One time I simultaneously checkmated 4 kings across 3 different timelines. Another time, I checkmated 3 kings in two past timelines with the same bishop while simultaneously checkmating a pair of kings in the same present timeline with a single rook. This game is galaxy-brain-expanding in all the best ways. It's fantastic.

That said, there are flaws. Bishops are far more powerful than in standard chess, as are queens. A number of ordinary Chess opening moves are outright suicidal due to the way the enemy Queen can instantly checkmate your king 4 or 5 turns ago on a triagonal to the past (as you can't block it); until you get the hang of this you are better off going directly to a kingside castle on your opening move or moving the queen's bishop's pawn forward one square before you move the queen's pawn.

A number of the small-board game modes are very awkward due to the rule that you have to move on all boards in the present, even if you have no pieces on the board, forcing you to make cross-board moves right from the get-go.

On the flip side, the user interface is amazingly clear for what is literally a 4-dimensional set of events (the 3rd dimension of "height" is unused, so despite the name being "5d chess" the gameplay is actually just 4-dimensional: X/Y and T/L). Every crappy UI designer (for games and otherwise) should be forced to sit down and play this game so they can actually learn something about how to make an intuitive UI.

The only thing I think the game needs is a button that shows all legal or mandatory moves, because occasionally you get stuck in a position where the only way out is to go back in time or to make a zany multi-dimensional capture of a checking piece (which you don't notice because you didn't plan on it) and it can be a time-consuming affair to figure out what it is you need to do to make a legal move.

Octopath Traveler does an amazing job of modernizing the old school JRPG, but has a number of flaws that ultimately prevent me from recommending it to anyone but diehard JRPG fanatics. It's a valiant effort, and I expect their next game (whatever Triangle Strategy winds up being called) will improve on some of these issues and be a game I can whole-heartedly recommend. If you really enjoy JRPGs, you might want to pick this up on a sale.

Pros:
* The game isn't save-anywhere, but save points are exceedingly frequent through the main game, effectively giving you "save-anywhere" without the ability to abuse by saving after every battle.
* The graphics are absolutely gorgeous.
* The character designs are unique and the class support abilities give lots of customization possibilities. They also aren't all carbon copies of FF classes, but have their own flair.
* Some of the characters' stories were quite good. However, note that due to the way the story is structured, it acts as more of a "short story collection" rather than the "novel" that a JRPG usually is. This imposes a relative lack of intricacy to the plots, if you prefer highly detailed complex web-weaving plots, you won't find them here.

Cons:
* The progression is rather formulaic. Go to town, talk to people, use that character's plot ability a couple times, do dungeon, defeat boss, talk to people in town again, move on to the next story beat. It's literally 4 story beats times 8 characters for the main progression. None of these segments really stand out as unique or interesting.
* Due to the nonlinear nature of the game there's no serious interaction between the characters outside of a handful of bonus scenes. In addition, whichever members you don't have in your party at the time, you'll miss their bonus scenes, even if you've already unlocked all 8 characters.
* The extreme depth-of-field blur effect on the graphics caused some eyestrain for me in some areas. Would have appreciated the ability to turn that off. (It was the extreme foreground blur that bugged me, not the background blur.)
* The "protagonist" you select is locked in the party, despite there being no real reason for that to be the case, so he or she winds up being grossly overleveled relative to everyone else no matter what you do. If it's a damage output character, that damage output character will wind up dominating battles. In my case, Therion was doing so much more damage than everyone else that I quickly realized I could just set my party up to have a Merchant donating BP to him so I could just use Aeber's Reckoning every two turns. At that point, there was no reason to have anyone else doing anything other than just buffing Therion's speed, debuffing/breaking the enemy, or healing. This became dull and repetitive very fast. Why do anything else when Therion can just alternate between Steal SP and Aeber's Reckoning and steamroll the enemies?
* The final dungeon doesn't have any saving, forcing you to oneshot it all. The boss rush doesn't offer any real strategic value - you already beat the bosses, the boss rush versions aren't that much more difficult to make them more interesting, so why bother? Either they're absolute pushovers in which case they're a boring waste of time, or they're still a challenge, in which case the final boss is going to be downright murderous and the experience of repeatedly fighting the boss rush before you get to re-try the final boss is going to be miserable.
* There is a serious difficulty spike on the final boss, forcing some very tedious grinding, and there aren't any great grind spots that make it less miserable. I spent nearly 10 hours taking my party from level ~50 to level ~70... when Therion was already level 65. Given the lack of saving in the final dungeon, you either have to go after the boss and waste an hour or more, or just grind levels. This is certainly reminiscent of older JRPGs, but this really didn't need to be brought back. At the very least, an area with scaling enemies that pay out more and more XP/JP to lessen the tedium would have been helpful.
* The high damage output of the final boss virtually forces you to do certain things strategically. I won't go into detail, but I felt as though I was forced into using 1 of 4 of my support abilities to a particular thing on everyone. It's not customization if you're forced into having a certain setup!