Octopath Traveler 0 reviews - Stay for the story

It's only been seven years since the original game first launched, but it's hard to imagine a world without Octopath Traveler. Not so much for the series itself, but for what its visual identity brought to the RPG genre through its “HD-2D” art style.

Not only did Square Enix deliver a stellar direct sequel and long-running mobile gacha to the Octopath brand; it's remade several Dragon Quests, offered strategy fans something new with Triangle Strategy, remade the 1994 cult classic Live A Live, and has an action RPG on the way with next year's The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales. We haven't seen it fully adapted for Final Fantasy yet, but it seems like only a matter of time.

The aforementioned gacha, Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent, has been transformed into a full-fledged premium title with Octopath Traveler 0. Make no mistake, this is much more than a simple port. In many ways, this is a new benchmark for a rare but always welcome endeavor: adapting F2P, microtransaction-heavy smartphone games to traditional console fares that have no additional purchases beyond the sticker price.

There are times when you can sense the likely limited budget of a project. It's this clash between successfully adapting the strengths of the source material and failing to reinforce every one of its weaknesses that leaves Octopath Traveler just short of greatness. A few more tweaks could have kept us up and running.

Orsterra company

At its core, Octopath Traveler 0 brings several years of Champions of the Continent storytelling and content to modern consoles and PC. CotC eventually moved into a new arc connected to Solistia, the setting of Octopath Traveler 2, but for most of its run it built up the sprawling story set in the Orsterra region from the first game. The story takes place a few years in the past and the scope is exponentially larger.

Instead of a traditional duology mainline of telling the stories of eight (hence the name) travelers in sharply character-driven experiences, Champions begins by focusing on a trio of dastardly villains. They each have multi-chapter arcs, and it's after their collective defeat that the game really kicks in.

Battles can now support up to eight party members at once, rather than the limit of four seen in the two main titles.

A much larger arc follows, focusing on a particularly evil villain in the form of King Pardis III, who in the process introduces an impressive list of allies. Then there's another antagonistic trio, followed by a second, more substantial arc, culminating in the world-saving stakes you've come to expect from the genre.

Champions takes full advantage of its years-long development approach to weave together a story so long it could easily inspire a four-season anime. Each arc connects to the next, giving a huge number of characters meaningful personal growth in the process. But it has its faults, and that's where Octopath Traveler 0 comes into play.

The CotC protagonist has the full depth of a bag of rocks and is given the slimmest bits of narrative. 0 has an already huge story and adds another arc to the mix – more of a running line that covers most of the overarching saga. The hero now comes from a village called Wishvale, which does not exist in the mobile version and is destroyed there at the beginning of the game. Not only does it pave the way for a nice contrast – unlike the villains and the girls, you don't get consumed by revenge! – more importantly, it leads to a robust new system.

Make a wish

Reviving Wishvale is the cornerstone of Octopath Traveler 0's gameplay loop. Square Enix has added to the meaty turn-based city builder RPG simulator, and the results are pretty solid. It's hardly a deep enough dive into a very different genre to justify a purchase strictly on its own merits, but it's still more complex than I expected.

The all-new eight-chapter story of Wishvale features tons of original characters up to 0 working together to rebuild their home. An impressive array of customization options awaits you, and while the building effort will seem quite limited at first, the amount of tillable land increases over time along with new types of buildings, objects and more.

By the time you're done here, dozens of houses will be built, plus a pub for cooking, a specialty shop, a church with lavish spiritual benefits, a produce farm, and a cattle ranch. There's a training facility that provides some EXP and JP (Job Points that can be spent to unlock abilities) for your benched characters, a museum that holds journal entries and artifacts as well as a music player for collectibles, and even a monster arena with several optional fights. All of this is complemented by plenty of recruitable denizens who can serve in various capacities to bolster the utility of the main facilities or just supply you with additional gadgets.

Aelfric's grace under pressure

The cast of champions also has a lot more voice acting now, but the English dub is pretty spotty so I stuck with the Japanese. The script has been improved, scenes have been added for almost everyone, and Wishvale serves as a partial conduit for many of these moments. If you plant your party members here, you'll see many of these added conversations, but the most important characters will get better stories and a greater sense of growth. Now there's even a boat for a few high seas adventures. Oh, and you can convince a lot of animals to come live with you, which is fantastic.

Unfortunately, not everything got such a facelift. Octopath Traveler 0's beautifully dark and richly twisty main story clocks in at over 80 hours (the devs say it's closer to 100, and I can see that stretching that far for some, but that kind of size calls for an appropriate scope in terms of gameplay. It misses the mark here.

In previous console-bound Octopaths, your more limited party could gain access to advanced job classes. This opens up unique opportunities to combine skills and create a custom-made party for any occasion. Octopath Traveler 0 has over 30 potential party members, so this is somewhat mitigated by sheer volume; and yet, despite its enormous run, these advanced task classes do not exist. What you see is what you get, and despite plenty of interchangeable equipped abilities (which can either be duplicated from your character's thin skill sets or found around the world), the result is tens of thousands of wasted JP.

There just isn't enough anywhere to spend it. Unless you want to create hundreds of copies of specific skills, and I have no idea why I'd ever want to, even a little level-grinding shines a bright light on this half-baked aspect of the experience. In shorter RPGs it would be a mistake, but in Octopath Traveler 0 it borders on farce.

Octopath Traveler 0 can't escape its mobile roots in other places either: the graphics are mixed. They're a few steps down from Octopath Traveler 2, with lots of rough-looking textures and too few unique animations to add much visual punch to most scenes. At least the artwork that is the hallmark of the series is not lacking. Boss fights are a one-two punch of top-notch sprite designs and award-winning theme music, and it's clear that more money has been spent on late-game dungeons than earlier locations, with a handful of stunning locations that range from body-horror-centric to breathtakingly gorgeous.

All of this adds up to a somewhat uneven game, but richly rewarding regardless. Those looking for a relatively short, tightly paced experience should avoid Octopath Traveler 0. What about me? The longer the better, as long as the narrative ambitions match the length of the labyrinth.

Octopath Traveler 0 made me cry on several occasions. It made me uncomfortable in the best ways possible, and by the end I found myself questioning my own sense of morality. I felt despair when the heroes suffered agonizing losses, and received a joyful catharsis when they emerged victorious. For genre daredevils like myself, the somewhat twisted customization system is more of an undeniable blemish than a permanent scar in such exuberant circumstances.

The banger soundtrack highlights the strongest moments of the plot, and it's exciting to bring an octet of travelers to clash with beautifully rendered enemies. If this is a case study on how to turn a gacha into something bigger, the scattered missteps won't sink the game, which I hope will lead to more projects. Dissidia Opera Omnia, Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, and a few other ridiculously named games deserve the Champions of the Continent treatment that Octopath Traveler 0 unleashed.