear I don't think "devs were lazy" or something because they didn't make that effort; I think they bit off more than they could chew, and should have adjusted their design to be more consistent in the scope of what they could achieve. If, for example, the problem is that not everyone recruited all 8 characters and having to work based on that: don't allow that to happen. Or if the problem is having 8 characters, why not have 6 instead? You can say "well, they wanted to have 8!" but you can't know for sure they didn't say "we want to have 10!" once, right?
I'm not arguing for either as the change that needed to happen to allow for one thing or another, mind, but the way things are now, there are disconnects in the design. There is no aspect of the game that needs to be the way it is, unadjusted for their scope, leaving those disconnects unaddressed. Just because the designers say "our goal was X" doesn't mean they couldn't have then thought "our goal was X, but that doesn't work here given the other thing we want to do, so let's go with Y" (and given how game development works- they surely did do that for many many things!). The argument of it being hard to impossible to do something because of a certain different design decision being prioritized goes both ways, because now I get to end up questioning whether that other decision was actually worth it.
As always, I'll say I expect to enjoy the game quite a bit and am excited for it! I've actually appreciated this thread because it helped me set my expectations better. I just resent this idea that people are criticizing only that there are 8 individual stories vs a connected one, that the awkward handling of the characters is a requirement or just how things are, etc. and honestly that kind of defense happening here bothers me more than the flaws in the game.
Man, review scores sure have poisoned the critical discourse surrounding video games.
Strongly agreed.
People obsessing over these arbitrary scores, for games they haven't even played yet most of the time, is incredibly frustrating, and the way it makes people spit venom whenever someone dares to criticize a game they liked (or just think they'll like) is even worse.
I just mainly stick to reading reviews by writers I like and know I have a similar taste to, and then also skimming other reviews to see what their impressions of various aspects are so I can try to judge what I might feel about it myself.