I cannot wrap my head around why David Cage isn't considered more of a joke in the industry, and why his games are actually praised and celebrated. His games feel like something Tommy Wiseau would come up with.
Interested to know why you thought so negatively of the Octo.
Probably closer to ambivalence than outright dislike. Felt like a really by the numbers vanilla RPG trying to capitalize on nostalgia to me, rather than an actual attempt to make a great game the same way that the old games it's influenced by did. The way that character-separated stories resulted in party members who aren't being focused on behaving like zombies left a bad taste in my mouth, and I found the narrative completely uninteresting to begin with.
The visuals also rub me the wrong way. The idea of pixelated sprites on a 3D diorama-like plane is really really cool (and could potentially look amazing), but I think it only works if all three dimensions are actually pixelated (like Minecraft but with small enough blocks that you could actually make appealing visuals from them) rather than the smoothed out and blurred/bloomed (or whatever you call that filter) to death look. At that point, the pixelation adds nothing really, and just looks kinda dumb.
Gameplay was completely blegh.
I didn't actually get that far into it before tossing it aside, so take that with a grain of salt-- I just didn't care, ultimately.