at about the 20 hour mark where I fell off the first octopath, so it would be safe to say that 2 does a much better job with what is inherently a very difficult design premise
there is a small bandage fix for the characters not interacting with each other (outside of banter scenes) in the form of 4 2-man side-stories. it's neat but it draws more attention to how weird this structure is
in any other RPG, a single character or a cast around them are propelled by a tension encapsulating the entire world they live in. there's rarely a sense that the overarching narrative and the setting are separate entities; it's the same wave the characters are all riding
the worlds in octopath 1 and 2 are static stages where stories mostly happen in them and not to them. each of these stories, outside of minor connecting threads, exist in their own little pocket universes
how could you do it any differently while maintaining this nonlinear design format? an overarching narrative is not compatible with allowing a player to progress through these individual character stories in any order, or else you'd be experiencing a linear story in a jumbled order (you can see how BOTW struggles with making the flashbacks not rely too heavily on knowledge from each other)
there's ways this could potentially be done better, like having a global inciting incident spur on all of these disparate stories simultaneously, making the pure coincidence of them less silly. but ultimately, the lack of a singular throughline is the cost of this free-form structure, which octopath 2 makes a better case for
QOL improvements, more areas to explore which cover a wider range of levels (so there's less grinding), the actual story and voice acting quality is a big step up over 1's agonizing boredom, and the world is a lot more fleshed out
even if you don't like either of these games, they're an interesting attempt at what seems like an impossible design problem to solve