You've seen who it's made by. You've seen the big boy reviews. I promise you this game will not dissapoint you, if you're even slightly interested or intrigued by the JRPG genre, and I genuinely cannot praise this game enough.

For starters. It's Square Enix, and this is the 2nd game in the series. Besides the gorgeous graphics, the amazing gameplay, and the wonderful soundtrack, they've pretty much polished up every aspect of the game and made it better in every way compared to the first installment. (this isn't to say the first game is awful, it really isn't and you should definitely play it if you enjoyed this one)
The only thing that could deter people would either be the random enemy encounters (which is why I mentioned you should be a bit intrigued by the JRPG genre) or how the story pacing goes. Each character has a set number of chapters, each chapter is "locked" behind a specific level requirement. You COULD go underleveled, but it will be harder to beat the aforementioned chapter. So you might end up in a situation where you'd do the 2nd chapter of every character in your party, instead of doing all X chapters of a specific character, and progressing their full story all at once. This way of storytelling has it's own charm, so don't feel too worried about it.

In-between chapters, you'll mostly find yourself doing either side quests, or wandering around enemy areas to level up your party. Besides that, what you should do is explore the map. There are hidden chests around every part of the map, and some contain strong/unique equipment that could easily mitigate the underleveled issue. Gear is really strong, so if you're bored, you should definitely explore the open-world and do side quests. If you aren't the exploring type, for the most part shop equipment will suffice assuming you're properly leveled.

The characters system is what makes Octopath stand out, as you're given the choice to pick between 8 travelers, each with their respective skill-set and role. Don't spend too much time worrying about who you choose, you'll end up recruiting all of them at one point. Parties are made of 4 characters, so depending on how you decide to level up your characters, you might end up having to level up 2 separate parties from the ground up. Alternatively, just keep 2 overleveled characters, and swap 2 underleveled characters, and level them up like that. It's up to you. While the characters themselves don't interact a lot between each other in their respective main stories, they have a lot of side banter that happens during a character's specific chapter. Say.. the Warrior experiences a scary moment in his chapter, and one of the party members offers to help during the "banter dialogue". Besides that, a few side stories exist where 2 characters end up working with each other, and during the final chapter of the game you'll see them all together in the story.

The soundtrack is 10/10, nothing to comment here.
The story might be a bit confusing at times, or have obvious plot twists, but overall I'd say it's a 9/10. Every character has a refreshing story that is different compared to everyone else's.
The HD-2D graphics is something that started with the Octopath series, but has been expanded upon by now in other games. Still extremely gorgeous.
The voice acting for this game has a few small hiccups sometimes, and you will notice it especially on a specific side character, but overall it's great, and they've worked with pretty big names this time around. You might definitely recognize some of them.

The combat is more complicated than it might seem at first. Enemies have different weaknesses. Find the weakness, keep hitting them with what they're weak against, and you'll end up stunning them. While simple on paper, every character has a different role, and a different type of "action" in combat. The Apothecary is able to make concoctions using items found in shops or while exploring. The Merchant can't do that, but the Merchant can summon NPC's from around the map, each with their own skills. So on and so forth.
Side note for the tryhards out there, Square Enix has the tendency to hide final, optional boss fights that legit just feel unfair to play against. Have fun.

The open-world map is pretty big. You have a lot of terrain to cover and explore, and there are countless places you should/have to visit, either they be cities, caves, hidden entrances to whatever shenanigans the devs were thinking in that moment, etc. Every part of the map is part of a "region", and every region is different from each other. Deserts, actual Cities (not small towns), jungles, mountains, and many more.

Overall, the story is 9/10, soundtrack 10/10, graphics 10/10, quality-of-life 8/10, gameplay/combat 10/10. Play the game, it IS worth every cent.