“Octopath Traveler 0” Review

Octopath Traveler 0 has a lot to it. The “main” parts of the story, primarily the antagonists discussed here, are some of the best in the series and will keep people invested along with the Animal Crossing-like charm you get from restoring Wishvale, but once you get past it, it’s all really just… there, and getting to its real, yet satisfying ending will take some effort. The end result is a huge game that definitely boasts more value than it’s $50 asking price.

When Octopath Traveler 0 was first unveiled in July as a surprise “one more thing” during the first real Nintendo Direct following the release of the Switch 2, it was met with a curious mix of surprise and disappointment. It was a surprise because Nintendo appeared to end the presentation with another HD-2D game in The Adventures of Elliott: The Millennium Tales, a new IP currently scheduled for release next year, before quickly revealing Octopath Traveler 0 with its December release, closing what’s been a nice year for Nintendo and the Switch 2. But why is it disappointing? It’s also a fairly loose adaptation of Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent, a mobile game with gacha mechanics.

Mobile game or not, the game is finally here, and it’s mostly fantastic.

Before going into depth about Octopath Traveler 0, let me talk about my experience with the series. I love Octopath Traveler. When the original game came out on the Switch in 2018, it was my Game of the Year. Despite that, I unfortunately have not had the pleasure of playing Octopath Traveler II, and because of that, I can’t really speak to the changes or improvements the series has made as a whole. If that’s what you’re looking for, sorry but thanks for the click. Luckily for me, Octopath II took place in a different world with totally separate storylines while Octopath 0 is essentially a disjointed prequel that takes place shortly before the original game, so I already do have some foundational knowledge of Orsterra as well as a bunch of the characters you’ll come across in 0.

Octopath’s Many Plots

Getting back to what 0 is, as mentioned in the intro, the game is an adaptation of the mobile game (just without the monetization) and while I didn’t play that either, I’ve heard from a lot of people that it was a surprisingly engaging title in many ways, especially with its story. In this game, you play yourself for the first time in the series living in a quaint small town called Wishvale. You can change your gender, your appearance, your job or class for combat, and even get a say on what your favorite food is (for the Pinoys out there, I said my favorite food was lamb caldereta). Unfortunately, in the most obvious JRPG fashion, your hometown gets destroyed and your family is murdered by a trio of antagonists in search of a certain ring that you just happen to be in possession of. You can probably guess what happens next.

Did you guess you’d survive and spend a few years planning your revenge in search for these people that ruined your home? Of course you did. Did you think you’d find a whole bunch of survivors during your journey and recruit them to restore your hometown and bring it to more advanced prosperity? You’re on a roll! What about the ring you have? Does it mean you’re the “chosen one” who has something of greater purpose to accomplish in addition to these other responsibilities? You bet it does.

So let’s recap. You’re the Chosen One who’s looking to solve the mystery behind the ring that made three bad people ruin your life, and you’re also in charge of rebuilding your town. That’s the bulk of what Octopath Traveler 0 is, and just like in the original, once you get past the prologue, you’re free to tackle these duties in any order you want. The mobile game was like this too, except Wishvale didn’t have a name. It was referred to as the Nameless Town, and there was no story to it. It was just a (monetization) feature, whereas the restoration of Wishvale is definitely central to what’s happening in the game.

Wealth, Power, Fame, and some of the worst people ever

At the beginning, the narrator asks what’s most important to you: Wealth, Power, or Fame? This essentially ends up being your path to learning about Octopath 0‘s three antagonists, and eventually getting your revenge and thus completing the story arc. It doesn’t matter which of the three you choose as you’ll end up eventually taking every path anyway. It’s really just a way to feed you a path to help progress through the campaign much like how you had your choice of which of the eight characters you’d be progressing the story for in the original game.

If you choose the path of wealth, you’ll be looking for Herminia, the “Witch of Greed” who literally gets off on how rich she is. If you choose power, you’ll be hunting “The Hero” Tytos who arguably took the greatest pleasure in murdering your family and friends with his addiction of taking over every town around him. And if you choose fame, you’ll learn about “The Playwright” Auguste, who is absolutely obsessed with the drama in his own writing that he causes pain and death to people in his plays for his own enjoyment. If you think me going into any sort of detail about how these antagonists are delves too closely into spoiler territory, or you think it’s unnecessary, I’m not apologizing.

I wholeheartedly believe that these three are some of the most obnoxiously horrible enemies you’ll find in any video game in the most positive way possible. Going through these vignettes and bringing them to their deserved demise was among the most satisfying things I’ve done in any game, and I had to point that out. This part of the overall plot was absolutely fantastic. The main thing that might annoy people here is the fact that it’s not advised to stick to one path. Each path had three chapters to it, and during anytime during any chapter, you’re free to explore the land of Orsterra to your heart’s content and complete tasks related to the other paths outside of the one you chose. Each chapter and area in the game also lists a recommended battle level for you to be on as you pursue them. It’s not advised to go into a level 20 chapter or area when you only have a level 9 party, but it’s up to you. We’ll talk about battles a little later.

We have Animal Crossing at Wishvale

The other central plot element to the game is the restoration of Wishvale. When I first previewed the game at PAX West, I didn’t care for it. I skipped it as soon as Square Enix would let me. Of course, this was before I knew this was your hometown burned to ashes. As you progress through the game and meet characters like Stia, an architect who has a penchant for building structures way too quickly and fighting with an axe, it becomes all too easy to really begin to care about the town.

You won’t do much at first outside of building a dive bar that doubles as the town’s hub and collecting building materials, but as I continued to come across different NPCs and party members during the journey and eventually build a farm, a shop, a church, and more, seeing everything progress gave me a feeling of comfort, and I suspect this to be the case for people who invest their time into the game as well. It’ll eventually get to a point where your customization options will rival something like Animal Crossing, and while I had no intention of turning my Octopath into Animal Crossing, I found myself aligning buildings with other buildings in pixel perfect fashion and making sure certain people only lived with certain people. I lost a lot of hours building Wishvale, and I honestly can’t tell you whether I enjoyed or regretted it.

Exploration and Path Actions

Octopath Traveler was a classical RPG through and through, with towns to explore, people to talk interact with, dungeons to crawl, and monsters to fight, and even though Octopath 0’s source material was a mobile game, it really did all of it well.

One of the more interest aspects to exploration and interaction with NPCs are the game’s Path Actions. NPCs that you can talk to will also give you the option to Inquire about people’s individual stories, Purchase items on their person, Contend with them to engage in battles to win items, Entreat to encourage NPCs to give you items, Impress people by fighting them to give you more items, or Invite them to Wishvale. Each of these Path Actions has a certain success rate tied to your Wealth, Power, or Fame points, and if you attempt any of these actions and fail, your reputation in that town falls. If your reputation falls to zero, you can’t use Path Actions there anymore, and you have to pay a fee at that town’s pub to restore to your reputation.

In the original game, the type of actions you could do with NPCs relied on having the right character in your party. For example, Therion the Thief not only could talk to people, but he could steal from them as well. Having the Path Action system in Octopath 0 eliminates the need to have specific people in your party, and I think that’s an ideal improvement. I also wanted to note that the basic Inquire option to learn about the stories of various NPCs was a nice touch. As a huge Trails fan who loves the fact that every NPC had a name and story behind them, this is probably a nod to that series, which I absolutely respect.

Combat

Speaking of having specific characters in your party, finally we come to combat. Random battles make their return, and the turn-based combat system is identical to Octopath Traveler except for the fact that you can actually have direct control of up to eight characters in battle. The way this is handled is with a front and back row, but only the front row can actually do anything. At the same time, enemies sometimes have knock back effects that can force characters to switch rows. Your characters can also switch characters during their turn in a situations where you want your back character to come to the front and unleash their abilities.

Aside from the difference of having two rows and eight characters in all, the battle system is the same, relying on your ability to break your enemy’s shield by attacking them with weapons they’re weak against. For example, if the enemy has four shield points and is weak against swords and polearms, you have to attack with shields or polearms four times before they become vulnerable to every other kind of attack. To help make this easier and to add to the overall strategy, you also have Boost Points which work a lot like Bravely Default‘s Brave Points and from there it pretty much turns into a guessing game when you face enemies without an obvious weakness. Much later in the game, you’ll eventually have access to the Scholar job that has the ability to unveil enemy weaknesses during every turn.

Octopath Traveler has always had one of the best turn-based battle systems in the genre for me and that remains true with Octopath Traveler 0. You’ll be spending a lot of time fighting in this game, and I really like that while the bosses are tough, they aren’t overly spongey with the HP. My only real issue with the fights is I think the random battles are too plentiful to their own good, and there wasn’t a way to reduce the encounter rate early. Purists might also have an issue with the fact that there are no Advanced Jobs or “super classes” in the game, but that also might be purely due to the fact that there is no shortage of characters in the game to have in your party.

Everyone is here! … Is that good?

Again, Octopath Traveler 0 is based on the mobile game Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent. Marvel Contest of Champions, Pokémon Champions, WWE Champions… what do these “Champion” mobile games have in common? They’re all about the gacha mechanics with playable characters, and that was the foundation of Champions of the Continent‘s monetization strategy.

Octopath 0 is a full, premium game. There are no characters to pay for, so you’re just gonna get them. Aside from the required characters you come across in the plot, you’ll also meet a whole bunch of other characters in sidequests, including the eight characters from the original game. Unfortunately, while it definitely helps to attain these characters for the battle grind, a lot of these characters including the OG eight are just filler characters who offer nothing to the overall story. Aside from just being more characters level up who can also live in Wishvale, they’re really just there for fan service. You can also tell when a character or sidequest you’re doing isn’t important; non-essential sidequests won’t have any voice acting as most of the “canon” parts to the game are fully voiced.

So let’s talk “canon” before we get to the verdict because this can ultimately affect your enjoyment of the game. If you were to ask me personally if Octopath Traveler 0 was canon, I’d tell you it isn’t despite what the developers or writers might tell you. You use a version of yourself that you craft and mature. You make choices. There’s agency, and considering the fact that you come across the OG game’s cast and can recruit them to your party and make them move to Wishvale? There’s no way it’s actually connected. Should this inhibit your enjoyment of the game and whether or not you should play it? That’s entirely up to you.

You can play your own way

Canon issues aside, if it wasn’t obvious, there is a lot to do in Octopath Traveler 0, and the best thing about it is you can pretty much handle everything in the game however you please. It took me over 80 to roll the “real” credits in the game, and even then I didn’t do all the sidequests. This review is already over 2,000 words long, and I didn’t even mention the game’s cooking system–it’s fluff.

I probably already spoiled too much by talking about the “real” credits, but I really think this needs to be mentioned in any good review of the game because I think keeping it a surprise is arguably to the game’s detriment. In regards to the story arcs of Wealth, Power, and Fame, there’s way more to it than what I just talked about in regards to the antagonists. Way more. That’s why it’s over 80 hours, and this was added content after the initial release of the mobile game. I won’t say anymore than that, aside from the fact I didn’t like that stuff as much as what I discussed here.

So again, Octopath Traveler 0 has a lot to it. The “main” parts of the story, primarily the antagonists discussed here, are some of the best in the series and will keep people invested along with the Animal Crossing-like charm you get from restoring Wishvale, but once you get past it, it’s all really just… there, and getting to its real, yet satisfying ending will take some effort. The end result is a huge game that definitely boasts more value than its $50 asking price. Octopath Traveler 0 definitely has my full recommendation because it’s mostly fantastic, but for the sake of personal freedom and agency, players shouldn’t guilt you if you don’t attempt to get the game’s true ending.