Generative AI is absolutelyeverywhererightnow, so it’s no surprise to see Spotify putting it to use in its latest feature, simply called “DJ.” It’s a new way to immediately start a personalized selection of music playing that combines Spotify’s well-known personalization tools that you can find in playlists like Discover Weekly as well as the content that populates your home screen with some AI tricks. I got early access to DJ and have been playing with it for the last day to see how Spotify’s latest take on personalized music works, but the feature is available as of today in beta for all premium subscribers in the US and Canada.

While Spotify has loads of personalized playlists for users, I’ve found that the app lacks a simple way to tell it to just play some music you like. On Apple Music, for example, I can ask Siri to play music I like and it’ll start a personalized radio station based on music I’ve played alongside some things it thinks I’ll enjoy but haven’t played before. It’s a reliable way to jump right into my collection. In the same vein, Spotify’s DJ pulls together a mix of songs you’re currently listening to, old favorites you might have forgotten, and new tunes that fit in with what it thinks you’ll like.

The AI twist to DJ comes in the form of a literal DJ, which speaks to you in an AI voice generated by Sonantic, a startup that Spotify bought last year with a focus on generating realistic speech. In this case, the DJ’s voice model was trained on the voice of a real human, Spotify’s own Head of Cultural Partnerships, Xavier “X” Jernigan. Jernigan hosted “The Get Up,” Spotify’s morning show that combined recorded segments with music tailored to your tastes.

The DJ’s voice is generated through AI, and so are the things it says to you. When you first kick off a DJ session, you’ll get a quick overview of what you might expect to hear. For example, the first time I started up DJ, “X” came on and told me that it was a DJ designed for music and that it knew what I liked and for starters it was going to play me some Jenny Lewis. Sure enough, Lewis’s “Do Si Do” kicked things off, along with a few other songs with a similar vibe. At the top of the now playing screen, you’ll see a little info on how the song was picked, like “based on recent listening,” “throwbacks,” “recommended for you” or “from your past.”

Once you start a segment, you’ll generally hear a handful of songs that fit into the category, but if you want to change things up you can just tap the DJ button in the lower right corner of the now playing screen. At that point, X the DJ pops back up to give you some info about what’s coming up next. When I just tapped it, X said, “OK, changing it up. Here are our editor’s picks for the best in hard rock this week, starting with Motionless In White.”

Spotify says that none of the dialog you hear from X is pre-recorded; it’s all generated on the fly by OpenAI. However, the company wanted to make it clear that it looks at generative AI as a tool for its music editors, not something that it is just trusting to get everything right. Spotify’s VP of personalization Ziad Sultan told Engadget in a product demo that the company put together a “writers room” of script writers, music editors, data curators and engineers, all of whom are working together to make sure that the bits of info that the AI DJ drops are useful, accurate and relevant to the music you’re hearing.

Sultan stressed that Spotify’s usage was a lot different than implementations like free-form text, image generation and other such AI use cases. “We’ve built a very specific use case, and we’ve made a few choices about how it’ll be implemented,” he said. “The most important one is the creation of that writer’s room – we’re taking this [AI] tool and putting it into the hands of music experts.”

What’ll make Spotify’s DJ work or fail is whether it can pull up music you want to hear. From that perspective, Spotify isn’t doing anything wildly different than it already does: analyzing your listening history and finding stuff it knows you like and things it thinks you’ll enjoy. And as with everything else you do on Spotify, your DJ usage will be analyzed so that it can get better at serving you tunes you want to listen to. At the beginning, anyway, the AI DJ aspects are being used as small augmentations to a personalized music channel – and as long as Spotify can continue to know what songs you love and which ones you’re likely to fall in love with, DJ should be a useful addition.

According to a report from Reuters, ChatGPT is listed as the author or co-author of at least 200 books on Amazon’s Kindle Store. However, the number of bot-written books is likely higher than that since Amazon’s policies don’t require authors to disclose their use of AI.

Brett Schickler published on the Kindle Store a children’s book written and illustrated by AI. Although Schickler says the book has earned him less than $100 since its January release, he only spent a few hours creating it with ChatGPT prompts like “write a story about a dad teaching his son about financial literacy.”

Science-fiction publication Clarkesworld Magazine has temporarily halted short-story submissions after receiving a flood of articles suspected of using AI without disclosure, which was reported by PCMag. Although Editor Neil Clarke didn’t specify how he identified them, he recognized the (allegedly) bot-assisted stories due to “some very obvious patterns.” He added that spam submissions resulting in bans hit 38 percent in February.

– Mat Smith

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

The biggest stories you might have missed

• How to find the best gaming console for you in 2023

• A Pokémon Presents event will take place on February 27th

• Apple's 1TB 12.9-inch iPad Pro is cheaper than ever

• Sony’s new midrange headphones borrow some features from the premium WH-1000XM5

• Beats Fit Pro earbuds now come in three new colors

• Samsung's 2023 8K Mini LED TV starts at $5,000

Bungie wins $4.3 million in case against 'Destiny 2' cheat company

The legal fight continues, however.

Bungie has been embroiled in a legal battle with cheat provider AimJunkies since 2021, with both sides slapping the other with lawsuits. Now, the game developer has walked away with $4.3 million in damages and fees after a victory in an arbitration proceeding. However, US District Court Judge Thomas Zilly ruled mostly in favor of AimJunkies last year, deciding Bungie had failed to provide sufficient evidence to prove its claim. He gave Bungie the chance to present more evidence – and that copyright infringement lawsuit is still headed to trial. Bungie will use this first victory in its argument during AimJunkies' countersuit, in which it accused the developer of violating its ToS for reverse-engineering its cheat software.

Continue reading.

Microsoft is already reversing some limits it put on Bing's AI chat tools

The company says it will restore long chats 'responsibly.'

Microsoft limited Bing's AI chats early after launch to prevent disturbing answers, but it now plans to restore longer chats. It’s expanding the chats to six turns per session (up from five) and 60 chats per day (up from 50). The daily cap will climb to 100 chats soon, Microsoft says, and regular searches will no longer count against that total. An upcoming test will also let you choose a tone that's "precise" (that is, shorter and more to-the-point answers), "creative" (longer) or "balanced."

Continue reading.

Microsoft will put Xbox games on GeForce Now in an attempt to win over regulators

If the deal goes through, Call of Duty games will come to NVIDIA's streaming service.

During the European Commission hearing over Microsoft's proposed takeover of Activision Blizzard, Brad Smith, Microsoft president, announced the company and NVIDIA have struck a 10-year deal to bring Xbox games to the GeForce Now streaming service. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said: “This partnership will help grow NVIDIA’s catalog of titles to include games like Call of Duty, while giving developers more ways to offer streaming games.”

Earlier this month, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority said the Activision acquisition could result in a "substantial lessening of competition in gaming consoles," and that Microsoft already had a 60 to 70 percent share of the cloud gaming market and that, should the deal go through, it would "reinforce this strong position." In December, the US Federal Trade Commission sued to block the merger.

Continue reading.

'M3GAN' and 'Get Out' producer Blumhouse is moving into horror games

Blumhouse Games will release titles that cost under $10 million to make.

Blumhouse

Horror movie behemoth Blumhouse is getting into video games. The company behind hits like M3GAN, Get Out, The Purge and Insidious is opening a production and publishing division that will work on original horror games for PC, consoles and mobile. “We’re in the scary story business. We do films, we do TV and there is this massive, growing segment in media and entertainment called gaming,” Blumhouse President Abhijay Prakash told Bloomberg. The game publishing division will keep the budgets modest and rather than adapting its own movies into games (something Blumhouse has tried in the past), the company will look for projects that are in development and offer studios financial support and creative insight.

Continue reading.

ChatGPT is listed as the author or co-author of at least 200 books on Amazon’s Kindle Store, according to Reuters. However, the actual number of bot-written books is likely much higher than that since Amazon’s policies don’t explicitly require authors to disclose their use of AI. It’s the latest example of AI-generated writing flooding the market and playing a part in ethically dubious content creation since the November release of OpenAI’s free tool.

“I could see people making a whole career out of this,” said Brett Schickler, a Rochester, NY salesman who published a children’s book on the Kindle Store. “The idea of writing a book finally seemed possible.” Schickler’s self-published story, The Wise Little Squirrel: A Tale of Saving and Investing, is a 30-page children’s story — written and illustrated by AI — selling for $2.99 for a digital copy and $9.99 for a printed version. Although Schickler says the book has earned him less than $100 since its January release, he only spent a few hours creating it with ChatGPT prompts like “write a story about a dad teaching his son about financial literacy.”

Other examples of AI-created content on the Kindle Store include children’s story The Power of Homework, a poetry collection called Echoes of the Universe and a sci-fi epic about an interstellar brothel, Galactic Pimp: Vol. 1.

“This is something we really need to be worried about, these books will flood the market and a lot of authors are going to be out of work,” said Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the Authors Guild. “There needs to be transparency from the authors and the platforms about how these books are created or you’re going to end up with a lot of low-quality books.”

Clarkesworld

Meanwhile, science-fiction publication Clarkesworld Magazine has temporarily halted short-story submissions after receiving a flood of articles suspected of using AI without disclosure, as reported by PCMag. Although Editor Neil Clarke didn’t specify how he identified them, he recognized the (allegedly) bot-assisted stories due to “some very obvious patterns.” “What I can say is that the number of spam submissions resulting in bans has hit 38 percent this month,” he said. “While rejecting and banning these submissions has been simple, it’s growing at a rate that will necessitate changes. To make matters worse, the technology is only going to get better, so detection will become more challenging.”

Clarkesworld currently prohibits stories “written, co-written or assisted by AI,” and the publication has banned over 500 users this month for submitting suspected AI-assisted content. Clarkesworld pays 12 cents per word, making it a prime target. “From what I can tell, it’s not about credibility. It’s about the possibility of making a quick buck. That’s all they care about,” Clarke tweeted. 

JASON REDMOND via Getty Images

Apart from ethical issues about transparency, there are also questions of misinformation and plagiarism. For example, AI bots, including ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing AI and Google’s Bard, are prone to “hallucinating,” the term for spouting false information confidently. Additionally, they’re trained on human-created content — almost always without the original author’s knowledge or permission — and sometimes use identical syntax to the source material. 

Starting last year, tech publication CNET used an in-house AI model to write at least 73 economic explainers. Unfortunately, apart from the initially cagey approach that only revealed it was written by AI if you clicked on the byline, it also included numerous factual errors and nearly identical phrasing from other websites’ articles. As a result, CNET was forced to make extensive corrections and pause its use of the tool — however, one of its sister sites has already at least experimented with using it again.

Almost every music streaming service on the market offers a radio feature, allowing you to create an automatically generated playlist around a song or artist you love. For the most part, however, those features don’t offer a lot of flexibility. You pick a single song or artist and the platform does the rest – as is the case with Spotify and Apple Music.

Google has begun rolling out a redesigned radio feature on YouTube Music the company claims provides users with a lot more control over their listening experience. Among the new features the refreshed experience includes is the ability to pick up to 30 artists when creating your own radio station. You can also decide how frequently those artists repeat and apply filters that change the mood of the resulting playlist. For instance, a few of the selections include “chill,” “downbeat” and “pump-up.”

It’s also possible to adjust the parameters you set after creating a station by tapping the “Tune” option that appears at the bottom of the interface once you’re listening to your new playlist. Naturally, you can save the station to revisit it later. Once the new experience is available on your device, you will see a prompt in the main interface that says “Create a radio.” As with many of Google’s rollouts, it may take some time before you see the feature on your client.

On its own, it’s fair to say the feature won’t be enough to convince some to ditch Spotify and Apple Music for YouTube Music, but if you’re among the 50 million subscribers Google says has access to the service, it may prompt you to use it more frequently or convert the free trial you got with your phone into a paid subscription.

Horror movie powerhouse Blumhouse is getting into video games. The company behind hits like M3GAN, Get Out, The Purge and Insidious is opening a production and publishing division that will work on original horror games for PC, consoles and mobile.

“We’re in the scary story business. We do films, we do TV and there is this massive, growing segment in media and entertainment called gaming,” Blumhouse president Abhijay Prakash told Bloomberg. “The space is hundreds of billions of dollars; we’re in a great position to try and access it.”

As with the film side of the production company, Blumhouse Games will keep the budgets modest. It plans to release games that cost under $10 million to make. Rather than adapting its own movies (something Blumhouse has tried in the past) into games, the company will look for projects that are in development and offer studios financial support, creative insight and the Blumhouse name to slap on their titles.

Veteran game producer Zach Wood — who was recently involved in Prey: Mooncrash and Redfall — will run the creative side of Blumhouse Games. Don Sechler, a former PlayStation executive who worked closely with indie studios, will oversee the operational and financial aspects.

It's hardly the first time that a movie studio has opened a gaming division. Disney used to have one, as did Lucasfilm (which now licenses its properties to external developers). Annapurna Interactive has perhaps set the template for Blumhouse Games to follow, though. The games division of Annapurna Pictures has an excellent track record as an indie publisher, having released the likes of What Remains of Edith Finch, Florence, Donut County, Outer Wilds, If Found..., Neon White, Stray and Sayonara Wild Hearts over the last six years.

Hey, if Twitter is making money from it, why not? Facebook’s parent company, Meta, announced its own Twitter Blue-like subscription called Meta Verified on Sunday morning. Mark Zuckerberg took to his newly launched broadcast channel to share the news, saying the subscription service would give users a blue badge, additional impersonation protection and direct access to customer support. Meta plans to test the subscription first in Australia and New Zealand before rolling it out to other countries. When Meta Verified does come to the US, it will cost $15 per month through the company's apps on iOS and Android. On the web, where app store commissions don't apply, the service will be $12 per month.

The company told Engadget the subscription will only be available to users 18 years or older. Meta will also require a government-issued ID that matches the Facebook or Instagram account’s profile name and photo. Once you're verified, you’re locked in to that profile name, username, date of birth and photo. If you want to change, you’ll have to go through the verification process again.

The blue tick on Twitter does come with the cringe-inducing text of: “This account is verified because it’s subscribed to Twitter Blue.” (And you know I click to check.) Will Meta take a similar approach? And can we stop our egos from chasing that Instagram blue tick? And by “we,” I mean… me.

– Mat Smith

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

The biggest stories you might have missed

The best President's Day sales on tech we could find

Hitting the Books: Meet the man who helped Microsoft break into the entertainment business

A new Civilization game is in development

PlayStation VR2 review: A great headset that should be cheaper

The best tablets for 2023

We’ve got picks for every ecosystem

Engadget

While tablets don’t always get the same level of attention as smartphones or laptops – landing right in the middle in size and specs – they’ve become an increasingly important device for many, particularly with the shift to working and learning from home. There are a lot of options, so it can be difficult to pick the right one. We’ve done a bunch of the hard work for you, and we’ve got our top picks across a range of categories and prices, smartly timed after the release of the latest slates from both Apple and Samsung.

Continue reading. 

Anime classics, including ‘Sailor Moon,’ ‘Naruto’ and ‘Death Note,’ are free to watch on YouTube

Viz Media has put a lot of free anime up on its YouTube channel.

Viz Media has uploaded some of the most well-known anime series to YouTube, for free. You can watch Sailor Moon – the old series that aired in the ‘90s – Naruto, Death Note, Inuyasha, Hunter X Hunter and others on the publisher's account. Viz has organized the episodes into playlists. However, you’ll have to be in the correct region (North America, it seems) to get access. No free anime for us Brits at the moment.

Continue reading.

Meta is bringing Telegram-like ‘channels’ to Instagram

The company will test the feature on Messenger and Facebook as well.

Meta has set its sights on copying a new messaging app: Telegram. Mark Zuckerberg just showed off “broadcast channels,” a new Instagram feature that brings one-way messaging to the app. The company is testing the feature with a handful of creators and plans to bring the Telegram-like functionality to Facebook and Messenger as well. Broadcast channels allow creators to stream updates to their followers’ inboxes, much like channels on Telegram. Those who join the channels can react to messages and vote in polls, but can’t participate in the conversation directly.

Continue reading.

NBA legend Paul Pierce settles with SEC over allegedly false crypto statements

He plugged EthereumMax on Twitter without disclosing payments he received.

NBA Hall of Famer Paul “The Truth” Pierce agreed to pay $1.4 million to settle charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission over a cryptocurrency he promoted on Twitter. The government agency found Pierce violated anti-touting and antifraud provisions of federal securities laws. Pierce’s case echoes Kim Kardashian’s $1.26 million settlement in October for plugging the same currency. Pierce and Kardashian were also sued last year for their involvement in the scheme.

Continue reading.

The rumors were true: Facebook parent company Meta is preparing to launch a Twitter Blue-like subscription called Meta Verified. On Sunday morning, Mark Zuckerberg took to his newly launched broadcast channel to share the news. He said the subscription service would give users a blue badge, additional impersonation protection and direct access to customer support. "This feature is about increasing authenticity and security across our services," Zuckerberg said, adding Meta would test the subscription first in Australia and New Zealand before rolling it out to other countries. Meta Verified will cost $15 per month when users subscribe through the company's apps on iOS. On the web, where Apple's up to 30 percent commission on in-app purchases doesn't apply, the service will cost $12 per month. The subscription will cover both Instagram and Facebook accounts. 

Rumors that Meta was preparing to trial a paid verification service started to swirl at the beginning of February when reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi discovered code referencing "paid blue badge" and "identity verification."  

Developing...

Some of us are destined to lead successful lives thanks to the circumstances of our birth. Some of us, like attorney Bruce Jackson, are destined to lead such lives in spite them. Raised in New York's Amsterdam housing projects and subjected to the daily brutalities of growing up a black man in America, Jackson's story is ultimately one of tempered success. Sure he went on to study at Georgetown Law before representing some of the biggest names in hip hop — LL Cool J, Heavy D, the Lost Boyz and Mr. Cheeks, SWV, Busta Rhymes — and working 15 years as Microsoft's associate general counsel. But at the end of the day, he is still a black man living in America, with all the baggage that comes with it.

In his autobiography, Never Far from Home (out now from Atria), Jackson recounts the challenges he has faced in life, of which there are no shortage: from being falsely accused of robbery at age 10 to witnessing the murder of his friend at 15 to spending a night in lockup as an adult for the crime of driving his own car; the shock of navigating Microsoft's lillywhite workforce following years spent in the entertainment industry, and the end of a loving marriage brought low by his demanding work. While Jackson's story is ultimately one of triumph, Never Far from Home reveals a hollowness, a betrayal, of the American Dream that people of Bill Gates' (and this writer's) complexion will likely never have to experience. In the excerpt below, Jackson recalls his decision to leave a Napster-ravaged music industry to the clammy embrace of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. 

Atria Books

Excerpted from Never Far From Home My Journey from Brooklyn to Hip Hop, Microsoft, and the Law by Bruce Jackson. Published by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 2023 by Bruce Jackson. All rights reserved.

“We gotta figure out a way to stop this.”

In the late 1990s, the digital revolution pushed the music business into a state of flux. And here was Tony Dofat, sitting in my office, apoplectic, talking about how to stop Napster and other platforms from taking the legs out from under the traditional recording industry.

I shook my head. “If they’re already doing it, then it’s too late. Cat’s out of the bag. I don’t care if you start suing people, you’re never going back to the old model. It’s over.”

In fact, lawsuits, spearheaded by Metallica and others, the chosen mode of defense in those early days of the digital music onslaught, only served to embolden consumers and publicize their cause. Free music for everyone! won the day.

These were terrifying times for artists and industry executives alike. A decades-old business model had been built on the premise that recorded music was a salable commodity.

Artists would put out a record and then embark on a promotional tour to support that record. A significant portion of a musician’s income (and the income of the label that supported the artist) was derived from the sale of a physical product: recorded albums (or singles), either in vinyl, cassette, or compact disc. Suddenly, that model was flipped on its head... and still is. Artists earn a comparative pittance from downloads or streams, and most of their revenue is derived from touring, or from monetizing social media accounts whose numbers are bolstered by a song’s popularity. (Publicly, Spotify has stated that it pays artists between $.003 and $.005 per stream. Translation: 250 streams will result in revenue of approximately one dollar for the recording artist.)

Thus, the music itself has been turned primarily into a marketing tool used to entice listeners to the product: concert and festival tickets, and a social media advertising platform. It is a much tougher and leaner business model. Additionally, it is a model that changed the notion that record labels and producers needed only one decent track around which they could build an entire album. This happened all the time in the vinyl era: an artist came up with a hit single, an album was quickly assembled, often with filler that did not meet the standard established by the single. Streaming platforms changed all of that. Consumers today seek out only the individual songs they like, and do it for a fraction of what they used to spend on albums. Ten bucks a month gets you access to thousands of songs on Spotify or Pandora or Apple Music roughly the same amount a single album cost in the pre-streaming era. For consumers, it has been a landmark victory (except for the part about artists not being able to create art if they can’t feed themselves); for artists and record labels, it has been a catastrophic blow.

For everyone connected to the music business, it was a shock to the system. For me, it was provocation to consider what I wanted to do with the next phase of my career. In early 2000, I received a call from a corporate recruiter about a position with Microsoft, which was looking for an in-house counsel with a background in entertainment law — specifically, to work in the company’s burgeoning digital media division. The job would entail working with content providers and negotiating deals in which they would agree to make their content — music, movies, television shows, books — available to consumers via Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. In a sense, I would still be in the entertainment business; I would be spending a lot of time working with the same recording industry executives with whom I had built prior relationships.

But there were downsides, as well. For one thing, I was recently married, with a one-year-old baby and a stepson, living in a nice place in the New York City suburbs. I wasn’t eager to leave them—or my other daughters—three thousand miles behind while I moved to Microsoft’s headquarters in the Pacific Northwest. From an experience standpoint, though, it was almost too good an offer to turn down.

Deeply conflicted and at a crossroads in my career, I solicited advice from friends and colleagues, including, most notably, Clarence Avant. If I had to name one person who has been the most important mentor in my life, it would be Clarence, “the Black Godfather.” In an extraordinary life that now spans almost ninety years, Clarence has been among the most influential men in Black culture, music, politics, and civil rights. It’s no surprise that Netflix’s documentary on Clarence featured interviews with not just a who’s who of music and entertainment industry superstars, but also former US presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

In the early 1990s, Clarence became chairman of the board of Motown Records. As lofty a title as that might be, it denotes only a fraction of the wisdom and power he wielded. When the offer came down from Microsoft, I consulted with Clarence. Would I be making a mistake, I wondered, by leaving the music business and walking away from a firm I had started? Clarence talked me through the pros and cons, but in the end, he offered a steely assessment, in a way that only Clarence could.

“Son, take your ass to Microsoft, and get some of that stock.”

Here's something to occupy your weekend if you're an anime fan. Viz Media has uploaded some of the most well-known anime series out there to YouTube and made them available to stream for free. You can now find shows such as Sailor Moon — the old series that aired in the 90s, not the remake, Sailor Moon Crystal — Naruto, Death Note, Inuyasha and Hunter X Hunter on the publisher's account. From what we can see, Viz has organized the episodes into playlists, which should make binge watching them easier.

The episodes are punctuated with ads, though you've probably already expected that for free content. Also, they're not visible in some regions, so you may have to use a VPN, depending on where you are. Take note that Viz uploaded the Japanese audio versions of the shows with English subtitles, and they haven't been remastered to fit modern aspect ratios. This is a great chance to enjoy older shows that may not be readily available on streaming services, though, especially if you're feeling nostalgic or were too young to watch them when they first aired. 

Octopath Traveler 2 is a retro-styled RPG, set in another steampunk-esque fantasy world. Square Enix isn’t reinventing the turn-based RPG for this sequel, instead expanding and (mildly) correcting some of the weaker parts of the original. There are new battle dynamics and moves, a well-utilized day-and-night game mechanism, and shared stories that attempt to convey a connection between the eight narratives. But it’s still a casual one. If Final Fantasy XV was about four best buddies going on a road-trip, then Octopath Traveler 2 is more like an Uber Pool rideshare. There might be friendly small talk, but there’s still not enough of a meaningful connection between the eight protagonists.

Nintendo

Octopath Traveler 2 doesn’t offer any technical graphical upgrades I need to explain, although there seems to be a little more detail to both the sprites and environments. It’s still a pretty game. Half of the appeal is how games like this coax my memories of 16- and 32-bit games.

Having said that, the team behind this series has realized they can play with the scale a bit more: this is the Nintendo Switch, not a SNES. In some of the opening scenes for Hikari the warrior, characters rush past a crowd of 40 or so fighting in a desert. Developers Acquire and Team Asano have amped up the cinematic cutscenes a little more, too. Cameras will pan out and around your characters, as they brood on cliff faces, or as they’re forced to kill their abusive parents.

OP2 tries, only ever so slightly, to convey the idea that you’re on a collective journey. Once you’ve chosen your main character (who will be ‘locked’ into your party until you complete all five chapters of their story), you’ll bump into other travelers. Then you’ll be given the option to play through their origin story, or circle back to it at the local tavern at a time that’s suitable for you.

Nintendo

Occasionally there will be some minor banter elements, called “shared stories” where two characters will share a few scenes together. These often connect stories and offer up some rewards. Still, it’s a little too infrequent – and not enough to get the impression this is a team of heroes helping each other to save the world from various calamities – or become a global dance superstar. (Yes, that’s someone’s aim.)

Osvald, the scholar, starts his journey in prison, accused of killing his wife and child. He’s this game’s defacto black mag,e with an array of elemental attacks. Still, this time, given his gritty backstory, his path actions (abilities and interactions you can make with non-playable characters in towns, and generally any time outside of battles) aren’t your typical black mage traits. One is scrutinize, a risky way of gleaning information from characters, while the other is mug, where you can duel pretty much any NPC you come across, and steal their possessions if you win.

However, with eight characters, many path actions overlap. Castti, an item expert and apothecary, can inquire for the same information you can get from scrutinizing, without any risk – she just has to be a high enough level. Meanwhile, Throné, the thief, can steal during daylight hours, giving the same results of a mugging without the fight.

Alongside those skills, each character also starts with a unique talent, offering battle abilities or passive skills that others won’t be able to use, even after unlocking secondary classes.

Nintendo

Like the original, the battle system comes into its own once you can switch around job roles. To do so, however, you’ll need to find the guild for each job to unlock it. Some are easy enough to find – I came across two of the ‘secret’ jobs entirely by accident – while others are eluding me even now, 60 hours into the game, at roughly level 60 across my party. Where are you, hunter guild!?

More effort has been made to tonally differentiate the eight tales of Octopath Traveler 2 compared to its predecessor. With Temenos the cleric, who works as some sort of blasphemy hunter/mystery solver, gets a few scenes where he’s trying to solve crime scene mysteries. It’s not exactly Phoenix Wright, with all the clues there, twinkling away, waiting for you to walk up to them, but it helps to make the chapters feel different to the others.

Partitio, the merchant, likewise, has a story that feels like some whimsical K-drama, as this entrepreneur makes friends of enemies and travels the world striking deals. He gets an oddly bizarre montage of his final deal striking, hopping on ships and visiting a few secondary characters you probably already forgot. The aforementioned Castii starts the game with amnesia (ah that video game classic), and if there’s anything shared across most of the characters, it’s the sense that most of them are unreliable narrators. Rounding out the cast you have Agnea, the dancer, and Ochette, the hunter. (Not all eight will resonate with everyone, will they?)

Even the final chapters for each of the eight characters only results in a few extra banter scenes. I’m playing through the final chapters for each character, and if it's anything like OP1, this will probably unlock a true final area, dungeon and boss. At this point, I doubt all the themes and story will coalesce into a satisfying conclusion — there’s been some allusions to a ‘shadow’, but that’s true of 90 percent of all RPGs. /I’ll be happy with another challenging boss.

Nintendo

The battle dynamics follow the same formula of the last game: you aim to break the enemies’ defenses through applying elemental and weapon weaknesses. Break them, and they’ll stop attacking — or reset the charge-up to their high damage abilities – allowing you to do increased damage, or carefully heal and prepare for the next part of the fight. Once again, you’ll be able to boost attacks as a battle continues, augmenting damage or extending the length of strengthening spells and other boons.

The sequel adds latent powers, a limit-break styled super attack unique to each character. For some, this allows them to handily perform two actions at once, while others will deal augmented damage or supercharge spells and physical attacks. This was how I found my favorite characters and they seemed to stick around the squad longer. (Thank you for your service, Throné.)

Day and night affect the entire game, and thankfully it’s an easy trigger button that you can tap at any time outside of a battle. There are benefits to fighting during night, depending on the characters. Throné and Temenos offer debuffs and buffs at the start of nighttime fights, although it seems like fights are generally tougher than during the day. You will also come across different enemies depending on the time of day. This transition will also move NPCs around the town, or make them disappear entirely. The music also thoughtfully segues between the two states, which is a nice touch. Yet again, OP2 has a polished soundtrack, filled with orchestral bangers and several battle-theme earworms.

OP2 builds on the strengths of the first game, with lots of non-linear options to the story, with enough of a difference between chapters to break it all up. However, there still isn’t quite enough cohesion between the travelers and the tales they weave.

Octopath Traveler 2 launches on Switch, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 and Steam on February 24th.