Octopath Traveler 0 is where the series finally clicked for me

I’ve always appreciated, but never quite loved, Square Enix’s Octopath Traveler games. On paper, they’re tailor-made for me — glorious throwback turn-based RPGs from the company behind my all-time favourite series, Final Fantasy, that feature an absolutely stunning “HD-2D” retro-inspired pixellated visual style.

But they’ve often felt too bloated, with excessively lengthy campaigns that drag even more due to a bizarre structure that segmented characters and story threads. 2023’s Octopath Traveller 2 took some steps to improve these issues over its 2018 predecessor, but I still found myself failing to fully engage due to the persisting feelings of disjointedness and a ridiculously long playtime of 60-plus hours.

With Octopath Traveller 0, however, the series has finally clicked for me. While some of my earlier gripes remain, and a few new ones arise, the core experience feels much more focused this time, giving this prequel a beating heart that I felt its predecessors were lacking.

I feel surprised to say that not only due to my conflicting feelings about the other games, but because of 0’s unique origins. That’s because the game falls into an interesting space of being both a port of a mobile game and a pseudo-remake. It takes the bones of the smartphone title Champions of the Continent, strips its gacha systems and adds a slew of new story and gameplay material to stitch it all together. And while that might sound like a Frankenstein’s Monster of a game, it actually works remarkably well.

In 0, you play as a warrior of the guard of the small town of Wishvale. When a trio of sadistic villains lay siege to your town in search of divine rings, it’s up to you to venture out to stop the fiends while rebuilding your home. Immediately, this gives 0’s narrative an emotional hook that was sorely lacking for me in the previous Octopath games. While those certainly had their affecting story beats, there was largely still a frustrating lack of connection between the individual characters. Even after playing a few dozen hours of the second game, I still can’t even really tell you what it was about. (Compare that to another Square Enix HD-2D RPG, the magnificent Live A Live, which does the whole “short story” thing in a far more cohesive, memorable and narratively satisfying way.)

But in 0, I didn’t feel that same sense of disconnect because everything comes back to Wishvale. Much of this is owed to the fact that this is the first Octopath game where you create your own hero and play as them from start to finish. This ensures that you never lose sight of the central Wishvale yarn. Even when you’re recruiting new characters — of which there’s a sizeable roster of 30 — it’s all rooted in your journey to have them help restore your home.

And that feels weighty here because everyone has a role to play in that endeavour. Through a surprisingly robust town building mechanic, you’ll be constructing all kinds of homes, shops, farms and other buildings in which the people you recruit can contribute. An early example of this is Tyme, a man who fled the burning Wishvale to drink his sorrows away. After convincing him to push past his pain, he’s now in my town, periodically giving me stone, a material I can use for other buildings. What’s more, the world of Orsterra is filled with resources to collect throughout its regions, constantly making you feel like you’re making progress towards Wishvale even when you’re far away from it.

Town-building mechanics work surprisingly well

All of this connective tissue has helped keep me invested throughout 0, even when it brought up some of those aforementioned issues I had with the other Octopath games. In particular, there is still an inherent detachment between much of the cast of characters. When you begin a new quest chain, the party you had with you will suddenly disappear in cutscenes, with only your silent protagonist being featured in them alongside whichever new faces are relevant to that particular storyline. For me, RPGs are at their best when your party feels interconnected and heavily tied to the main story, so I still don’t love this angle.

But again, it’s much more palatable as everything does come back to Wishvale. And having everyone unite for this common good does create a unique sense of community. In all honesty, I was surprised to see myself caring about this little town. Games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley usually aren’t my jam, but implementing these kinds of town-building mechanics in an RPG works really well.

0 also handles the anthology storytelling format better than previous Octopath games. Essentially, there are a few main arcs tied to each of the villains, which already feels much more focused than the other games’ disparate storylines. It gives each arc a distinct and memorable flavour based on the antagonist in question, like an exploration of class warfare against the cruel aristocrat Herminia. All in all, the villains are resoundingly strong, provide each storyline with its own compelling hook.

That’s especially important because once again, this is another staggeringly massive game, and one that can take 100 hours to complete, no less. This makes it even longer than the other two Octopath games and, admittedly, it’s tested my patience at times. (For full transparency, I still haven’t fully beaten the game because of the significant time investment.) 0 definitely needn’t have been this long, especially since it’s only doubling down on the bloat that plagued its predecessors.

It’s particularly unfortunate because 0 really is one of those games that gets well and truly “good” once you’re a couple dozen hours in. It’s certainly decent in the opening stretch, but both the Wishvale town building and turn-based combat don’t properly come alive until you’ve made solid progress with them. For the former, the size of the land you have to work with (which already varies depending on the system you’re playing on) increases as you recruit more people and raise your Town Level, thus deepening this minigame.

Combat takes time to heat up

That’s not too bad, inherently, but the combat definitely suffers a bit more from this sluggish pacing early on. That’s because the game is designed around eight-person parties, but it can take a bit of time to get there. This means that the early battles are your regular small-party Octopath fare of using standard weapon-based attacks to exploit enemy weaknesses which, in turn, can “Break” them to cause brief periods of vulnerability. The clever Brave Point system also returns, allowing you to bank up to four points to launch multiple attacks at once or supercharge an ability. But on the whole, it’s largely just alternating between these two options without anything meatier to dig into.

But eventually, you’ll have enough characters to create eight-person parties, and that opens up battles in all kinds of ways. How this works is you’ll still have your main offensive four-person team in the front row, with what’s ostensibly a support team in the rear that can provide passive effects like SP (MP) restoration or buffs. But at any point, you can switch the teams, which, of course, adds a layer of strategy, especially when breaking and BP are concerned. Using your first row to render the enemy vulnerable before switching to the reserve team that’s fully stocked on BP means you can launch an all-out attack. Or on the flip side, perhaps a particularly tough boss will require you to have a more defensive lineup that can be swapped around.

Naturally, the potential party configurations will only become more intricate the more characters you unlock. And 0 features more stellar music from series composer Yasunori Nishiki, providing the necessary rousing swells to accompany the increasingly grand and challenging boss fights. When all of that comes together, Octopath Traveler really sings.

In the end, that’s the high that’s kept me going with 0. While it retains — and, at times, even exacerbates — the series’ core issues of structure and pacing, it makes significant improvements with respect to telling an overarching and emotionally satisfying story and bolstering it with interesting twists that you don’t often see in these kinds of RPGS, like town building and expanded party sizes. Unlike the other two Octopath games, I definitely see myself sticking through it to the end of 0, which is something I absolutely didn’t expect from a repurposed mobile game. If you’re willing to commit a lot of time to it, Octopath Traveler 0 is ultimately worth your while.

Octopath Traveler 0 is now available on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC.

Image credit: Square Enix