A Cozy JRPG Throwback – Octopath Traveler 0 Review
Octopath Traveler 0 is a prequel to the original Octopath Traveler, adapting the content from the mobile (gacha) game Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent and reworking its content into a regular single player turn-based JRPG. After playing through this game for over 80 hours and achieving the true ending I can confirm there’s no gacha mechanics in this game at all. This game reworking content from a mobile game is surprisingly similar to the recently released Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian, which also is a single player turn-based JRPG with no gacha mechanics.
There’s many changes from the mobile game but the biggest one is that this game adds a hometown storyline which is the prologue of the game along with a questline for town building. This game is a prequel and you don’t need to play the other games to understand its story but I’d still recommending just playing the games in chronological order because the more recently released titles have more quality of life improvements. Octopath Traveler 1 originally released in 2018 and admittedly does feel outdated now.
I didn’t play Champions of the Continent, the mobile game this game is based on, but when I played Octopath Traveler 0 it played like a perfectly normal JRPG with no gacha mechanics at all. In fact, I would go as far to say that I like the gameplay of Octopath Traveler 0 more than Octopath Traveler 1 or 2. There’s many small changes to the gameplay loop and I felt like the formula of the older titles was becoming far too stale.
For instance, both Octopath Traveler 1 and 2 had 8 playable characters (whose first name initials would spell out OCTOPATH). You would pick one as your starting character and recruit the remaining characters. The story would progress each individual character’s storyline in an episodic nature. These main quests wouldn’t consider any of the other characters you recruited because you could recruit the 8 in any order. These character chapters would generally be split into 4 distinct episodes, with later episodes having stronger enemies and bosses implicitly encouraging the player to do the earlier character chapters for other recruitable characters first.
In the older Octopath games, after picking your starting character and doing their initial main story quest you’re free to explore most of the map and recruit whichever character you want, but of course you’d have to be careful of different regions having very powerful enemies as well. There would be a post-game final boss or final chapter where your party may interact briefly with each other as well as unvoiced skits between a few characters when you enter a new region. Octopath Traveler 2 also had crossover chapters that would have 2 of the playable characters in a story, but these were only for a few select duos and didn’t cover all possible combinations of 2 characters of course.
Octopath Traveler 0 changes the formula by instead having the character stories focus on the villains which is a brilliant idea. There’s also a self-insert protagonist character that you can name and change the appearance of. You can change your protagonist’s class when out of battle by mastering enough skills using job points.
Your protagonist will have a prologue story and you’ll be able to explore some of the world after completing those events, but there’s another interesting change as well. Instead of being able to do any story quest you’re now locked to completing any of the first three villain stories, called in-game as the Master of Fame, Master of Power, and Master of Wealth. After these storylines are finished you’ll unlock the Master of All story arc, and after that you’ll unlock even more storylines which I won’t spoil.
I really like this change more because the developers could tune the difficulty of the game more finely. In the old games you could do any of the 8 character storylines at any time, but all of them would have the same formula of starting out extremely easy for their chapter 1, and getting harder by their chapter 4. The older games had a form of level scaling for chapter 1’s as well to make them slightly harder if you had a full party of characters but the episodic nature of the story did make the game as a whole feel repetitive.
In Octopath Traveler 0 the Master of Fame, Power, and Wealth story arcs are all a tutorial and even the Master of All boss feels like a final tutorial boss that makes sure you know all of the game’s mechanics before you move to the game’s advanced dungeons and bosses. I use the term tutorial very loosely, as the bosses in these earlier chapters can still be challenging if you’re under-prepared or new to the Octopath series. The later storylines now know that you completed all the previous storylines so they can have all the characters participate in a narrative continuing where you left off. Whereas in old titles with 8 sets of episodic chapters the game didn’t know which ones you did, so there was no narrative with interacting characters until the finale.
It’s similar to how in the oldest Mega Man games they would allow you tackle any of the eight bosses at once, but in the more modern Mega Man games the eight bosses are split into an introductory four bosses and an advanced four bosses, the latter of which only unlock beating the initial four. The game knows with certainty that you have the power-ups from the initial four bosses and can design levels around them for the advanced four bosses, whereas the oldest games couldn’t account for that. That’s how Octopath Traveler 0 plays like, as it knows you completed the earlier set of storylines and the later storylines end up being more reasonably challenging and it knows which characters you recruited from the main story so they actually interact in the narrative.
It sounds like a small complaint but in the old Octopath games it felt really boring recruiting the last of the 8 characters and still having to do their introductory quests. The later story arcs in Octopath 0 start off at a nice difficulty where the previous arc left off which I really enjoyed. The stakes in some of the later storylines feel really high as a result. It’s also really fun building up a team of the world’s most powerful characters.
There are a total of 34 recruitable characters in this game (not counting the protagonist) instead of having only 8 characters in the older titles. This number sounds overwhelming but it’s not. The game slowly drip-feeds you more characters as you discover more cities and advance the story. The story of this game is genuinely long, probably clocking in at 80-100 hours for a player, but it’s never boring. I never noticed the game spamming me with new characters either, as they were all recruited at a reasonable pace. The exception is only the beginning where the game lets you recruit enough characters to maintain a full party of 8 for the battles.
Each storyline arc has cutscenes but they’re never long except for the intro and endings. Most of this game was actually spent in the battles and exploring instead of lengthy cutscenes unlike many other JRPGs. The large number of recruitable characters sound stressful but none of the characters are truly missable (if you actually do miss certain characters the game will let you fix it but I won’t spoil specific mechanics).
This game has a total of about two dozen sidequests that open up slowly as you progress the story but quests where you recruit a character are marked differently with a person icon in case you don’t want to do generic sidequests.
Some characters are automatically obtained from progressing the narrative as well. Although the game’s story arcs are centered around the villain usually you’ll team up with someone in the region to defeat them which is how you end up recruiting many characters. Sometimes characters even permanently die which shocked me.
Recruiting the characters from sidequests was never hard or grindy. Usually you’d see a cutscene where you learn about the recruitable character and help them by delivering an item or defeating in a boss in an optional dungeon. Some characters who are strong may require defeating a tricky boss or navigating a dungeon, but it’s generally very fair and there’s no time limit for recruiting a character. These recruitment sidequests felt like those found in The Witcher 3 where they actually introduce a character, show off their personality, and you solve a problem. The days of generic “defeat 20 specific monsters” are thankfully over. All of the recruitable characters are unique and have their own nuances, unlike generic recruits in tactical RPGs.
I didn’t see any dialog options causing recruitment issues either. I noticed you could say “no” to recruiting characters so in my playthrough I made sure to choose “yes” to recruit them. It’s very modern game design, so you don’t need to worry about making a dialog choice and then 20 hours later it turns out you can’t recruit a character because of said choice.
Only one character had their recruitment quest locked behind what looked like a generic quest and this was because an earlier quest triggered a later quest in a specific quest chain, but for the majority of characters their recruitment quest automatically appears in your quest list when you progress the story enough. I liked my quest list filling because there was no need to scour the world talking to all the NPCs to unlock obscure sidequests.
Sadly for many of these recruitable characters they’ll only have have their sidequest scene for when you recruit them and you’ll never see them again in the narrative until the ending where they’ll have a line or two of dialog. Some recruitable characters do have optional sidequests like Xerc’s, and it was a really well-made questline that showed off a scholar’s approach to solving problems. This is the exception, and not every recruitable character has fully fleshed out optional quests. It’s pretty similar to many Fire Emblem games where you’ll recruit a character that has most of their character arc for the one chapter where you recruit them, maybe an unvoiced scene in a support conversation, and you won’t really hear from them again until the ending scenes. On the other hand, characters recruited from the main story do make many appearances, have full voice acting in the main scenario, and end up being central figures in the endgame.
In actual gacha games such as Fire Emblem: Heroes, Genshin Impact or Persona 5: Phantom X, the character recruitment is completely different, where you’d usually have to wait a while in real life or spend actual money in order to acquire in-game currency, which in turn are spent on pulls on banners, timed events where you can win a variety of characters. In other words getting a character is like winning a small lottery. In Octopath 0 the characters are recruited like a normal JRPG such as Suikoden so there’s no need to worry. You just need to go to the sidequest marker, complete it and you get your character. There’s no gacha stamina mechanics either (stamina referring to a gacha mechanic where you have to wait real life time to progress the game), so you can play as much as you want whether you want to grind character levels or job points, explore towns, find treasure in dungeons, or progress the main story.
Although it’s a very surface level comparison, yes, the developers actually did unintentionally make a fun Suikoden-like game by integrating all the characters into this game.
Each character in Octopath Traveler 0 is very finely tuned and I felt like every character, even those belonging to the same job, had their own purpose on my team. There is a fight where you can use your entire party of 35 in a boss fight but that’s only one situation in the 100 hour game. I wish there were scenarios where you could make multiple teams and have them tackle a big dungeon or fight different parts of a giant boss. I thought at first that maybe the developers were afraid that players might not acquire the optional recruits and could get soft-locked, but then I realized on the other hand that the main story actually gives you plenty of recruits for free too. Think of it this way: the original Final Fantasy 7 back in 1997 had varying final boss fights depending on how many characters you recruited, with an easier version of the final boss if you chose not to obtain any of the optional recruitable characters. Games such as Infinite Undiscovery, Suikoden, and Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes made phenomenal use of multiple teams tackling a big dungeon, so I felt this was a very huge missed opportunity. In other words, you can get 35 characters but for most of the game you can only use 8 at a time.
You have the same 8 classes from the older Octopath games but some recruitable characters have unique classes no other unit can obtain. Your protagonist can switch between the normal 8 classes at any time as long as you unlock the classes from buying enough skills in your current class, but all recruitable characters have their class predetermined and those cannot be changed.
I typically found 3 recruitable characters of each regular job class and there were many other characters with unique classes I won’t spoil. Each character has the “normal” core skills of their class but each character has their own unique skills as well, making it worth it to recruit everybody even though you’d think they’d be redundant. Although characters such as Ludo, Carinda and Tressa are all recruitable merchants each one has a slightly different take on the merchant class with slightly varying skills and passives. But even regardless of that wouldn’t you still want Tressa in your party?
You eventually can learn skills on your recruited units who have mastered their class to give the skill to other units. When you do this the skill acts like an inventory item that you can give and take back from a unit and you can keep re-learning the skill to get a big stack of that skill to share with everybody. There’s no subclass (secondary class) option but you can put learned skills onto other units with exceptions for certain units’ signature skills. It’s too bad that some skills cannot be shared but I understand that the developers didn’t want the players to break the game. The game is plenty breakable as is.
Another difference with Octopath Traveler 0 is that you can bring eight characters into battle instead of only 4. The characters are organized into two rows and you can swap characters who are directly in front and below each other. It allows for a lot of new strategies to be used in battle. I noticed that on average the bosses have more shields and health, but it’s because your party is a lot more powerful due to having two rows full of units. In the old Octopath games it was tricky early-game to get the characters to cover enemies’ weaknesses but with 8 characters you can move around you’re guaranteed to cover enemies’ weaknesses even after just a few hours of play. Octopath 0 is easier on average than the first two games if you train up your party well and the game gives you plenty of options on how to build your team. More party building options and customization is always great to have.
The gameplay is pretty much the turn-based JRPG combat you’d find anywhere else. You have the same stats and equipment system you’d find in any other JRPG. You level up characters by fighting random encounters.
Your characters have set jobs and to learn more skills from your job you use job points that you also get from fighting enemies. I suppose one dislike is that the protagonist doesn’t have any advanced classes.
I really liked exploring in Octopath Traveler 2, going into a secret temple at the remote edge of the world and unlocking a rare job so it was a letdown there wasn’t at least one or two special classes for the protagonist. There wasn’t even a special class from progressing the story but from the narrative it would’ve make sense to do so, but I can’t spoil specifics. I really like how in Fire Emblem: Three Houses the protagonist obtains a unique class after a certain point in the story, but you also don’t have to use it if you don’t want to. I really would’ve liked some kind of “promotion” to their class so to speak.
There are two big standout features of the actual combat system that set it out from other JRPGs. The first is that all enemies have shield values. Enemies have a set number of weaknesses which are a mixture of weapon types and elements that are represented by question marks. You need to figure out the weakness types an enemy has and use them which decreases the enemy’s shield value each time. When their shield value drops to 0 you “break” the enemy.
Breaking the enemy stops the enemy from acting that turn and also allows your weapons and skills to deal more damage, even if your weapon type or elemental type isn’t their weakness. When the enemy is broken it’s your time to do all the big damage. You don’t actually use the weaknesses to deal more damage, the weakness types are really just an avenue to drop the shield value in order to break the enemy and then you can deal big damage with any weapon or skill type. It’s not like in a game where enemy is weak to fire and you have to use fire moves, you can use any moves you want after breaking the enemy.
The second big feature is that each time a character acts they gain a “boost” to use via boost points. You can store up to 5 boost points but you can only spend 1-3 at once. When you use your boost you won’t get a boost point for that character’s next turn. Boost will either let you boost your normal attacks causing you to do multiple normal attacks at once, or it will power up a skill significantly (boosting a skill won’t cause it to be used multiple times it only strengthens it). Loosely speaking it can be thought of as similar to the default system in Bravely Default, except here you don’t go into debt, you can only spend the boost points you have.
The shield and boost mechanics each on their own are nothing special but together they make for an extremely fun battle system. My go-to technique in battle was just using skills that performed multiple hits on an enemy, which would reduce the enemy’s shield significantly without using any boost. That way I’d save the boost for a powerful skill to use after breaking the enemy. It’s a really fun and addicting system that stands apart from other JRPG battle systems such as the old Final Fantasy games or Persona and Shin Megami Tensei.
My only small criticism with the battle system is that depending on the time I break the enemy my characters might get significantly more moves. For instance, if I broke an enemy at the beginning of my entire turn (the first character of the timeline) I would be able to use the remaining characters for that turn and the next turn’s character actions as well. But if I broke an enemy at the ending of a turn (the last character of a turn) then I’d only get to use the next turn’s character actions.
This meant that it’d always be worth it to wait until the beginning of a new turn to break the enemy since you get to use all your characters twice instead of once. I’m using the term “turn” loosely because the enemies and your characters have speed stats that cause varying orders for your actions but loosely speaking all your allies get a turn and all your enemies get a turn on the timeline. Your enemy’s shields get replenished only after the break period ends (sometimes they get more shields the next time as well) but if your enemy has one or more shield present then their shield won’t replenish. This means you can take your time and buff everybody before you actually break the enemy, but this seems like it’s meant to be exploited on purpose. On the other hand there’s nothing wrong with just breaking and dealing damage multiple times each battle, it’s not as if you have to play optimally 100% of the time.
A big misstep was the 9999 damage cap. When your characters are powerful, whether it’s through their stats, level, equipment, or just a powerful skill, their damage essentially becomes locked to 9999 even though they should’ve actually have dealt more damage. I don’t mind having a damage cap because I understand the developers don’t want the players to have broken characters early on, but I believe it could’ve been implemented in a far better way.
You need to recruit a particular character in the mid-game and learn his passive skill to spread it to other characters to break the damage cap for each character. The problem is that it ends up wasting a skill slot and you only have 3 passive skill slots, limiting my customization significantly since endgame enemies all have significantly more than 9999 health points.
This is worse than Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which had a similar issue but it wasn’t so debilitating in that game because you could equip hundreds of skills per character. In that game, skills costed points and you were limited on skills based on a character’s lumina point limit rather than having a limit to the number of skills itself, meaning one skill wasn’t really hogging up a spot.
I’m not a game developer of course, but in this game I’d much rather have the player obtain a key item after doing that character’s quest (or even after a certain point in the main story) that lets you permanently break the damage cap with all characters so that you don’t need a dummy skill hogging up a skill slot for all your characters.
I also don’t know if this is an oversight but in the early-game when I had the damage cap at 9999 damage I was able to outsmart the game by using multi-hitting weaker skills instead of a stronger skill that hit once. Often a weaker multi-hit skill would do 7000*4 = 28k damage and a single powerful skill would do 9999 damage. Even a two-hit skill could do more damage than a one-hit skill. By outsmarting the game like this so easily what was even the point of having a damage cap? I wasted valuable job points on getting a stronger move that hit once when there was already a move unlocked that was weaker but multi-hitting that ended up being far superior. I suppose now I can see the appeal of Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?.
Some endgame bosses have over a million health points and some have movesets where they become significantly more aggressive if not beaten within a reasonable number of turns, meaning that your character is worthless if they’re only doing 9999 damage per turn.
One huge disappointment I had was with the graphics. The characters generally have great pixel art and animations though I really don’t like the characters’ hands which look too block-like and out of place. The backgrounds also don’t look that good, being full of repetitive textures. The reason for this is because the assets were re-used from Champions of the Continent, which was released between Octopath 1 and 2. Even though these games are all full of 2D sprites with simple 3D backgrounds it is off-putting that Octopath 2 looks better.
The art direction itself is still top notch and the actual town designs are amazing, being full of taverns, inns, castles, churches and more. The world has many kinds of biomes too, such as winter, desert, and tropical regions as well. I still think back to the dark ages, where titles such as Final Fantasy 13 actually removed towns and relegated its shops and crafting system to save points.
Another big dislike I personally had was the special effects during exploration. I understand these games from Square Enix are 2D-HD games and I really like some special effects such as fire, but I feel that as a whole the special effects go a bit overboard. I can imagine the camera wobble during fights can be annoying to many too.
The dark areas are a tad too dark and the in-game lantern the protagonist uses isn’t good enough. There’s a “special region” in the endgame I cannot spoil and I understand thematically why the developers wanted to have special effects present but those endgame areas gave me a massive headache due to how overblown the special effects were. I’d show an image of it, but it’s an endgame spoiler.
On the bright side I really like the quality of life enhancements, such as an in-game mini-map showing clearly all the areas I could go, as well as counters for defeating elite enemies and treasure chests opened on each map, once you unlock the feature.
One new feature that is contentious is the town-building mechanic which the Octopath traveler series never had before. I didn’t find it overbearing at all and it felt like having a castle in Suikoden, or in other words it was a very fun addition to the game.
You pick up green glowing spots in dungeons to collect building materials. I never found these out of the way and I’d get more than enough materials from just traveling to new regions or while grinding for levels. You use these materials to create buildings. Some were generic buildings such as houses and large houses, but you could also craft unique kinds of buildings such as an arena to fight previously defeated elite mini-bosses, a farm, a training facility, a church and more.
These buildings let you unlock bonus features. The training facility for instance unlocks the ability to permanently learn skills from a character to share with other characters and also lets you put in characters to gain experience quickly. This is very useful since you have 35 characters but a maximum party of 8, and anybody not in that party of 8 won’t get experience.
Another great structure is the farm, which allows you to plant seeds you find and grow them into ingredients used for cooking, and eating those dishes allow you to receive different kinds of bonuses in battle.
You can invite certain NPCs you find around the world as well as party members you recruited to work or live in the buildings to gain additional bonuses. The systems all harmonize perfectly. The prologue story continues into the town-building storyline. I think it may be possible to continue the main questline without doing the town-building but eventually I found doing the town-building to be really worth it for all the easy bonuses you get.
I wish that the storylines interacted better with each other because the prologue and town story was a new addition put in for this game. When the stakes in the plot get large it feels like the town gets left behind with the town characters you were introduced to only having a few lines of dialog in the endgame. It really does feel like the protagonist is the chosen one who eventually has to leave the town but visits every once in a while.
The town-building storyline does have requirements to keep progressing it but I never found the requirements strict. Usually you’d just have to cook a basic meal, plant a few crops, build a few houses, and recruit a certain number of townsfolk which felt more like a tutorial for the town-building mechanics itself. There is fast travel to all cities and your crops grow from just doing regular battle encounters naturally. After exploring a new dungeon I’d just warp back to my farm and collect my crops and plant new seeds I found, so it was never repetitive at all it was just natural game progression.
One of the biggest features of Octopath games is the “path actions” system. It lets you interact with NPCs in a variety of ways and actually makes talking to NPCs interesting for once. These path actions vary a lot from just receiving items for free, buying and haggling prices from NPCs, recruiting an NPC to use them in battle temporarily, to even just fighting an NPC as if they were a mini-boss to get items.
In old games you could perform different actions to NPCs depending on the on-screen character you’re using but now they simplified it since you have one protagonist. I like this a lot more because I can easily just do all the path actions with the protagonist instead of switching characters and getting stressed out with the overwhelming options.
Instead of checking your character’s level for path chance success it checks their reputation stat which are divided into power, fame and wealth. You raise these by progressing the main story or by doing sidequests and they can’t be lowered. You don’t have to meet the stat requirements but you might have a lower chance of success if you try using a path action on a strong NPC. If you fail enough you’ll lose town reputation, which means you cannot perform path actions until you pay what is essentially a fine to restore your reputation, though you could just save and reload if you’re patient enough.
This system sounds silly but it’s extremely creative and I’ve barely seen any games do this because it would take a lot of work from the developers. Most RPGs just do skill checks very broadly which is nice but never as detailed as Octopath Traveler’s path action system. I suppose you could loosely think of it like the kicking mechanic in Radiata Stories, where you could physically kick any NPC in the game to turn it an encounter which could be easy or post-game boss levels of difficult with varying levels of rewards, though Octopath has bartering and recruiting path actions too on top of just fighting.
It’s hilarious in this game because you can challenge a random elderly man to battle who would be almost as strong as the final boss, and if you could defeat him you’d get the most powerful weapon in the game. I’m exaggerating a bit and those cases are very exceptional but it’s worth doing the path actions when you go to a new city, and there are roughly a dozen full cities each full of NPCs with a lot of goodies to collect.
These collectibles acquired from path actions are generally not missable and by doing path actions you can get more powerful really quickly. It’s not just equipment either, you can get trade route papers to expand Wishvale’s shop’s inventory, new recipes to cook and new seeds to plant. These all feed into the town-building farm and cooking in the tavern. This is one of the rare cases where I really liked interacting with NPCs. It’s not necessary at all either because you can still get items and equipment from monster drops and treasure chests in dungeons but by doing path actions you can break the game wide open very early.
To be honest I felt more disappointed that the chests hiding behind elite enemies didn’t have good loot compared to random NPCs in towns. I regret not not doing the town restoration questline earlier because among many bonuses you also get the ability to unlock blue treasure chests from it.
The story of the game is a bit all over the place with somewhat awkward pacing. The early-game villains are unapologetically evil and I loved it. I played with the English dub and the voice acting was phenomenal. The voice acting felt like a theater performance throughout, maybe a few lines here and there were a bit overacted but I felt it to be extremely refreshing.
I really enjoyed the scenes with Auguste who was, put simply, marvelous. Even the game itself makes fun of it later on and some scenes were over the top on purpose. It’s strange having an Octopath game focused so much on the villains but it was genuinely a very interesting take on the formula and it worked out well. The villains in this remind me of Jack Horner in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, a villain who is cartoonishly evil but it works out well because the games don’t even try to make you sympathize with them.
I’ll have to spoil the first half hour of the game in order to give a premise of the plot but I won’t spoil anything past the first few hours. You play as a self-insert character living a peaceful life in the cozy town of Wishvale. You’re the child of the captain of the town’s guard who gives you basic combat training to prepare you for your first day of work as part of the town’s guard. During a festival you’re attacked and the village is sacked by an invading army, with most of the residents being killed and the survivors fleeing the village.
There are three introductory villains who make an appearance: Tytos, Herminia, and Auguste. After escaping and finding the village sacked the protagonist begins efforts to rebuild the village. They also want to find the surviving villagers and also get revenge on the three villains who orchestrated the attack.
I’m simplifying the plot a lot but there was one plot hole that annoyed me. How did the protagonist know about Herminia and Auguste? They were hiding during the attack on Wishvale. I would’ve preferred if this was told explicitly in-game because it really took me out of the story. Otherwise this is just the premise and the plot gets really complex afterwards with even more villains entering the fold.
The story arcs found later on in the game end up turning more into a traditional JRPG where the separate arcs converge and everyone works together to save the world, so if that’s what you’re looking for you it’s worth it to keep progressing through the game. Some of the story arcs are amazing, but some others can be a bit lengthy and boring too. My main criticism stems from the endgame arcs in the finale which re-use old content too much and the fun gameplay started turning exhausting to get through.
I really wish there was a way to remove the random enemy encounters as well. I understand the developers don’t want players to get access to later regions too early so having random encounters with powerful enemies is the obvious solution to that, but I wish there was an in-game mechanic to remove at least lower level encounters so that I could explore the fields for collectibles and secrets more easily. I really would’ve preferred if there was a way to have on-screen enemy encounters too so that you could just physically navigate around enemies you didn’t want to face.
I really loved the soundtrack in this game. I enjoy the works of many video game composers such as Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy series), Hitoshi Sakimoto (Final Fantasy: Tactics and Final Fantasy 12) and recently Lorien Testard (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33). Yasunori Nishiki composed the soundtrack of Octopath Traveler 0 and he stands tall among these legends. It’s tough to put in words but this game features really engaging classical music. There’s many great battle, boss, city and dungeon themes spread throughout the game. This title has some of the best boss fight themes since Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance. Over the decades I’ve spent reviewing games I’ll always discover a new theme that really resonates with me, but Decisive Battle 0 is hands-down one of the best boss themes I’ve ever heard. It’s genuinely a banger and Nishiki is a master of his craft and that’s just one of the many themes present in the game.
Octopath Traveler 0 is one of the best turn-based JRPGs I’ve played in a long time. It’s a long game, taking me about 80 hours to recruit all characters and get to the true ending of the game. The entire game as a whole was a really fun experience. It’s pure turn-based JRPG goodness. I really enjoyed recruiting all the characters, customizing their skills, and obtaining gear. Although I didn’t particularly enjoy random encounters every few steps I still enjoyed the combat, the boss fights, and exploring the fields and dungeons for collectibles. There’s a lot of fields and dungeons to explore across the world map and I was surprised how many zones there were with a variety of distinct biomes. There’s even a ship allowing you to access a large bay. I wish I could’ve explored the ocean around the entire map.
The graphics may be a step back from Octopath Traveler 2 but the sprite design and boss designs are still phenomenal and the art direction in the game’s many cities is still very appealing. Completing path actions was fun just like the older games and the new town-building mini-game seamlessly fit into the game. I genuinely wish the developers would bring town-building or farming in future Octopath games too. Although the story has pacing issues and the story quality varies significantly depending on the story arc you’re in I found it to be an interesting story as a whole and after the initial arcs you’ll get a decent JRPG story with a colorful cast of characters where you save the world. Even though the assets were re-purposed from a mobile game this game was fully reworked to be a normal JRPG experience with no gacha mechanics whatsoever. The addicting combat system and the banger soundtrack were the game’s biggest highlights.
Octopath Traveler 0 Review
Our Score: Amazing
Pros
- Addicting turn-based JRPG combat where you strike an enemy’s weakness. Many fun recruitable characters and fully fleshed out job system.
- Intriguing story with amazing English dub voice acting.
- 80+ hour game. It’s a purely single player JRPG experience with no gacha mechanics at all.
- Amazing soundtrack. The fields, cities, dungeons, regular encounters and boss themes are all amazing.
- Random encounters can be annoying after a while. It would’ve been nice if there was an item or skill to reduce them.
- Story pacing can be a bit awkward depending on the story arc you’re completing. The final arc drags on and recycles a significant amount content.
- The graphics were made before Octopath Traveler 2 and as a result look worse than that game. Some spritework such as character hands don’t look that good. Special effects can be overbearing at times in certain dungeons.
- At the time of release there is too much audio compression that makes the game less pleasant to listen to.
– Brandon Harris
Reviewed on the PC (Steam)
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