I have been on Team Octopath since the first title was revealed back in 2017 and am an avid HD-2D supporter. When it was announced that the mobile Octopath, Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent, was getting a console version makeover, I was on board. As someone who has a bit of an aversion to playing games on my phone, I had yet to experience this latest tale in Orsterra, but recently, I have been spending some time with this brand-new rendition of Octopath Traveler 0. After about 20 hours with it so far, and what I expect to be FAR from the end, I find Zero to be a bit of a peculiar beast. One that offers both a familiar look and feel but also seems to be delivering a much different game than the previous two mainline Octopath titles, too.
For fans of the overall gameplay, especially the combat, Octopath Traveler 0 will feel like slipping back on your favorite pair of gloves. Zero maintains a very similar battle system, incentivizing you to hit enemies with specific weaknesses to break their guards and boosting to dish out greater damage or more hits. In the other games, you had a good amount of control over the types of damage you dealt, thanks to being able to swap around your party members’ jobs. Zero, at least so far, feels more limiting in this sense, as you are at the mercy of whatever weapons and abilities the characters you have so far recruited and have in your party possess, since only the main character you create at the start of the game is able to actually change jobs.
There does seem to be a bit of customization and flexibility offered through Ability Mastery items you can discover as you play. These are special equippable versions of abilities that various classes could learn into slots characters can unlock by spending their JP on. I love RPGs with job systems and the experimentation that comes from trying out combinations and hypothesizing about clever party compositions, which I got in spades from Octopaths 1 and 2, but I haven’t quite gotten that same feeling yet with Zero. It all still feels good, just… different.
If one of the aspects of Octopath Traveler that has turned you off in the past was how the stories feel a bit too disjointed and not like a cohesive story, then Zero may just be a great option to check out. Even in the twenty or so hours I have played, the narrative has been far more focused on a singular character—that being your created character. At the start of the game, events cause your home to be destroyed, and your mission is to find and deal with those responsible.
Where previous games had large, spanning chapters with each of the eight characters having their own storylines to play through that could have very little interaction or impact on the others, the opening storylines each focus on one of the perpetrators of your home’s destruction and one of its restoration. I count myself among the crowd that was disappointed in how disjointed and separate each of the character chapters could feel, particularly egregious in the first game, and I’m taking quite a liking to Zero’s approach. But the more I play, the more I’m realizing that it also makes it feel more like a traditional RPG. This focus seems to have come at the expense of giving most of your party members depth and strong motivations, which may be part of Zero being based on a mobile gacha title.
I’m keeping my fingers crossed that as I get further in, more stories around all my other party members will start appearing, and that a character’s story isn’t limited to only the small quest tied to recruiting them into the group. My main character’s story has been nail-biting so far, but I just hope it hasn’t come at the cost of making the rest of my party seem like bodies to fill slots in my part, either.
Despite looking nearly identical to its predecessors, Octopath Traveler 0 feels like it could happily exist as either an Octopath title or a whole new IP, both using the HD-2D art style. I’m thoroughly enjoying my time with it and can’t wait to see how everything plays out. Still, it is also having me give serious thought to trying to define what it means to be an Octopath game—something that, before playing Zero, I could have answered easily. It is now causing me to have to reevaluate those ideas. But for that, you will have to wait for our full review closer to the release on December 4.
Octopath Traveler Zero is releasing on Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S and PC
Irrational Passions was provided with a PS5 code.
