How can you say octopath was boring and then say sea of stars is better??
Not a single interesting thing happened in Octopath as far as I played, in neither of the games.
Just endless amounts of text saying exactly nothing. Completely lifeless experience, not a single character talking like a real person would.
In my experience, characters in Japanese traditional RPGs only VERY rarely act and talk like real people, more like some stereotype the writer had in their head - I won't lie, it is possible the translation was making this worse, but I don't know Japanese, so hard to say.
Sea Of Stars wasn't great writing-wise, that's for sure, but still way better than that overly wordy pseudo-important blabla Japanese games tend to devolve into.
There was passion in it, you could see that someone actually cared and thought about how a character with a believable personality would act.
They didn't always pull it off. It was on a fan fiction level, writing-wise, but I'd always rate that higher than those soulless walls of text Octopath bores you with.
Now, I can deal with a lack of good writing if the rest of the game keeps me interested (aka gameplay).
But Octopath (both 1 and 2) fell flat here in a way Japanese JRPGs (funny you have to specify that now) often do: Theoretically interesting combat system that is engaging at first, but 90% wasted complexity because the games are so easy you notice you can get by with mostly just basic attacks. Also, as pointed out: Grindy for all the wrong reasons.
Sea Of Stars was MUCH more unique and interesting (and sometimes even challenging) gameplay-wise.