As a massive lover of JRPGs, there are so many different series I love. Whether it’s a heavy hitting franchise with years of instalments like Final Fantasy or Persona, or a more niche RPG like Valkyria Chronicle, I have so many favourites that I’ll happily jump between whenever I get a chance. Crawling its way up my favourite RPG series list over the last decade, Octopath Traveller and its sequel married my love of turn-based combat and gorgeous 2D art to create some of the best RPGs ever made. Now the one Octopath game that got away is free from the shackles of mobile, and has been fully remade as a full fledged entry to this illustrious series. Octopath Traveller 0 is a wonderful way to end a year of extraordinary RPGs, but can it stand up against its sensational siblings?
One of the main hooks of the Octopath Traveller series is that you follow eight different protagonists through an adventure, choosing your first character and finding the rest as you go. Octopath Traveller 0 scraps this entirely, and instead has you create a custom character using a selection of HD-2D hairstyles and faces. With a new blank slate to adventure as, you’re thrown into life in Wishvale. This charming little hamlet is a great place to live, at least until it’s burned to the ground by evil soldiers and their leader who’s looking for an all powerful artifact.
Without a home your character is taken in by a mysterious cleric, and hidden away from the world until reaching adulthood. It’s then that you reunite with your childhood allies and begin a quest to rebuild Wishvale as it once was. There are plenty of folk who survived the attack scattered across the land, alongside people who just fancy living somewhere new and cosy. Coupled with this quest of construction there’s also a desire to make the land a better place by purging the evil from it, in the form of three tyrants who hold wealth, military strength and influence over the arts.
Whichever path you decide to follow first, you’ll have to do plenty of the series’ staple turn-based battling. Your hero and their companions each have their own job that grants them different abilities, be that elemental attacks or the ability to use swords and spears with ease. You’ll use these skills to target the weaknesses of enemies, and hopefully break and stun them before they can hurt you too much. The combat system is as compelling and masterfully crafted as ever, and makes random battles a joy.
To really take advantage of breaking enemies, you’ll want to use burst attacks. Each turn you’re granted a potential extra action you can unleash on foes, and if you store these you can end up using four attacks in a single turn. By taking advantage of this you can often wear down even the toughest of foes before they have a chance to act, and against bosses this is often essential.
If you’ve played an Octopath game before you’ll be more than familiar with this combat, but 0 does add some new flourishes too. The main change is that you can take eight characters into battle instead of four, with four in the front row and four in the back. You only really control the front as you fight, but at any time you can tag in the ally behind a party member and use their skills instead. This is especially impactful because they’ll have been building up extra turns as the fight progresses too, which leads to some particularly silly burst attacks that just keep coming.
There are all the usual bells and whistles outside of combat too in Octopath Traveller 0, like Path Actions. These allow you to interact with the people in a variety of ways, like bartering for goods or convincing them to join you as summons in battle. These used to be tied to specific characters but are instead now tied to stats relating to your influence. It functions much the same though, and enables you to gather all sorts of goodies with a bit of luck.
The new exciting out of battle side of Octopath Traveller 0 is the village building, which is a massive chunk of side content that’s hugely rewarding. By gathering materials and completing side quests you’ll be able to build all sorts of structures in Wishvale, from houses to settle people to a bar where they can happily rehydrate. By bringing new folks into the town you’ll gain passive benefits like bonus items, and before you know it you’ll have a community working with you and granting you goodies as they do.
Like all the Octopath Traveller games, there’s a wonderful sense of freedom in this mobile remake. You’re free to take on the three threats in any order you choose, and will always have tons of side quests and new dungeons to explore if you’re not interested in progressing. There’s just as much content stuffed into this entry as the original two games too, so if you’re hoping to spend hours and hours in this gorgeous HD-2D world you’ll have plenty to keep you busy.
I really enjoyed my time with Octopath Traveller 0, but I have to admit that compared to its predecessors it’s just not quite on that elite level. The difficulty is incredibly low, and even optional elite enemies often feel too easy to take down. The story is much less impactful too, with less important characters to create memorable moments with. Even the visuals, while wonderful, just can’t hold a candle to those previous Game of the Year contenders. While a great game in its own right, it’s impossible to avoid comparisons to the first two games – which 0 doesn’t fare well in.
Octopath Traveller 0 is a fantastic turn-based RPG, with all the series features you could hope for. Its combat is as compelling as ever, with enough depth to keep you engaged for the entire runtime. Despite this though it’s hard to deny that this mobile remake feels a little lacking compared to past Octopath games, and you’ll likely have a better time with it if you don’t go in expecting that level of excellence.
