If, like me, you’re a fan of old-school Japanese RPGs, you’ve probably played Octopath Traveller. It landed like a bolt from the blue in 2018 and managed to both reinvent and reminisce about games from our childhood.

Octopath Traveller 2 was one of our highest-scored games of 2023, and is still one of the best JRPGs of recent years. It’s a bit of a disappointment that Octopath Traveller 0 doesn’t live up to those lofty heights. It’s good, but it doesn’t really evolve the formula, and many of the core features are simplified or missing.

Octopath Traveller 0 is the Champions of the Continent mobile game rebuilt as a standalone adventure. Sure, it’s a new game for diehard fans, but it still carries some of the blemishes of the mobile version. I had hopes it would stand beside previous entries, rather than their shadows.

READ MORE: Review | Octopath Traveler 2, ‘modern nostalgia’ (PS5)

A sword-ed affair

Combat in Octopath Traveller 0 is the same as it was in the first two games — and that’s a very good thing. The Octopath Traveller franchise has developed a tried-and-tested formula for revitalising JRPG combat.

If you haven’t played either of the previous games, I’ll give you a quick rundown. 

Every fight uses your eight heroes, arrayed in two lines of four. The front line does the fighting, and you can swap them with the back line whenever you want. You have your collection of Mages, Fighters, Healers and all the usual RPG flair.

The enemies you fight — including everything from forest-dwelling ratmen to corrupt templars and giant serpents — have a range of weaknesses. Each time you encounter a new enemy, you have this fantastic little puzzle to work through as you test your abilities to find their weaknesses.

There is some obvious logic to it, like shooting arrows at flying enemies or using fire magic against ice elementals. But there are plenty that take some trial and error.

Breaking rank

Finding the weaknesses is more than just doing big damage — though big damage numbers are definitely a core part of it. Weaknesses can also ‘break’ your enemy. Doing enough instances of damage will cause that enemy to miss their round of actions this turn. This is a huge advantage and adds massive tactical depth if you can plan out the attacks needed to break an enemy before they let rip a massive attack. 

Lastly, your unit’s abilities can be powered up. For many core abilities, this means doing bigger damage with fireballs. But for your main attacks, it adds more swing to your core weapons. So there are plenty of times when an enemy is near breaking, and it’s better to trade weaker single attacks with bigger damage spells if it causes them to break. 

This constant back and forth in combat is easily the highlight for me, and kept me engaged with Octopath Traveller 0, even when other game elements dragged. This system of combat even has a solution for fighting low-level enemies that you can trounce in two hits – breaking them still nets you job points for unlocking new abilities. Awesome stuff.  

When you wish upon a Wishvale

A core new addition to Octopath Traveller 0 is the town of Wishvale. It’s where you’ll spend much of your time going back to between adventures. As part of the story, our hero is tasked with rebuilding their hometown and bringing in new citizens. Throughout the towns you travel through, some folk would be open to relocating to the pastoral construction site known as Wishvale.

Everyone you invite brings a special ability, which activates depending on the building they are housed in. Some might give you a shipment of wood, while others increase the town garden’s output. It’s a nice little distraction between the more combat-focused adventures. 

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However, it takes until late in the game to unlock all the buildings and segments of the town. The town progression is tied to a subquest that ticks along beside the main story. So there were large portions of the game where I didn’t go back to Wishvale, knowing I had nothing new to place or changes to make. 

This is one way that Octopath Traveller 0 still feels like a mobile game. Wishvale feels like it’s paced to check in with over long stretches of time, rather than in longer gaming sessions. Once you have everything unlocked, it’s fun to move buildings around and place everything to create your own little hamlet. But much of the time, I just unlocked one new house, put it in the newly opened slot and then went back to the story.

Classy proposals

The original Octopath Traveller appropriately followed the story of eight characters, each with their own tale. Octopath Traveller 0 does away with that by having you create a custom character. When you begin, you select the usual hair shapes, eye colour, hair colour etc. You then choose between one of the eight classes that are available in the game.

Over the course of the adventure, you’ll most likely work through most of the classes. Each of them has a selection of core abilities — Mages can throw fire or lightning, Warriors use martial weapons, and Dancers buff your party with sweet grooves. As you level up each class, you choose new active abilities and unlock new passives. About halfway through the unlocks for each class, you’re able to select a new class and jump over.

I began with the Mage, before moving over to Merchant, then Dancer and so on. One crucial point here is that once you’ve chosen a new class, you have to unlock a certain number of abilities before you can choose a new one. So if, like me, you select Merchant and don’t gel with the abilities, you’re stuck with it until you unlock enough to swap to another. 

Unfortunately, many of these classes are simplified in Octopath Traveller 0 compared to their versions in Octopath Traveller and its sequel. The Apothecary, for instance, can’t create concoctions in fights. The Thief can’t steal from people in the overworld. You do have access to similar out-of-combat abilities in a similar vein to the previous game’s Path Actions that gave each character unique interactions with people in the world. 

Party up

From start to finish, there are 30 other party members to unlock, each with a little bit of story slotting them into the main adventure. Unfortunately, you only have the option of changing your own unique hero’s class, so the additional party members are all a bit ‘take it or leave it’.

Like the hero, they level up and gain new abilities, but without much customisation, I often found a preferred lineup and left others at the tavern.

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Admittedly, with 30 characters to include, some of the narrative reasoning is very loose. One soldier character is like, “I have a key, you also have a key, let’s find the locks they go into together!” If I had a dollar for every adventure I’ve been on because some dude at the coffee shop also had keys in their pocket, I’d probably be having more adventures.

Gather ’round for storytime

The story itself is fun in a very moustache-twirling Saturday cartoon style of melodrama. You initially have three big bads who were responsible for the destruction of Wishvale, and each of them owns a magic ring that gives them evil powers. One is a military leader, a classic fallen paladin leading a holy crusade. Then you have a money-driven overlord who buys the loyalty of her subjects from her Scrooge McDuck-style room filled with gold coins. Lastly, a mad theatre director, looking for the perfect sad story by doing terrible things to everyone he comes across. 

Each of these three big bads fills out their own section of the map, and when they’re dealt with, you have the final mastermind to contend with. One piece that I did enjoy is that you can pick and drop stories whenever you like. I began with the theatre director, and swapped over to one of the other stories for a few hours. The game gives nice little summaries of the story so far when you reach critical milestones, so this was a good way to stay on top of the drama. 

The story deals with heavy themes, like the first two games before it. Expect to encounter murder, slavery, medical experimentation and body horror, to name a few. So if you like your RPGs on the darker side, you’ll likely enjoy the tale told here. 

Should I buy Octopath Traveller 0?

Octopath Traveller 0 is a funny thing. Every time I picked it up, I enjoyed the combat and the soap-opera evil villains. But then I’d miss some of the more detailed elements from the two previous games, like Path Actions or the more crafted individual hero stories. Wishvale is an interesting addition, but it feels like it doesn’t live up to its full potential.

The game’s design is heavily influenced by the streamlined mechanics of Champions of the Continent on mobile. Even though the developers tried to mitigate this by adding complexity — making it feel more like a full-fledged RPG — Octopath Traveller 0 still gives the game a mobile-like pacing.

Quest Daily scores Octopath Traveller 0:

7/10

Octopath Traveller 0 is out now on PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X and Nintendo Switch / Switch 2.

Quest Daily was supplied a copy of Octopath Traveller 0 by Bandai Namco for the purpose of this review.