Review: Octopath Traveler 0
Across its first two entries, the Octopath Traveler series has established itself as one of the most exciting names in the RPG space. The first game, which featured eight “main” characters who you guided through separate stories, excelled thanks to its fantastic retro-style visuals and deep, moreish combat, and Octopath Traveler 2 improved upon it dramatically with a more cohesive narrative and a huge raft of combat synergies and tactical depth. Now, Octopath Traveler 0 – a sort-of prequel, based largely on material from an existing free-to-play mobile spin-off game – has expanded the series even further, with an event more tactical combat system and some excellent new features.
Unlike previous games in the series, which explored eight separate storylines at once, Octopath Traveler 0 simplifies things with a single protagonist – one you create and name yourself. This main character is your leader for the whole game, one who starts with more special abilities and can unlock all of the game’s different job classes. At the beginning of the game, their home town of Wishvale is destroyed by a trio of evil characters, which sets you on dual paths for the rest of the game – one involves discovering the wider conspiracy behind your town’s destruction, and the other is about restoring your town to its former glory.
In previous games in this series, your questing party at any given point consisted of four of the game’s eight characters. Octopath Traveler 0 overhauls this system considerably: once you’re recruited enough party members, you’ll be controlling eight different characters during battle. This new combat system is a brilliant twist on the formula established by earlier games. Each character still has a class that dictates their attacks and abilities, but this time, individual characters can’t swap classes – there are more people to recruit, though, so you can fill out a varied team where everyone serves a function. Ideally, your eight characters will have enough weapons and abilities to hit every enemy’s weaknesses.
The big change for Octopath Traveler 0 is that during combat you have a front row and a back row of characters, and you can swap your characters between rows during a fight. Characters in the back row can recharge health and prepare to unleash bigger attacks, while characters in the front can both attack and receive damage from enemies. The way you level up and mold individual characters as the game progresses has simplified, but battles are more complicated – and exciting. There’s more strategic pathways available to you now, and when you manage to get into a good rhythm, Octopath Traveler 0 has the best combat in the whole series.
The story, on the other hand, takes a while to really get going. The change in structure means that there’s not so much of an immediate hook: there’s one story, but it’s trifurcated awkwardly at the game’s opening, and does not feel super connected to the characters. This improves as the game progresses, and the eventual twists, turns and reveals are all quite exciting. Voice acting is inconsistent across the board, but never too annoying, and the actors behind some of the hammier villains are really having fun.
All of this is paired with the pleasant thrill of restoring Wishvale, which is a more rewarding endeavor than it initially seems. You can return to your home at any time and build more housing, farm vegetables and meat, and provide housing for people you meet on your travels. These systems deepen as you go, and Wishvale becomes a lovely symbol of your progress through the game. The Octopath games have always had simple navigation and exploration – you’re really just following prompts on the map, with no puzzles to solve – but the real challenge comes in fine-tuning your team to beat the game’s many challenging bosses, unlocking new gear and thinking carefully about how to get your team working in sync.
Octopath Traveler 0 looks great, too. This is the latest game to use Square Enix’s “HD-2D” visual system, where 2D sprite characters are rendered in high detail environments. It’s a style that suits some scenes and situations better than others – some details on the overworld felt a bit simple to me, betraying the game’s mobile origins – but during certain cutscenes and set-pieces, the game stuns. This series has always had a brilliant soundtrack, too, and the music in this entry is suitably epic.
Octopath Traveler 0 is absolutely enormous. Getting to the final credits will take several dozen hours, but that’s really the tip of the iceberg – there are extra final bosses and plenty of reasons to keep improving Wishvale. You could comfortably spend over 100 hours in Octopath Traveler 0, which may sound daunting, but it’s a game you can play at your own pace – I spent over 18 months playing through Octopath Traveler 2 slowly, and it was always easy to jump back into whenever I returned. This game asks for a lot of your time if you want to see everything, but it’ll make it all worthwhile.
Octopath Traveler 0 is available now on PC, Nintendo Switch 1&2, PlayStation 4&5, and Xbox Series X/S. A Switch 2 review copy was provided by the publisher for review
James O’Connor has been writing about games and games since 2008. He is the author of Untitled Goose Game for Boss Fight Books.
