Which Octopath Traveler Game Should I Play?

"Should I play Octopath Traveler 1, Octopath Traveler 2, or Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent?"

[---OT1/OT2---]
OT1 has 8 distinct quests, one for each character, which vary wildly in quality. It has a weaker central plot and a few standout stories.
OT2 takes everything that OT1 did and then does it better, with improvements across the board. You don't need to play OT1 to understand OT2, but you will miss some references.
OT1 costs $50 USD and OT2 costs $70 USD.

[---OT: CotC---]
CotC uses most of the assets from OT1, including sprites, backgrounds, characters, and locations and then adds new content, gacha, timers, and microtransactions. There are now 150+ travelers with short quests and abilities.
Side stories are weaker, but the main plot is strong.
As a live service game CotC has years of significant updates with more to come.
Gear progression is more curated than the Switch games.
Since Square Enix profits when you spend rubies to revive, bosses often feature unfair mechanics and recommended levels far below what is actually required.
Traveler quest chains are mostly mediocre-to-bad, with some exceptions. The worst ones destroy the continuity of OT1/OT2 or are essentially character assassinations, so it's best to think of them as non-canon fan fiction.

CotC is free to play. Most content and of the story can be cleared without spending any money. F2P means missing out on optimizations, collecting FOMO units, and the very highest-end content. If you do spend money most packages are very expensive.

[---Verdict---]
All three are fun, developed games with a few major differences.

[---A warning example---]
Beware the abject despair of the anon who invested too much of his time and money into this fun but greedy game, and heed the warning
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/vmg/thread/1302098#p1315271
Not sure how I'm gonna cope with dumping 3k rubies and getting nothing worth talking about. Everyone's gonna have Rinyuu but me. Clerics are my weakest job, and I'm gonna lack the best and most important one ever. Everyone's gonna be using her for everything. Now I'll have to save up 6000 more rubies to spark her on a future banner like Elrica's, meaning she's gonna cost me 9000 rubies just for a single copy.. And that will take at least six months assuming I skip literally everything from now until then. Bargello, Live A Live (though that was doomed anyway as I'd need 12,000 rubies for those 2 banners), 1.5 anniversary, all the other good travelers...hell, Elrica might even come before I hit 6k. And all of that will have to be done without Rinyuu, the most important support in the game to have. I don't know what I'm gonna do or how to cope, and FOMO's got me too hard to uninstall. I'm not looking forward to being miserable for such a long time period.
Gonna work on scrounging together what rubies I can, but this is the darkest time I've had in this game, and I've had many dark times.