Mastering the Break and Boost systems in Octopath Traveler 2

How and when to press the advantage

Octopath Traveler 2‘s combat is a traditional, turn-based affair built on studying and analyzing opponents. You defend against attacks while picking away at their defense, eventually breaking their guard through repeated hits to their weak points, then capitalizing for maximum damage. These ideas manifest in the Break and Boost systems that Octopath Traveler 2 gives you to work with, and mastering them is key to getting through some harder fights.

Those who played the first Octopath Traveler will feel right at home on the sequel’s battlefield. Your party and the enemy take turns firing off attacks at each other until only one group is left standing. Disrupting that turn order and hitting for big damage are what Break and Boost do, respectively. Here’s how, exactly, those concepts work out.

Mastering the Break system

Every enemy has a shield marker, with a number on it, and a small set of squares adjacent to it. The shield represents the enemy’s guard, and how many times you’ll need to bust through it to Break them.

You can Break an enemy by hitting its weak points, noted by the squares. While a new enemy’s squares will be unknown to you at first, discovering those weaknesses will turn the “?” boxes into icons for easy recollection. (Additionally, some party members can reveal weaknesses during battle.)

Say an enemy has a shield with a 2 in the center, and has a Dagger icon as one of their vulnerabilities; hitting them twice with a Dagger will Break them. This not only steals a turn, giving you time to wallop on them, but also drastically reduces their defenses.

This is good in two ways. First off, it means one less round of attacks from the enemy. But two, it gives you a chance to either heal up, or really unload some damage. And to capitalize on that, we also have Boost.

Mastering the Boost system

Boost makes up the second half of Octopath Traveler 2‘s Boost and Break systems. Every turn, your party members generate 1 BP, or Boost Point. Using this, you can power up the potency of your abilities.

How this works depends on the skill. For some, it will increase the damage done. For others, like a standard Attack command, it may increase the number of attacks your character throws out. You can Boost an ability up to 4x, or three times. Each character can hold onto a maximum of 5 BP.

This means that you should use Boost Points when you can. You can’t take them with you into new fights, and you can’t bank more than five at once. The most ideal situation is to Break an enemy, then unload using boosted abilities.

That’s not always the best-case scenario, though. Maybe your party is a little low, and you want to Boost an Attack to Break the foe, delaying their turn and giving your side time to recover. Or you could use BP in combination with latent powers to unleash a severe combination of hits.

By capitalizing on the Boost ability to throw out more or heavier attacks, alongside the offensive boost Break provides, your scrappy party of adventurers can more easily tackle the realm’s fiercest monsters. Just make sure to keep an eye on that BP gauge and spend ’em while you’ve got ’em.