Octopath Traveler 0 Review – Review

To most console players, Octopath Traveler 0 is a huge swerve following the first two Switch games in the series. Those earlier games lean into the “Octo” part of the title, featuring eight different characters that you pick in any order, slowly completing their separate story arcs that roughly culminate in a world-intertwining finale. Octopath Traveler 2 had incremental refinements on the structure, adding in more variety, better pacing, and more compelling stories. But as the console world had two numbered Octopath games, Square Enix was also running Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent on mobile. The gacha-based RPG was a huge systematic change and upgrade, featuring much stronger combat with eight-character parties and a different vignette-heavy structure to storytelling. Octopath Traveler 0 is essentially a remake of the Orsterra story from Champions of the Continent, though if you had no idea there was a mobile game, it would be hard to tell if there were any mobile origins. No matter where the story arcs from Octopath Traveler 0 came from, the fact of the matter is that this is the best Octopath Traveler game that Square Enix has made and quite frankly might be the best HD-2D game they’ve touched as well.

The world of Orsterra featured here was the setting for the first game in the series. Octopath Traveler 0 functions as a prequel to that game, telling a slew of new stories as well as setting up some of the plot threads in the original. Brilliantly, this game solves a lot of the storytelling issues brought about by having eight different main characters by making the main character be a player-created avatar. Not only does this give you a level of customization, but it also provides a solidified entry point into each story arc you come across. Coming off the heels of the Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D remakes, it struck me how much the implementation of your “Chosen One” avatar here is reminiscent of the Hero from Dragon Quest games. There is no need to make sure Primrose and Olberic talk during their story’s respective cut scenes, because the main character is your character and everyone else is secondary.

The game’s prologue sets up your character’s place in the world: your parents are murdered and your hometown of Wishvale is destroyed by three villains. Everything to do with Wishvale and your hero’s friends there is new to Octopath Traveler 0. The quest line that builds out of the town involves rebuilding the ruins and populating it with your party members and other willing villagers you meet in your travels. I appreciate the concept of Wishvale, but it started to fall apart for me as it wore on because building out your town felt too much like a checklist and a means to an end. It starts strongly: I found the opening hours of the prologue and the restoration plot to be compelling. But at a certain point, I just wanted to upgrade my training facility to level up more heroes and get enough quality materials to build a church. This ain’t exactly Stardew Valley. Still, Wishvale serves an important narrative conceit as it’s the home base for every member of your party. It’s a neat little trick that made me not think twice of how every story beat only featured my hero and not the seven other party members tagging along in the overworld and fights.

That gets to the slam-dunk best enhancement: eight-player combat. Lifted more or less exactly from the mobile game, the eight-player combat builds off the strong foundation of the original game’s turn-based Press Turn foundation and deepens the strategy to delicious levels of tactical building flexibility. You have two rows of four characters each in combat at one time, with them paired off into units you can swap between during their turn. It allows for much better coverage of weaknesses and also lets you better protect healers or glass cannons. As you get more characters and abilities, you can start to build some wild synergies and gain extra attacks and consistent boons to characters. Whenever I thought I had my strategy locked into place, I came across some small tweak that would open up more possibilities.

A change from Octopath 1 and 2 is that only your hero can change classes. Everyone else is locked into one unique form of a class (or every so often, a completely unique class). There are ways to finetune and customize the other characters with equipment and a few flexible skills slots, but Olberic is just a warrior now. He can’t be a dancer no matter how much he wants to be one. The positive from this is that you come across upwards of 30 characters throughout the game to build your eight-player party from, including every single one of the original eight heroes from the first Octopath Traveler. At a certain point though, I felt like I was accruing these characters to fill my Pokedex as opposed to looking for a new character to drop in. However, the writing for these characters, even in relatively short doses, is very strong and even if there wasn’t an obvious spot to drop Goodwin in when he showed up in the back half of my adventure, I wanted to have that bizarre character in my party in some capacity.

The writing was never truly a weak part of past Octopath games, but it feels even more refined and improved in this game. That’s helped by the overall structure and pacing as well. Aside from the Wishvale restoration quest, you are also tasked with chasing down the three villains who razed your town. That kicks off the “Master of All” story arc that dominates the first half of this game (and is structurally identical to the mobile RPG). The three villains in the Master of Fame, Master of Power, and Master of Wealth storylines are delightfully vile beings that you want to absolutely demolish while also wanting to see what craven nightmare things they do next. Auguste is an all-timer RPG villain as a twisted playwright. Tytos’ warlord zombie conquest features several compelling supporting characters. Herminia’s gold-hoarding witch reign also has some novel twists and turns. All three of those arcs come to a head in relatively short (but not too short) order and that kicks it over to the lengthy Master of All quest that more or less railroads the story in a positive manner for a short while. Finishing the Master of All quest rolls credits, but beyond that is still so much game. The back half includes the entirety of the “Bestower of All” story arc (also structurally identical to the mobile RPG), which is not as straightforward as the opening plot but tells a layered, compelling story that builds off of what happened in the first half throughout the world and sets up some of the events of the original game. What I loved the most about the two main story arcs is that it felt like the world around me was evolving and changing as I completed stories. You see the impact of the events around you and for the most part, any thread unresolved early on gets clarity and more attention later on. Also as a quick point of clarification: I keep saying “structurally identical” because while the big-picture story arc for all these plots is the same, Octopath Traveler 0 fills in so much more nuance and detail. The Master and Bestower quests are seemingly Extended Editions of the mobile plots.

I truly thought I was done with the world of Octopath Traveler after the second one, but this prequel blew me away with how it brought an excellent mobile-only story to the forefront and leveled up the combat, exploration, and structure of this RPG series into something far better than what came before. I have a few small issues, whether it’s the late stages of the town building questline or the lack of class changing for all characters, but those are ultimately small potatoes to the successes that echo throughout the world of Orsterra in Octopath Traveler 0. The eight-player combat rules, the vignette-esque storylines are fascinating, and the overall world building is top notch. This is one of the best traditional turn-based RPGs I have played in ages and it makes me excited for what might be next from the folks involved with this excellent adventure.