Shortly after the release of Octopath Traveler on the Nintendo Switch, Square Enix sought to capitalise on its success with a mobile prequel called Champions of the Continent. As with many games on mobile, it was filled with microtransactions and gacha nonsense, but by all accounts it was a pretty solid game nonetheless. Now, it’s been reworked and transformed into a proper, premium console release, and the results are quite stunning. More than just the reheated leftovers of a gacha game from half a decade ago, Octopath Traveler 0 feels like a fully fledged entry in one of the best RPG series on the market — though it’s not without its issues. 

Octopath Traveler 0 takes place some amount of time before the first Octopath Traveler game, and is set largely in the same world as that game, albeit with some minor and major changes to some cities and locations.  It’s the first game in the series that lets you insert yourself into the story, with a player-created character that acts as the primary protagonist throughout the game. 

Once you’ve created a character, you’re thrown into the town of Wishvale, where you grew up and where you’ve lived all your life. You’re just barely an adult, and your dad – the captain of the guard – thinks it’s time for you to join the guard and help keep Wishvale safe. 

Unfortunately, this is a JRPG, so Wishvale remaining safe is not what happens. Instead, it gets swarmed by power-hungry fiends, some of whom have the backing of the church. Their overwhelming power and ruthless tactics see the town razed to the ground, your parents slain, and most of the townspeople killed in cold blood. Wishvale and its people are no more. 

Thankfully, you, a couple of your childhood friends, and a few other lucky souls were able to escape. You have a chance encounter with a strange scholar who hides you in his home in the countryside, helps you train, and gives you an almighty magic ring. There are many other rings like it, he tells you, and the people responsible for destroying Wishvale are among them. 

What follows is a very long, very disjointed story of renewal and revenge. Our player character wants to rebuild Wishvale, return it to its former glory and maybe even beyond, and that requires resources, helpers, influence, and a lot of time. But they also want to get revenge on the monsters who killed their family, their friends, and their fellow townsfolk. There is some crossover – taking down these terrible and powerful people helps improve the protagonist’s standing in the world and put Wishvale on the map – but for the most part, you’re left balancing the desire to rebuild with the desire to get revenge. 

This can be a bit odd at times, because you can just ignore rebuilding entirely if you want. I assume this is, at least in part, a strangely dissonant leftover from the game’s origins as mobile game Champions of the Continent — Wishvale doesn’t exist in that game, so there’s no town to rebuild. Other parts of the story have been expanded on and changed somewhat, I understand, but much of it follows in the mobile game’s footsteps. That’s not a bad thing, the storytelling is mostly excellent, and with the protagonist’s motivation behind it, it all feels largely coherent and enjoyable. 

Mercifully, this is not a tired story about breaking the cycle of revenge. Even if you weren’t personally involved in the villains’ evil plots, they are characters that would need dealing with, as they’re purely and monstrously evil, with far fewer shades of grey than villains seen prior in the series. The brutality of these characters is a step above — one early-game villain, for example, is a playwright who commits heinous atrocities, even against his own son, to use as material for his on-stage tragedies. Another is a former war hero who tries to drug soldiers in his command into mindless killing machines, kidnapping and enslaving the loved ones of scientists working on those drugs to ensure production continues. 

That’s not to say there’s no nuance. Even at their most heinous, there is humanity reflected in many of these villains, it’s just outweighed by their monstrous tendencies. This is punctuated rather bluntly as you face off against them, as each transforms into a horrible, disgusting beast midway through battle — they’re human, of course, but there’s an evil deep inside that cannot be ignored. 

The combat and systems surrounding it in Octopath Traveler 0 are as solid as ever, and maybe even a little bit better than past games. The main additions to the combat are the new rows system, and the protagonist’s job system, both of which add a tremendous amount of depth to an already fantastic turn-based combat system. 

The addition of rows in combat is by far the best aspect of Octopath 0, though I understand this is largely inherited from Champions of the Continent. Still, Octopath 0 lets you place four characters in the front row – the usual “main party”, so to speak – and an additional four characters in the back row, each of which stands behind a front row character. During the front row character’s turn, you can press ZR to switch them out with the back row character, which lets the formerly front row character recover HP and SP while the formerly back row character takes all the damage and dishes out moves. 

It sounds complicated, and it certainly can be at times, as you’re effectively working with eight party members at any given time. What makes this system so enjoyable is the little synergies that such a system enables — most characters have an ability that can affect the front or the back row, or an ability that interacts with their position in the battle. One character, for example, gets a damage boost if they started their turn in the back row, while another can be swapped in, cast a heal, and then automatically move back into the back row after acting. These synergies are simple on their face, but when you’ve got eight characters in your party, they quickly become complex and interesting, as there is effectively no end to how your party is set up and how it can work together. 

The protagonist’s new job system is much more simple in comparison — there are eight jobs for the protagonist to choose from, and they can switch between them after learning a few abilities within that job. Other party members are largely stuck within their set archetypes, but the protagonist being able to switch between jobs effectively makes them eight characters in one. If you’re going into a fight that you know magic is good for, you can swap to a magic-focused job to dish out fireballs. Or, if you’re struggling to keep your party alive, you can change your protagonist to a cleric and keep everyone healed up. These are all things that other party members can do too, but if you’ve got a party that works for your playstyle, the versatility of the protagonist makes for a much more adaptive experience. 

All of this is built upon what I consider to be one of the best combat systems in turn-based RPGs to date. In my review of the first Octopath Traveler, I praised the combat system more than anything else. It’s the most refined, most well-developed version of the Brave system first introduced in Bravely Default, and it feels incredible to pick away at weaknesses to break an enemy, then blast them with a fully powered up attack. Everything I said in that review applies here, and with the additional tricks up its sleeve, it’s hard to imagine many other turn-based combat systems holding a candle to this one. 

In terms of presentation, I also have little to complain about. Octopath Traveler 0 looks fantastic on the Switch 2, and I much prefer its full implementation of the HD-2D art style compared to Dragon Quest’s halfway effort. The world is beautiful, the combat is packed with needless but gorgeous particle effects, and save for a few odd shimmers here and there, it almost always looks phenomenal. The soundtrack, of course, is also great, with composer Yasunori Nishiki having done a fantastic job, as always. 

For as much praise as I have for Octopath 0, I have some frustrations with it, too. Like the first Octopath game, Octopath 0’s storytelling is disjointed and detached from itself. Throughout much of the main story, your traveling companions – of which there are dozens – are almost entirely absent, because the game cannot, at any given time, account for who’s traveling with you, or if you’ve collected certain characters out in the world. With so many party members, rewriting the scenarios dozens of times to account for some characters being present and others not would be a monumental task, and that task, understandably, has not been undertaken. Octopath Traveler 2 helped in some ways with this, but it just doesn’t seem possible here, which is disappointing. 

There are a few minor exceptions, and the rebuilding storyline features a familiar and persistent cast of party members and NPCs, but other storylines most often just introduce new characters to work with. Some of these characters are quite interesting and cool, too, which makes it all the more frustrating that they’re not among the small army of folks I’ve collected for my party. As a result, it’s easy to overlook the fact that your party members are characters at all — for most of the game’s runtime, each party member is little more than a tool in your combat toolbox, ready to be taken out and smashed against a problem when it arises. 

There’s also just way too much going on. It’s a very long game, with dozens of little storylines that largely don’t interact, almost as many areas to visit, and hundreds of characters to wrap your head around. It’s as dense as it is long, too, and while there is an option to speed up cutscenes – which I used liberally – it still feels like it’s overstaying its welcome at times. I still mostly enjoyed my lengthy time with it, but I suspect many players will bounce long before the credits roll, because it’s absolutely massive, even if it is good. 

There are a few minor gripes, too. Some storylines feel rushed and underdeveloped, while others feel like they could be entire games in their own right. Some swaying effects in certain combat environments are absolutely nauseating, and there’s little in the way of accessibility options to help reduce that. And there are some story moments that really do not land at all. After Triangle Strategy’s dicey attempt at telling stories about slavery, I’d hoped that future games from Square Enix would steer clear of the topic, but this one has not, and while it’s not as bad as Triangle Strategy in that regard, it’s still not great.

Despite some frustrations, it’s hard to deny that Octopath Traveler 0 is yet another successful and enjoyable entry in the series. It’s fantastic that the excellent story content previously locked behind a mobile game is more available and even improved, and new additions to an already wonderful combat system make it a joy to play. 

Rating: 4/5