Octopath Traveler 0 Is an Ambitious, Messy, & Utterly Engrossing RPG

When my quaint little village finally reached Level 8 after more than 70 hours, and the music turned into a swelling championing theme — I was surprisingly emotional. I hadn’t realized how attached I’d grown to my version of Wishvale, and the more I played, the more that attachment grew.

In some ways, Octopath Traveler 0 is a befuddling game. It’s a wild experiment to transform a mobile gacha game into a single-player RPG, and at times, you can see the bones of that mobile experience shine through, and not in a good way. But taken as a whole, Octopath 0 is the most compelling game of the series — masterful storytelling and a wonderful little town-building system that integrates into every facet of the game. There were multiple times I’d find myself hooked on Octopath 0, playing for eight hours straight, but unable to exactly put my finger on why I was enjoying it so much. Uneven but ambitious, far too long but packed with systemic depth, Octopath 0 is a game that consistently punches above its weight — and it’s, by far, my favorite Octopath game yet despite all that.

All for One

Octopath 0 falls somewhere in the weird middle ground between a brand-new game and a port of Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent, released on mobile devices in 2020. It’s also sort of a prequel to the very first Octopath game, taking place on the continent of Orsterra and chronicling the events that led to that game.

For a series first, you craft your own silent protagonist here, a young hero who lives in the quaint town of Wishvale — renowned through a legend about a legendary ring of power. But when three villains descend on the village to gain the ring’s power, Wishvale is utterly destroyed, and the protagonist sets out on two different journeys — one of revenge and one of redemption. After the prologue of the game, you can choose to pursue four different narrative arcs, in any order you want: three that focus on taking revenge against the villains (Wealth, Fame, and Power) and one entirely about rebuilding Wishvale, focusing on a town-building mode.

The Octopath Traveler game’s defining feature has always been an episodic style of storytelling, with eight different protagonists who have separate tales that, eventually, weave together. And while the storytelling structure is novel, and markedly improved in Octopath Traveler 2, I always found that there was a certain lack of structure to the main narrative that hurt the experience.

That’s the biggest surprise of Octopath 0 — how the game has found a more viable answer to the series’ episodic storytelling, in part because of the original game’s mobile structure. Octopath 0 practically feels like a sweeping fantasy anime, with different “arcs” that you progress through along an overarching narrative. It follows the episodic nature of the previous two games but grounds the entire story with a player-created character, alongside the endeavor of rebuilding Wishvale, gives this game a much stronger narrative hook. But there are two other distinct factors that really help out Octopath 0 — the fact that each arc is villain-centric, and the Suikoden-esque party-member recruitment system.

I feel confident in saying that Octopath 0 has the best writing of all three games — weaving a grand tapestry of dramatic tales that revolve around war, invasion, subterfuge, rebellion, greed, lust for power, and more. While that’s a wide array of themes, somehow Octopath 0 manages to make it all come together in a truly compelling way. There’s some phenomenal world-building happening here that makes Orsterra feel far more compelling as a rich and vibrant continent than it was in the first Octopath.

But there’s also some shockingly dark narrative work at play here, almost Game of Thrones-esque in how grim it all feels. One of the midgame arcs has you taking down a despotic king seeking to conquer the entire continent, who tries to execute his daughters for the crime of not being born as men. Another revolves around the fame-obsessed playwright Auguste, who gets “inspiration” for his work by torturing and mutilating people.

Each villain is fascinatingly complex and richly written. And past that, each arc of Wealth, Fame, and Power has a handful of main characters that carry across the entire game, giving a real sense of the passage of time and how the powers that be mold Orsterra. It should, of course, be noted that the story is mostly carried over from Champions of the Continent, but has been significantly enhanced and padded out in sections, particularly the beginning, ending, and town-building storyline.

And despite the dark and oppressive storytelling, there’s a definitive sense of hope to everything in Octopath 0 — all revolving around Wishvale.

Build It, & They Will Come

Octopath 0’s biggest problem is that the game’s best elements don’t really start to shine until you’ve made it over halfway. While the narrative starts out strong and continues, I wish things clicked together elsewhere more quickly — because the more I played Octopath 0, the more I loved it. As you try and save the land from the corrupting influence of humanity’s worst tendencies, you’ll also be painstakingly rebuilding your hometown. And while the town-building may initially seem a bit simple and rote, but the further you get into the game, the more robust and expansive it all starts to feel.

As you progress the “Bringers of Flame” storyline, you unlock an array of different features for your town: fields to plant seeds for cooking resources, a pen to take care of animals, a training facility for party members, an item shop. You can also build out dozens of different decorations just for aesthetics, or houses for everyone to stay in, and that’s where things get really interesting. Each party member has a different skill that benefits your town, and you can also recruit more than a hundred NPCs to move to Wishvale, who all have their own perks. This might be that you get a regular delivery of supplies or battle items, or something hyperspecific to one facility, like boosting how often rare goods appear in the shop.

This opens up a wealth of options for how you build your town, but also integrally changes how you interact with the world of Octopath itself. The “Path Actions” of the previous games return, letting you “Inquire” with almost any NPC to learn a little of their backstory, but this can often also yield blueprints for new facilities or recipes for dishes (which give stat boosts and can be used to bond with allies, or recruit new characters).

You can purchase goods from people or invite them to your town to stay. And that’s where the brilliance of the town building really starts to shine, in how it seeps into all of the existing systems of Octopath, enriching them in nearly every way. Those Path Actions and NPC details were already good, but now they have an even more important and tangible effect. This, by and large, makes the world feel so much richer and interconnected.

The world is also bolstered by the expansive party member options, with more than 30 different characters to recruit, both original to Champions of the Continent and the entire cast from the first Octopath. These disparate party members are weaved into the main story and the rebuilding of Wishvale (alongside their actual mechanical use in your town). Again, this is where Octopath 0 largely nails the episodic structure better than the past two games — despite the fact that you can clearly see a gacha character system stapled together. You can see the gachification of these characters as the reason they aren’t fully integrated into the main story, and why most feel more like a “side story.” But despite that concession, the game makes it all work through Wishvale — and the idea of creating a home for everyone.

Each party member has an introductory quest, and then little bits of extra story you can get by bonding with them in town, giving them the items they want. My personal favorite is a spoony bard shipwrecked on a deserted island, who can only find the energy to get up if you cook him ratatouille. It’s decidedly lighter on story for party members than the previous two games, but it works with the overall direction of the game. These characters feel like cogs in a bigger machine, a group along for the ride of your protagonist’s journey — with the one exception being the Octopath 1 characters, whose roles here don’t always feel in line with the story of the original game. That’s an idea the Octopath series has always strived for, and it works particularly well here because of the phenomenal upgrades to the combat system.

If It Ain’t Broke

The final piece of what makes Octopath 0 shine is the best Octopath turn-based combat yet, and a drastic change from Champions of the Continent. This is the exact same break-boost system as the other games, but with one integral change — you now have an eight-person party, instead of just four. Essentially, your party is split up into a front row and a back row, with the front row actively engaging in combat while the back has passive effects like healing or SP restoration (and gains BP like usual). On each turn, you can swap out the front and back members, and this integrally changes your strategy in battles — unlocking a wealth of options for party compositions and adjusting to combat on the fly. Sometimes it’s a good idea to have your front row filled with members that can exploit enemy weaknesses, while the back builds up BP and waits until they’re broken.

On top of this, each and every character in the game has their own set of skills and ultimate ability — and can then be equipped with different active and support skills that you collect as well. In all, there’s a truly staggering amount of customization to Octopath 0’s combat system, so much that it can sometimes be overwhelming. But the core experience of combat in this series has never been as joyful, especially in the climactic boss battles where the music swells and really puts you in the moment.

Despite Octopath 0 being an exceedingly long game, quite literally 100-plus hours, the depth in the combat system kept me invested the entire time — especially when you layer in recruitable helper NPCs, and the changes the town-building can bring to the system. The only thing bafflingly missing is the ability to toggle the frequency of random battles, which could really aid some of the more exploration-focused areas, like sailing the seas.

The combat of the Octopath games was already great, but it’s genuinely remarkable how Octopath 0 manages to refine and improve those systems. It’s not a drastic genre-defining leap, but rather making something that already works run like an even more well-oiled machine.

Testing the Waters

Octopath Traveler 0 has some clear issues — from sluggish early pacing and taking time for the town building to flourish, to the way Octopath 1 characters feel stapled onto the game. But despite any of those issues, it’s a game I found myself deeply in love with, falling deeper in the with every dozen hours.

Yes, Octopath Traveler 0 can feel a bit bloated at times, but it’s also the best thematic use of the series to date of the “anthology” style of storytelling, all held together by deliciously dark villains and an uplifting core message. More than anything, it’s astounding how ambitious this game is in terms of transforming a mobile experience into a single-player RPG — on a level that we’ve quite honestly never seen in video games before. It’s experimental and messy in many ways, but so much more compelling because of that exact reason.

In a world where mobile games end service and ultimately disappear from history, I genuinely hope this is a blueprint both Square Enix and others can continue to use. But in the meantime, I can at least say Octopath is on the right track.

8/10

Octopath Traveler 0 launches Dec. 4 for PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 1 & 2, and PC. Inverse was provided a Nintendo Switch 2 copy for this review.

INVERSE VIDEO GAME REVIEW ETHOS: Every Inverse video game review answers two questions: Is this game worth your time? Are you getting what you pay for? We have no tolerance for endless fetch quests, clunky mechanics, or bugs that dilute the experience. We care deeply about a game’s design, world-building, character arcs, and storytelling come together. Inverse will never punch down, but we aren’t afraid to punch up. We love magic and science-fiction in equal measure, and as much as we love experiencing rich stories and worlds through games, we won’t ignore the real-world context in which those games are made.