My apologies if this has been answered already but have been casually following this thread to avoid spoilers... But do we know if there is a way to prevent overleveling for the individual chapters?
My understanding is that the later chapters for the individual characters stories, you will need your characters to be higher leveled. And that characters not in the party don't receive experience. Wouldn't this create issues with the leveling curve if, say, you started with Cyrus, played through his 3rd chapter, and then went back to do Chapter 2 for other characters? Since Cyrus always has to be around, and will now be at a higher level?
I know in Xenoblade games I run into issues where I avoid/miss unique monsters or quests and then come back to them waaaaaay overleveled and feel like I missed out on some of the challenge. If this assumption is true about Octopath Traveler, then wouldn't it incentive you to finish all the Chapter 2s in a row, and swap people in and out regularly? Maybe have 3 different sets of teams to rotate through stories. If they were able to counteract this, then it will be nice to just do chapters at a whim and not worry about it.
I admit, like a lot of people, I have been putting way too much thought into what character I want to start with. I really liked Primrose's playstyle in the demo. I like the idea of Cyrus' story. I really like the idea of the Thief and Merchant skills. In general, I really like that a lot of the base classes are the more quirky classes akin to Final Fantasy ones... Kind of avoiding Olberic because I am tired of main heroes in JRPGs with swords. The prospect of playing through the whole game with a thief, merchant, or scholar is really compelling.