‘Octopath Traveler 0’ review: A long, worthwhile adventure

Octopath Traveler 0 There was every excuse for being half-hearted. Depending on where it came from, it may have been smaller, thinner and less attractive than its predecessors. It’s a small miracle that it’s none of those things.

If you don’t know, Square Enix’s latest throwback-style turn-based RPG is a $50 console and PC adaptation of the free-to-play mobile game from 2020. The developers took a bunch of existing characters, enemies, story, mechanics, and music, and reorganized them into a completely different and completely welcome new format. Given that mobile games are inherently ephemeral, as they rely on storefronts, servers, and payment processes that may someday cease to exist, I think this is incredible.

It also helps that the end result is a real, real good RPG. Octopath Traveler 0 Takes a foundation that could have yielded something strange and bizarre and turns it into a game that expands and becomes more engaging the more time you invest in it. It may not feel as premium as other console games in the series, but it doesn’t stop Octopath Traveler 0 From being one of the best RPGs of 2025, and a worthy addition to what is fast becoming a very good series.

humble beginnings

Octopath Traveler 0 Differs in many ways from the first two console entries in the series, primarily due to the fact that it has improved components. Octopath Traveler: Champions of the ContinentA free-to-play phone spin-off. That means the design fabric that made those first two games different is gone here.

Specifically, you no longer choose one of eight pre-designed characters and spend the rest of your journey recruiting the other seven. That format produced games that felt more like short story collections than grand adventures, as each character had their own separate arcs that largely did not involve other characters. In Octopath 0Instead you create your own character, choose a starting class, and walk into the same prologue that every other player will see.

Soon, your humble hometown is burned down by some nefarious evildoers, and it’s up to you and a few other survivors to rebuild it and take revenge. Here, as before, there are many different stories that rarely touch each other. Octopath games, but they focus on heroes rather than villains. You can do them in whatever order you want, but eventually you have to do them all.

Perhaps the biggest change, which comes straight from the mobile game, is that there are several dozen playable party members Octopath 0Whereas there were only eight in each of the last two games. You no longer have to pay money to participate in slot machine pulls to unlock them, as they are now distributed at a reasonable pace throughout the story, and many of them are optional for recruitment.

structurally, Octopath 0 is much more attractive to me than champion of the continent Can be expected to happen at any time. I don’t like free-to-play gacha gameBut I love narrative RPGs. I think it’s almost a work of genius to adapt a mobile game to a console game the way the developers here have done it. Whereas Octopath 0 Feels different from its brethren, it rarely feels inferior to those other games. Sure, there are fewer combat animations for each character, and it’s noticeable to fans of the other games that most of the music is reused. But Octopath 0 Doesn’t cut corners. This is, for all intents and purposes, a big, new, fully featured RPG built using the bones of a mobile game. In a world where new games take a long time to be made and have ever-increasing budgets, I can’t help but appreciate this new approach to filling the gap between 2023 and 2021. Octopath Traveler II And whatever comes next.

Octopath Traveler 0 it takes a while to move forward

As a non-full-priced game with such a strange origin story, it would be reasonable to expect the game to have a lower running time than its higher-budget counterparts in the same series. However, this expectation was not far off target.

I’ll put it bluntly: it took me about 80 hours to finish this game. It’s a big investment, and it’s one that requires a certain amount of patience. Many of the first 20 hours are spent setting up what happens later. You’ll spend a large portion of that time recruiting an entire party and beginning the process of rebuilding your hometown, which is done in a fairly large city-building minigame. There are some essential, game-changing battle mechanics hidden behind the construction of certain structures that don’t unlock until you reach around the 20-hour mark.

Don’t get me wrong; I am not saying Octopath Traveler 0 It takes 20 hours to heal. However, what I am saying is that it saves its best for later. Like I said, it’s an investment, and I think it’s worth doing.

But once it starts moving, it becomes unstoppable

That reward takes a few different forms. One of them is the excellent turn-based combat, which is some of the most fun of any game released this year.

unlike the previous Octopath Games where four of your party members were on screen at once, Octopath 0 Allows you to work with up to eight teammates on the field at any time. They are arranged in front row and back row. Those in front can attack and take damage, while those in the back remain safe from blows and slowly regain resources with each passing turn. You can instantly switch between one character and another character that is in their corresponding horizontal slot on the formation screen, and figuring out who plays second role to whom is a big part of the build-crafting in this game.

This works exceptionally well with the main battle principle of each Octopath The game, which has a boost system. At the beginning of each turn, each character earns one boost point, and they can hold up to five at a time. You can use more than three in a turn to power up whatever you’re going to do, whether it’s a big attack or a healing spell. In previous games you had to be a little stingy with boost points, but not here. Slowly building up points with a full backup squad means you’re encouraged to use them more often, and combat is balanced accordingly. It’s an exciting and different kind of challenge Octopath II,

Building your hometown also factors into your progress. As I said earlier, you’ll need to build some structures and staff them with some recruitable NPCs to unlock many of the key features of the battle system. Building requires resources, but collecting them is usually painless, as long as you stay alert and make sure to pick up things on the road. Perhaps a little troubling is that there are also important quality of life features like fast travel that are locked behind building and upgrading structures.

I have one complaint about city-building, which is that you can essentially “finish” your city (that is, build every necessary gameplay structure) in the middle of the main story, at which point there’s no need to think much about it. I would have preferred more hooks for the endgame, but I think there’s also something to like about the focus on exploration and fighting as the game moves toward its conclusion.

The story gets better as it goes on

Speaking of which, the second main factor if you choose to invest your time is satisfaction Octopath Traveler 0 There is a narrative. This game is about how evil greed is, and each villain represents a different type of greed. Some people want fame, some people want money, some people want power, but they all wantAnd this is where they harm the people around them.

At first, it feels very heavy-handed and predictable. Stick with the story long enough, however, and you’ll find that early predictability leads to later twists that actually matter. Octopath Traveler 0 It is an extremely serious game, never attempting to cheat or outwit the player. It just wants you to care about this world and these people, and I think it does a good job of extracting those emotions from the player by the time it’s accomplished.

Part of this is a long final chapter, which probably amounts to a quarter of the game. This is where all the other previously disconnected storylines come together, and all the characters you’ve met up to that point begin to interact with each other for the first time. The game’s biggest narrative twists occur in the finale, which also includes the reveal of a villain for the ages. This is easily the best rival of any Octopath Game, but saying more than that would spoil the fun.

just sit with it for a while

Before we wrap up here, I’d be remiss not to mention Square Enix’s “HD-2D” art style that first debuted Octopath The game is still great here. I really dig the intentionally low-fidelity look of the sprites and 3D assets combined with modern lighting and depth of field effects. It doesn’t really look like any old game, but it still looks amazing. Yasunori Nishiki’s music is also a standout element Octopath 0Because he has become one of the finest RPG composers working at the moment. one of the boss fight themes This is such a banging song that I have been listening to it continuously for a week in my free time.

Unfortunately, the performance isn’t as good in the Nintendo Switch 2 version (which I played). It aims for and gets close to 60 frames per second most of the time, but there is a noticeable stutter that seems to be most prevalent during the first few seconds after entering a new area. Not unplayable by any means, but definitely a little disappointing.

still, Octopath Traveler 0 It’s a remarkably long and generally an experience well worth the effort, especially for anyone who is into the other games in the series. This is the kind of game you would look forward to as a teenager on summer holidays when you had nothing else to do. You can immerse yourself in it for dozens of hours, and the more you play it the better it gets, thanks to excellent combat and a story that finds its best form in its later stages.

I understand that not everyone has time for that kind of thing in their adult life, but if you can create a window for it in your life Octopath Traveler 0Your patience will be richly rewarded.

Octopath Traveler 0 Available for Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, Xbox Series X, and PlayStation 5 for $49.99.

Subject
nintendo switch video games