Octopath Traveler 0 is now the third main game in the series that began Square Enix’s “HD-2D” renaissance, taking both cult-classic and classically styled RPGs and imbuing them with a particular visual look and feel that pays homage to the heyday of 16-bit RPG excellence. Octopath itself has been iterated on enough that it’s forged its own identity within that framework, giving Octopath Traveler 0 the freedom to break some of its own conventions and iterate on others. It’s a reimagining of what an Octopath game means, and more than that, an excellent game in its own right.
Octopath Traveler 0 begins with character creation, which itself is a big departure from the Octopath norm. The games have previously told eight interconnected stories, each focused on named, individual characters. This new approach has you create your own protagonist, and they remain locked in your party throughout the entire game as the rest of it is filled in by various companion characters who you meet along your journey. The character creation is simplistic, with a handful of options for aspects like hairstyle and eye shape, but rendered in a retro pixel style that’s enough to give you a good deal of flexibility.
That pixel-art style is largely unchanged from the previous two installments, and like many of the HD-2D games, it’s an acquired taste. I found the lighting effects on the sprites to be distracting and washed out in handheld mode on Switch 2, but it looked much better on a big screen. Still, I find the art style in general to be fairly muddy and desaturated, and would appreciate the occasional vibrant splash of color, which Octopath 0 rarely provides.
Your protagonist is a resident of Wishvale, where a ritual celebration is interrupted by an attack from two strangers, Tytos and Auguste, searching for a magical relic in your midst. The two set the town ablaze and your friends scatter to safety. When you return, the town is fully destroyed and most of the village elders are dead. One of the few survivors bestows to you the relic Tytos and Auguste were searching for, a divine ring, making you the Ringbearer. The two attackers are in possession of their own rings, as is a third antagonist who tipped them off: a wealthy heiress named Lady Herminia. The conspiracy between these three to destroy your village in search of the ring that you hold propels the narrative and gives it dramatic stakes right from the start.
Those three antagonists are prime examples of one of Octopath Traveler 0’s great strengths, which is its cast of deliciously scene-chewing villains. Each is meant to represent an aspect of the ways power and influence can corrupt: Herminia is greedy and lives life to excess, and her ruthlessness in acquiring and maintaining her wealth has given her a reputation as a witch; Auguste is a playwright whose fame is renowned, as most of his viewers remain unaware of the sadistic ways he abuses people to inspire his dramatic flourishes; and Tytos is a famous war hero with political and military power at his back, which he uses to enforce his will. The theme throughout all of their stories, and the game as a whole, is that wealth, fame, and power corrupt.
To further that point, Octopath 0 delves into some very adult-oriented topics, with varying degrees of success and sensitivity. Auguste’s methods include torture, murder, and child endangerment. They’re stomach-churning in a way that very effectively sells his villainy. The choice to give Auguste a pale vampiric look while his identity as a playwright involves feeding on people’s suffering for his art is inspired, and his dramatic flair and cruelty reminded me of one of RPGs’ greatest villains, Final Fantasy 6’s Kefka. On the other hand, however, Herminia’s past and present includes references to prostitution, and her story’s treatment of sex work feels insensitive in a modern context.
Octopath 0’s story is delivered in episodic chapters, a mainstay of the franchise, which also cues you in to how you’re supposed to approach its structure. Finishing the entire “Master of Wealth” arc before moving onto the “Master of Fame” arc just isn’t viable–you’re meant to do the first chapter of each arc, then the second, and so on. That can make the pacing feel odd–each chapter ends with some ratcheting up of the dramatic stakes or a plot twist, so it feels strange to abandon it and go off to do something completely different. The first two Octopath games had similar pacing, but as this one starts out as a revenge tale for a player-created protagonist, it feels more awkward.
Easily the strongest aspect of Octopath Traveler 0: the stellar combat system, which is even better than its predecessors. It’s deceptively simple at first, appearing to be largely similar to past Octopath games, which themselves were homages to classic 16-bit RPGs like Final Fantasy 4-6. But as the “Octopath” name no longer applies to eight individual stories, it has been repurposed to refer to your party itself. Instead of eight playable characters, you can find dozens–some of them story-critical, and others as optional side quests. And instead of having a party of four, you have a party of eight–four in the front row, and four in the back. The multitude of characters makes them less fleshed-out than the eight core characters in other Octopath games, and even the most core character in Octopath 0 doesn’t get the attention of a main party member in Octopath 2. A handful of Wishvale natives that compose the core story cast get the lion’s share of the attention, and while the others party members have individual stories, they’re more like mini-episodes. You’re also bound to leave some behind in town while taking others questing, which runs the risk of making them underleveled and less useful in combat, so they do feel more like disposable tools than proper characters.
Each of the dozens of characters you come across have their own profession with special skills, like Apothecaries who specialize in healing or Dancers who give powerful buffs–as well as two weapon types they can equip. Your created protagonist is special, in part because they’re the only one who can change jobs and learn skills from any job class. That makes party-building incredibly flexible while also offering a satisfying strategy puzzle. You need to make sure you have a wide variety of skills and jobs represented, while also assuring that you have at least a few of each weapon type on-hand. Matching your weapon and spell types to enemy weaknesses will pressure enemies into a “Break” state, where they can no longer act and suffer extra damage. Meanwhile, the back row of your party composition is mostly safe from attacks, and passively gaining pips of Battle Points that can be spent for multiple moves at once, but can be swapped out with their front-row partner at any time. That one new element–having more characters available at any time with a focus on positioning and swapping their places–acts like a force multiplier for all the strategic choices Octopath is known for.
It’s just so damn fun, especially as a longtime Japanese RPG fan, to see something that feels simultaneously so familiar and fresh.
If that sounds like a dizzying array of options, it certainly doesn’t feel like it in practice. Octopath Traveler 0 has a great difficulty ramp that walks you through increasingly complex scenarios, forcing you to rethink your strategies and plan your party composition accordingly, and then testing your skill anew. At the same time, the combat challenges are remarkably tough, which makes it that much more satisfying when you crack the code, exploit a weakness, and defeat a boss. Far from a passive experience, combat is a frenetic puzzle that has you juggle your members back and forth for healing, damage, status effects, weapon swaps, and more. It’s just so damn fun, especially as a longtime Japanese RPG fan, to see something that feels simultaneously so familiar and fresh.
That said, this is a classically styled RPG, so prepare for a good bit of grinding. I found that even completing story and side quests and without running away from any battles, I wasn’t leveling up fast enough to keep pace with the recommended quest levels–and even when I did, sometimes I would feel underpowered for a particularly tough boss fight. Grinding is slow, and part of the rhythm of this style of RPG, but I could see it putting off some players. The slow pace of leveling seems targeted at discouraging overleveling. It’s just not practical to grind far above the suggested level, which then forces you to engage with the complexities of the battle system rather than breeze your way through with powered-up bruisers.
As you continue to gain allies, you also set about rebuilding your hometown. Story characters double as specialized shopkeepers in Wishvale, and you can recruit villagers from other towns you visit to move in and bring their own resource-gathering skills to you. The interface for this works on a satisfying grid system, letting you click buildings into place and then move them around at your leisure. The townbuilding can be a little relaxing break from the rigors of combat, but the two feed into one another as well. The better your town, the more options you have for buying specialized items or training your inactive members. Meanwhile, taking on strong, optional battles in the dungeons nets you a special material that upgrades your buildings. It’s not quite sophisticated or complex enough to substitute for a dedicated cozy game like Animal Crossing, but it was still satisfying to see my burgeoning Wishvale restored to its former glory whenever I needed a breather.
The Octopath Traveler series is also known for Path Actions, which are underserved here. In the previous two Octopath games, Path Actions were a way to incorporate a light puzzle element into the villages, as NPCs would respond differently to a particular character’s skill set. In this one, your protagonist is the one constant, and the other characters might not necessarily be with you at any moment. So instead, all of your protagonist’s Path Actions are available at any time, but only three are available for any given NPC. One is always to press them for information, another is usually to either recruit them to your town or hire them as a combat summon, and the third is usually to fight them for some special reward like discounted items. It’s a fine-enough compromise given all of the other options being juggled, but it does make exploring the towns slightly less engaging. Once you’ve looked around and recruited everyone to your town who’s available, there’s not much reason to try Path Actions afterward.
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Once you resolve the three main quests against the primary antagonists, the story takes a sharp turn into less personal territory, as you fall into a clash of kingdoms. I was less invested in this story at first–I had avenged my village and was well on my way to rebuilding my town, so what do I care about this royal drama? But by this point I was fully engaged with the combat, which retained my interest long enough to start caring about the various characters in this succession war. By the end, I came to really enjoy that story too, and to care about the characters involved in it.
And whenever I thought I had seen everything Octopath Traveler 0 has to offer, another layer unpeeled before my eyes. Around this point I also started to open up Mastery Skills, another aspect of combat that opens even more strategic choices. By continuing to earn Job Points (JP) after having already mastered all the skills for a character’s job, you can use those JP to buy copies of those skills, which can then be equipped by other characters. The permutations of this seem endless, and I’ve really only started to wrap my head around the strategic possibilities.
This is how it feels to play Octopath Traveler 0: a seemingly endless pattern of ever-deeper combat challenges and strategic wrinkles, slowly revealing themselves to you over and over through dozens of hours. I’ve seen credits, in a sense, but there’s still so much more to do and explore. It feels like a game that could go on forever. I just might let it.
