Octopath Traveler 0 had every excuse to be half-assed. It could have been smaller, leaner, and less compelling than its predecessors, just by virtue of where it came from. It is a minor miracle that it’s none of those things.
The latest throwback-style turn-based RPG from Square Enix, in case you don’t know, is a $50 console and PC adaptation of a free-to-play mobile game from 2020. The developers took a bunch of existing characters, enemies, storylines, mechanics, and music, and reconstituted them into an entirely different and wholly welcome new format. Given that mobile games are inherently fleeting, as they rely on storefronts, servers, and payment processes that will cease to exist someday, I think this is kind of incredible.
It also helps that the end result is just a real, real good RPG. Octopath Traveler 0 takes a foundation that could’ve produced something awkward and rickety and turns it into a game that keeps expanding and becoming more compelling the more time you invest into it. It might not feel as premium as the other console games in the series, but that doesn’t stop Octopath Traveler 0 from being one of the best RPGs of 2025, and a worthy addition to what is quickly becoming a very good series.
Humble beginnings
Octopath Traveler 0 is different from the first two console entries in the series in a number of ways, largely owing to the fact that it’s reformed from components of Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent, a free-to-play phone spin-off. That means the very design fabric that made those first two games stand out is gone here.
Specifically, you no longer choose from one of eight pre-designed characters and spend the rest of your journey recruiting the other seven. That format produced games that felt more like short story collections than grand adventures, as each character had their own distinct arcs that largely didn’t involve the other characters. In Octopath 0, you instead create your own character, choose a starting class, and set off into the same prologue that every other player will see.
Soon enough, your humble hometown gets burnt down by some nefarious evildoers, and it’s up to you and a handful of other survivors to rebuild and seek revenge. There are several bespoke story arcs that rarely touch each other here, as in previous Octopath games, but they’re centered around heroes rather than villains. You can do them in whatever order you want, but you’ll have to do them all eventually.
Perhaps the biggest change, which comes directly from the mobile game, is that there are multiple dozens of playable party members in Octopath 0, as opposed to just eight in each of the previous two games. You don’t have to pay money to participate in slot machine pulls to unlock them anymore, as they’re now doled out at a reasonable pace over the course of the story, and many of them are optional to recruit.
Structurally, Octopath 0 is substantially more appealing to me than Champions of the Continent could ever hope to be. I don’t like free-to-play gacha games, but I like narrative RPGs. I think it is an act of near-genius to adapt a mobile game to a console game in the way the developers have here. While Octopath 0 feels different from its brethren, it rarely feels lesser than those other games. There are fewer combat animations for each character, to be sure, and it’s noticeable to fans of the other games that much of the music is reused. But Octopath 0 does not cut corners. This is, for all intents and purposes, a big, new, fully-featured RPG built using the bones of a mobile game. In a world where new games take forever to get made and budgets are ballooning, I can’t help but applaud this novel approach to filling the gap between 2023’s Octopath Traveler II and whatever comes next.
Octopath Traveler 0 takes a while to get going
As a non-full-priced game with such a strange origin story, it would be reasonable to expect a game with less going on than its higher-budget counterparts in the same series. That expectation could not be farther off the mark, though.
I’ll just state it bluntly: This game took me about 80 hours to finish. It’s a massive investment, and it’s an investment that requires a degree of patience. Many of the early first 20 hours or so are spent setting the table for what comes later. You will spend a lot of that time recruiting a full party and starting the process of rebuilding your hometown, which is done in a fairly substantial town-building minigame. There are essential, game-changing battle mechanics that are hidden behind building certain structures that don’t unlock until you hit that 20-hour mark, approximately.
Do not misunderstand me; I am not saying Octopath Traveler 0 takes 20 hours to get good. I am saying, however, that it saves its best for later. Like I said, it’s an investment, and I think it’s a rewarding one to make.
But once it starts rolling, it becomes unstoppable
That reward takes a few different forms. One of them is excellent turn-based combat, which is some of the most fun in any game released this year.
Unlike previous Octopath games, in which you had four party members on screen at once, Octopath 0 lets you work with eight homies on the field at any given time. They’re arranged into a front row and back row. Those in the front can attack and take damage, while those in the back are guarded from hits and slowly recover resources with each passing turn. You can instantly switch between one character and another character who is in the same horizontal slot as them on the formation screen, and figuring out who plays second fiddle to whom is a huge part of build-crafting in this game.
This works exceptionally well with the main battle conceit of every Octopath game, which is the Boost system. At the start of each turn, every character earns one Boost Point, and they can hold up to five at a time. You can use as many as three in one turn to power up whatever you’re about to do, whether it’s a big attack or a healing spell. In previous games, you had to be a little stingy with Boost Points, but not here. Having a whole backup crew gradually building up points means you’re incentivized to use more of them more often, and the combat is balanced accordingly. It’s an exciting and different challenge from something like Octopath II.
Building up your hometown is plugged into your progression, as well. As I said earlier, you have to build certain structures and house them with certain recruitable NPCs to unlock many key features of the battle system. Building requires resources, but collecting them is generally painless as long as you’re observant and make sure to pick things up on the road. Perhaps a bit annoyingly, there are also important quality-of-life features like fast travel that are locked behind building and upgrading structures.
I do have one complaint about town-building, which is that you can essentially “finish” your town (that is, build every essential gameplay structure) halfway through the main story, at which point there’s no longer much need to think about it. I would have preferred more hooks for the endgame, but I suppose there’s also something to like about just focusing on exploring and fighting as the game winds towards its conclusion.
The story gets better later
Speaking of which, the other main vector of satisfaction if you choose to invest your time in Octopath Traveler 0 is the narrative. This game is all about how greed is bad, and each villain represents a different kind of greed. Some want fame, some want wealth, some want power, but they all want, and that is where they end up harming those around them.
At first, it feels very heavy-handed and predictable. Stick with the story long enough, however, and you’ll find that the early predictability gives way to later twists that actually have weight to them. Octopath Traveler 0 is an exceptionally earnest game, never trying to trick or outsmart the player. It just wants you to care about this world and these people, and I think it does a fine job of extracting those feelings from the player by the time it’s done.
Part of that is a lengthy finale chapter, which amounts to maybe a quarter of the game by itself. This is where every other previously-disconnected storyline comes together, and all the characters you’ve met up to that point start interacting with each other for the first time. The game’s biggest narrative swings all happen in the finale, including a villain reveal for the ages. This is easily the best antagonist of any Octopath game, but to say any more would ruin the fun for you.
Just sit with it for a while
Before we’re done here, I’d be remiss not to mention that Square Enix’s “HD-2D” art style that started with the first Octopath game is still great here. I really dig the intentionally low-fidelity look of the sprites and 3D assets, combined with modern lighting and depth-of-field effects. It doesn’t really look like an old game, but it looks awesome, nonetheless. Yasunori Nishiki’s music is also a standout element of Octopath 0, as he has become one of the finest RPG composers working right now. One of the boss fight themes is such a smoking hot banger that I’ve been listening to it for a week straight in my free time.
Unfortunately, performance in the Nintendo Switch 2 version (which is what I played) isn’t great. It targets and comes close to hitting 60 frames per second most of the time, but there's a noticeable stutter that seems most prevalent during the first few seconds after entering a new area. Not unplayable by any means, but certainly a little disappointing.
Still, Octopath Traveler 0 is a remarkably long and generally worth-the-effort experience, especially for anyone who vibes with the other games in the series. This is the kind of game that you’d yearn for as a teenager on summer break with nothing else to do. You can sink into it for dozens of hours, and it just keeps getting better the more you play it, thanks to excellent combat and a story that finds its best self in its later stages.
I understand not everyone has time for that kind of thing in their adult lives, but if you can create a window in your life for Octopath Traveler 0, your patience will largely be rewarded.
Octobpath Traveler 0 is available for Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, Xbox Series X, and PlayStation 5 for $49.99.
Topics Nintendo Switch Video Games
