Octopath Traveler 0 has a strong start, with a combat system that feels like a huge improvement over the previous entries and a powerful narrative set up. The story loses steam after the opening narrative branches, and the combination of a silent protagonist and no static party members makes it hard to get invested in the rest of the game’s narrative beats. The combat also starts to grow stale as the game progresses, with the focus on having tons of party members limiting the depth of each one.
Octopath Traveler 0
Developer: Square Enix and DOKIDOKI GROOVE WORKS
Price: $50
Platforms: PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, Switch 2 (reviewed), PC
The publisher provided a Switch 2 code for review
The opening hours of Octopath Traveler 0 lay a solid foundation. Three powerful enemies, focused on power, fame, and wealth, respectively, burn your village to the ground, killing most of the people, including your parents. You are chosen by a power ring to gather other, evil, powerful rings and destroy them, which just so happens to start with getting revenge.
This narrative setup does a ton of heavy lifting, allowing the silent protagonist, who never has actual dialogue, instead occasionally allowing you to choose one of several options, although these never have any real impact on the narrative.
The combat uses the eight party members by setting up a front line and a back line. Each character has a person behind them, whom they can swap freely with on their turn. The person in the back line gains a bit of health and SP at the end of each turn, and still gains BP. This allows you to build up powerful attacks by stacking BP in the back, while also making it easy to adapt to an enemy’s weakness.
This approach to combat grants you a ton of firepower, allowing you to fire off powered up moves more frequently than previous Octopath games. This is taken into account, with enemies hitting harder and bosses almost always having sweep abilities that can hit the whole front row. At times, it can feel tedious to be constantly healing, but once you have recruited a healer with an ability that can target the whole party, that issue goes away.
This does trivialize most random encounters, however, with the regular enemies in each area getting blown away before even getting a turn. You still get important rewards for these enemies and a decent amount of XP, but having to constantly go through the motions becomes tedious pretty early into the lengthy runtime.
Once the initial three storylines are concluded fairly early into the game, the story takes a nosedive. Once the focus shifts from your vengeance to typical chosen-one stuff, the silent protagonist aspect becomes an anchor in the story. None of your party members participate in the story outside of small sections, so it feels like a Canterbury Tales-style adventure narrative, but one where the last adventure is never referenced, and the main character never grows or learns anything.
This also makes it harder to swallow parts where character decisions feel pointless and dumb. For example, a mad king has some of the cursed rings, and it’s clear from the moment you are introduced that this only concludes with you killing him. Instead, you come up with a convoluted plan to fight with his army to gain his attention, despite him knowing who you are and that you are the chosen one. You even defend the king directly from an attack that would have killed him, delaying his defeat and resulting in more of your friends dying in the process.
If the main character had a personality or dialogue, this asinine thought process might be easier to swallow if it came with an explanation or character development, but it doesn’t, so it just feels pointedly dumb. The further into the story you get, the further you get from the main character having any real connection to the plot, and without constant companions to fill in those gaps, it’s tough to stay invested.
The abundance of party members, instead of a set group of eight like previous entries, also becomes an issue later in the game. You can’t class swap outside of the main character, so you hit a skill ceiling pretty quickly once you unlock all of them. You can gain masteries that let you teach abilities to other characters, but swapping out party members feels too punishing to do. You can have them train in town and earn those masteries there, but it becomes a real drip feed, and you can only have three learned abilities equipped at a time, so there isn’t depth even in that system.
The final piece is the town building quest, which progresses as you progress through the main story quests, even if it is largely disconnected. The story for rebuilding the town does manage to sustain itself, since you have a set cast of characters that are always present. This lets the story build, and the characters can actually reference events that happened previously.
The actual town building itself is a bit slow and too on-rails to be a standout system, but it’s enjoyable enough. New buildings and characters are spaced out a bit too much, and you unlock new facilities one at a time, so you have limited freedom over the direction of the town. You have plenty of control over placement, and the passive bonuses each villager can give, if placed in the right building, add enough strategy and rewards to keep checking in on the village.
The Final Word
While the combat system does feel like a significant improvement over the previous two games, the narrative doesn’t come anywhere close to either of those experiences. Octopath Traveler 0 is still a solid turn-based RPG with great art and music, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the other entries. It’s impressive for an experience made by cobbling together a mobile experience, but knowing what it started as doesn’t make it more than just fine.
MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average
