Octopath Traveler 0 review: "The strongest entry in this retro-styled JRPG series yet, I love the greater focus on tactical battles"

Though a prequel, Octopath Traveler 0 manages to feel like an evolution of the unique JRPG formula pioneered back in 2018. Conceptually, the first Octopath Traveler had a lot going for it. Its pioneering HD-2D aesthetic gave pixel art, arguably more commonplace today in lower budget small-screen titles, a renewed sense of grandeur that the artform would have evoked in its 90s console heyday. Its core premise of getting to play as an ensemble of protagonists, each with their own arc, while clearly taking inspiration from SquareSoft classics including Final Fantasy 6 and Live-A-Live, also felt novel from the typical JRPG formula.

The execution however had always fallen short, the individual characters' narrative threads never making for a satisfying coherent whole. As Square Enix gave more of its back catalog the HD-2D treatment, even this novelty was beginning to wear thin. After a sequel that was in many ways more of the same, I had tempered expectations for Octopath Traveler 0. Doesn't a prequel that's actually kind of a remake of free-to-play mobile title Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent suggest that the series has run out of steam?

Yet, after sinking more hours than I have for its predecessors, Octopath Traveler 0 is the strongest entry I have played, despite not being a dramatic overhaul. The foundation of its brilliant Bravely Default-inspired battle system provides more flexibility, especially with more party members than before. More importantly, this prequel shrewdly lets go of design structures that had held it back while excising the most egregious gacha elements of the original mobile title with enhancements that make this the definitive way to experience this saga.

Zero to hero

Perhaps controversially, the premise of an ensemble cast with each of their own paths no longer really applies here. Instead of picking from multiple protagonists, you create your own avatar, customizing their pixel appearance as well as their background, including details such as their job class and favorite food.

It addresses a fundamental issue with the series, where each traveler's stories often felt too disparate in quality and tone. This would get harder to ignore as the roster assembles, where one character would go from lead to bit part; from one plot dealing with weighty mature topics, to something a lot lighter. Your silent protagonist's humble existence in the idyllic village of Wishvale may begin formulaic, but it quickly makes a hard turn as you witness it being reduced to ashes and rubble at the hands of three despicable villains.

Emerging from hiding some years later, you then have a personal stake in venturing the continent of Orsterra far and wide to find and bring justice to these tyrants, each revolving around the themes of human desires, power, wealth, and fame. You're free to pursue each target in any order, though the level recommendations casually hint you ought to pursue all three in tandem. But with just three arcs to start with, there's significantly less of a discrepancy than the level gating between eight protagonists' paths from previous games that would dictate how you had to progress.

Each arc also has its own lead players with their own motivations who accompany you, sometimes also present in battle to lend support. That doesn't leave room to try to incorporate the perspectives of your growing party. So aside from when you first recruit a character in an introductory quest, your party members stay dutifully in the background until it's time to call them to fight.

With a narrower focus, it actually allows for a more consistent narrative. Octopath Traveler 0 doubles down on a dark, mature tone that stretches the limits of its Teen rating. The pixel art presentation means a lot is only suggested, yet the script paints an unforgiving and sordid world of vice, where horrible things can and do happen to decent people, and calls for people's heads aren't just mere threats.

It's not just the three tyrants who are truly twisted creations, such as a playwright who's a sadistic serial killer using his victims as inspirations for his masterpieces. The writing practically relishes in depicting tragic and fallible characters and the ways desires can compromise and corrupt people's hearts that result in them being more monstrous than any beasts you might encounter in battle.

Grateful eight

Even though your fellow party members have a less of a narrative role to play, where they most count is in the turn-based battles. Despite being primarily random encounters, they remain rivetingly paced, as you figure out each enemy's weaknesses and chip away at their shield points. There's such a crunchy satisfaction when you land the attack that shatters through and puts an enemy into break status, putting them out of action for at least a full turn. It's a relief when you manage to do this before they're about to act and also a sweet moment of revenge when your next party member can boost away their accrued battle points (BP) to unleash their most punishing attack.

Of course, your opponents are also capable of playing dirty. As the challenges ramp up, some might change their weaknesses, spawn cronies that literally are human shields preventing the boss' shield points from taking a hit, and other devious tricks that turn each battle into a puzzle where you have to calculate how to maximize each turn. Do you have a skill that can deal multiple hits instead of boosting a normal attack? Do you break them as fast as you can, or make sure you've got enough BP to exploit the break state before they come back, possibly even more powerful?

Fortunately, you also have some advantages, since you can now form a party of up to eight (arguably how the game gets away with the Octopath moniker, now that there's more than 30 recruitable characters). While it makes for a comical conga line when traveling together, in practice the party is actually formed of front and back rows. The latter are more like understudies, not able to act that turn but also aren't targeted by enemies and instantly take over if their partner in the front is killed. But, as you can also swap rows in a turn, your tactics have more flexibility, such as ensuring each pair of party members wields different weapon types or elemental magic, or being able to have someone near death swap to the back while another who's been quietly building BP can come off the bench at full potential.

The lack of second jobs is also made up by being able to spend job points (JP) to unlock slots for additional skills. In some cases, it might mean acquiring a weapon attack that can hit multiple enemies or grant multiple hits on one target, or perhaps gain access to elemental magic a party member didn't have. Being equippable skills, it means you can also customize and change as it suits, with more of these skill masteries unlocked as items found in chests or obtained from NPCs.

Path actions – unique interactions made with NPCs – still exist but are simplified, no longer related to whoever’s leading the party but depending on the NPC. They're arguably more on the transactional side, largely a way to obtain items, whether that's by asking nicely, buying or haggling for a bargain, or fighting for it. This also meant I often had ulterior motives for speaking to every NPC, more curious about their wares and what I could get from them, though another important option that can come up is inviting them to move to your town.

Long and winding path

Where Octopath Traveler 0 is at its most heartfelt is the arc that involves rebuilding your childhood town of Wishvale (another completely new feature compared to Champions of the Continent). There's a genuinely poignant tone to the cozy townbuilding, where the trauma of its destruction and those that were lost is never far from people's memories, especially as you find and reunite with survivors that have taken refuge across the continent. It makes you all the more determined to see the town thriving once more.

The townbuilding mechanics are nonetheless quite a basic case of finding materials as you explore and selecting and dropping the desired buildings onto land that has been cleared of garbage. Perhaps to prevent you from getting distracted, you'll often have to progress up to certain points in the main story before you can progress further to unlock a new facility or clear more land to build more.

Once you do, then you'll have incentive to invite more people to come live in the town, who in turn can generate more resources. New facilities can also help, from being able to grow your own produce for cooking stat-boosting meals, to a training facility that allows non-active party members to still gain experience. As the main story grows ever darker, as even more formidable threats appear, Wishvale becomes a source of growing comfort with each fast travel trip. It also helps that it's the one place you can always rest for free.

If Wishvale isn't the time sink you might have assumed, the main story, itself spanning over 100 hours, will do that on its own. This is after all based on the whole of Champions of the Continent's story updated over the course of more than four years and then some. Or, imagine Genshin Impact having an offline standalone release with all of its story content to date.

Octopath Traveler 0 however lacks the novelty of new locations that other expansions tend to have. Even while it takes its time to open you up to other parts of the continent as it stretches a much larger narrative, those who have played the first game will still find much of this Orsterra very familiar. Each arc also feels episodic, so that when it does wrap up you're left in an awkward lull until it transpires you need to speak to a certain character to move things along. It's perhaps a telltale sign of its live-service origins where you do tend to be left hanging for several months until the next update.

Still, when you consider how many live-service titles come to the fate of being discontinued, with all of its contents forever lost to time, it's commendable that something like Octopath Traveler 0 exists, which fully preserves a richly written saga that many fans with an aversion to free-to-play monetization may have never otherwise given the chance. While it's unclear what this spells for the series' future, you'll at least have this path to savor for a long time.

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