(since I had an ask that I chose to make about her today)
I always felt like the title of her story boss lead-in track, “For Master” (師匠のために), was a bit of an outlier relative to the others and doesn’t mesh quite as well with her (very well-done!) story arc.
Most other Octopath “keywords” that come in via the soundtrack are more nuanced in terms of what the character’s goal is and what they ultimately achieve as a result of their quest. Olberic’s sought-after “Redemption” changes shape from simply tracking down and beating Erhardt to finding the man truly responsible for Hornberg’s demise, but in the process he redeems Erhardt as well and finds real redemption in fighting for a cause and freeing the town that Werner holds dominion over. Tressa’s “Treasure” is something concrete she sets out to find in chapter 3, and achieves, but Noa Wyndham’s hand in marriage the experiences on her journey and the diary she kept of them turns out to be the real treasure.
These “For” keywords are almost always chosen with a strong double entendre to coincide with the twists in a character’s story arc. Like with Therion, whose journey for “Freedom” from the bangle turns into something that sets him free from Darius and his past more generally, allowing him to look for the future. There’s a lot of the ethos of squeezing the character’s journey down to a word that changes meaning with the shift in context between chapter 1 and chapter 4, which I love as a writer. Pick a single word which the story can grow around, such that its original meaning and the new contextual meaning shine together like interwoven rainbows from a prism in a sunbeam.
On one level, H'aanit is on a quest to find her master Z'aanta, then rescue him from his petrification curse, but her journey takes on more significance once she fights the dragon. She’s becoming a legend, a master hunter in her own right, ultimately slaying the Redeye where Z'aanta failed, and ending up with tall tales to tell him. Her journey always felt to me like it was about becoming a master, and finding it in herself to become one, rather than just looking for a specific person. However, since she never finds an apprentice, the choice of “師匠”, a master in the sense of an instructor or a teacher, feels slightly misplaced. Maybe if she had a kid aiming to learn from her in her chapter one, then she was finally able to go home and give those lessons at the end of her story, it would have landed better.
Alternatively, something like “For Quarry” might have been nicer. Since her quest starts out as a hunt for Z'aanta, then becomes a quest to slay the Redeye. It has the bonus of carrying extra nuance of putting Graham out of his misery once endgame lore drops. (Since that was something she did “for” him, albeit unknowingly.)
Other “For _” comments: Primrose, who sets out for “Revenge” and does indeed achieve total and fairly satisfying revenge, is admittedly a bit of a counterexample. Albiet a slightly more bitter pill because of all that Simeon bullshit.
Ophilia, meanwhile, is like a weird case where the original text is weak but the localized version is strong enough to hold up. Her pre-boss motif is “For Light” (試練のために). The original text could more directly be translated as “For the Ritual” or “For the Kindling”, but Ophilia’s involvement with the church is as much about her family, her adoptive father Josef and sister Lianna, than it is a strong attachment to the dogma per se. It’s a major character focus that her sister was supposed to be the flamebearer but Ophilia took over so she could be with their father. And in the finale of the Ophilia arc, the focus is on saving her sister, bringing her back to the light, much more so than on the trial of the flamebearer per se. In that way, “For Light” is great because it can be about the kindling, but it’s also very much about bringing Lianna back into the light.
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