Octopath Traveler 0 Review

When it was revealed, I didn't know exactly what to make of Octopath Traveler 0 - yet, most of that uncertainty didn't stem from the game's conception as Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent, either. While I loved Octopath Traveler II, I didn't stick with the original beyond a couple of hours. The disjointed stories didn't appeal to me, at least at the time. Octopath Traveler II resonated with me in a way that the first Octopath never did, even if on paper it didn't deviate much from the core gameplay loop established by it. You still found yourself in the shoes of 8 separate travelers, and their own unique stories. The difference, I suppose, is that Octopath Traveler II more explicitly ties things together into one central narrative.

That's no longer the case for Octopath Traveler 0. Instead of experiencing 8 separate character's storylines, players take control of a player-created character that acts as a supporting character for the real stories taking place across the continent of Orsterra. The game's structure couldn't be anymore different if it tried; while players do initially have agency for which stories they tackle, and in which order, the bulk of the game's narrative is completely linear, with branching storylines acting more like an extended prologue for longer arcs that make up what may as well be their own separate games - with their own separate credit rolls, even. 

I mention this, because if you were like me - you didn't engage with the original mobile game. Octopath Traveler 0 adapts and rebalances several arcs worth of content from Champions of the Continent for a new, singular title. Both in terms of focus, and in terms of scope, it is not like either of the two mainline entries that players might have grown accustomed to. This isn't a bad thing, but it does mean that if you didn't like the original games for their lack of narrative focus, you might very well find Octopath Traveler 0 the perfect gateway drug to get into the series. Yet, if you did enjoy the original games, there's no guarantee that you'll resonate with what's on offer here. What's even worse is that the game doesn't quite reach its stride until you're 20 hours in; you can't rely on the demo to offer a complete picture for what the game is; its weaknesses, its strengths, and especially the gameplay.

Many of the hallmarks of Octopath Traveler's core gameplay remain the same as the mainline entries; combat revolves around breaking down enemies defenses, leaving them momentarily open to heavy damage. This revolves around finding their weaknesses; at the start of a battle, underneath an enemy will be a row of blocks with a question mark inside. Whenever you strike an enemy's weakness, the block corresponding to that weakness will reveal itself, and they will lose a portion of their defenses for every singular hit of an attack that they're weak to.

The order in which certain attacks will appear from left to right offers an additional wrinkle where players can eventually learn what other attacks an enemy may be weak to not just by process of elimination, but by knowing what other attacks could potentially appear based off of existing weaknesses, and how they appear underneath an enemy. Like the other games, characters gain BP every turn which can be expended up to 4 times to either increase the number of strikes or overall effectiveness of your actions, depending on the skill chosen.

Frankly, Octopath Traveler 0 does not leave a good first impression. The opening hours of the story aren't great; the gameplay feels restrictive, with the battle system now balanced around having a full 8 characters in your party at any given time - 4 in the front row, and 4 in the back. Areas are simply designed; dungeons even more basic than the usual fare for Octopath Traveler. Asset quality, as Mikhail discussed a few weeks back, is distractingly poor - until I realized that I could zoom out the camera which helped disguise it, the vast majority of my playtime was on a PC gaming handheld where the reduced texture quality was less noticeable. English dubbed lines sounded noticeably more compressed than their counterparts in Octopath Traveler II, which meant I opted to stick to the Japanese audio instead, despite using the English dub for the previous games.

Much of the new content for this release revolves around the restoration of Wishvale, which is alright as a distraction - but gates many significant Quality of Life features behind it. It's at least slightly entertaining finding characters throughout Orsterra to invite to become a Resident, but on the flip side Path Actions have been so utterly simplified for Octopath Traveler 0 that they arguably might as well not even exist without the metagame of which characters you have in your party impacting what Path Actions you can take at any given time. Much like with the early level design and the decreased fidelity, early on it contributes to the feeling of a game that is simply less engaging than its contemporaries.

In isolation, I would forgive anyone for dropping the game in the opening hours. If you do give Octopath Traveler 0 a shot, though - do yourself a favor. Give it at least until the Master of All storyline; while I can't guarantee you'll want to stick around that long, or even beyond it, the game well and truly comes into its own by the time you've reached that point of the story. While its unique structure does feel restrictive in a lot of ways, avoiding spoilers - the end result once things get going is the sort of long form storytelling you simply can't find in the other Octopath games, and isn't particularly common outside of the franchise either. The 8-character combat is engaging in a way that forces you to consider not just when to swap out characters according to enemy weaknesses, but also as a form of attrition. The final fight of Master of All seriously taxed my party, even when I had overleveled to a significant degree. Side quests and dungeon design get increasingly more elaborate the further along you go, too.

Octopath Traveler 0 is the type of game that sneaks up on you. Maybe it isn't immediately obvious what makes it great, even if the deficiencies are impossible to ignore; every now and then something will stick out like a sore thumb that betrays what the game originally was, even if that's not necessarily what the game is now, in its current form. When taken on its own merits, Octopath Traveler 0 is the type of RPG you'd be hard-pressed to find anywhere else - and a fascinating case study in how, much like Final Fantasy prior, Octopath Traveler can reinvent its core elements while still maintaining an identity as a franchise.