As someone who doesn’t play mobile games anymore, I never played Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent. There’ve been a lot of Square Enix games that have seemed cool but just were inaccessible to me for this reason. The ideal has always been to take those concepts and turn them into premium console game experiences. That’s exactly what Octopath Traveler 0 seeks to do. Taking the original mobile game’s story, and building a brand new Octopath game around it.
We’ve been given the opportunity to check out the prologue and the first chapters of each of the initial four main story questlines. There’s a big shift this time around, turning the eight pre-defined characters into a single silent protagonist you can customize yourself. Despite not having a voice like other protagonists, your character’s motivation is pretty strong. After living out your days peacefully in the quiet town of Wishvale, your life is ruined when the town is invaded and razed to the ground. Three mysterious figures are responsible for this, doing so in order to seek an even more mysterious ring. After barely making it out alive with your childhood friend Stia, you set out into the world to get revenge.
After the prologue ended, I found myself very quickly getting back into the usual Octopath gameplay loop. Your protagonist feels more directly like a vehicle for player engagement with the world, which is a good fit for the kind of open-ended design Octopath is known for. This time, you aren’t even given the vague idea of a protagonist to inhabit, you’re just you. There’s no disconnect when your defined character ceases to inject themselves into the story, since you don’t do that anyway. The story exists, and I like what I’ve seen, but I’m excited at the idea that Octopath Traveler 0 could be aiming to put its focus even more on gameplay over all else.
You can pick one of eight jobs, and use path actions to NPCs to progress quests or gain extra items. Your four main story quests (one for each of the three antagonists, and then one for restoring Wishvale) are shown on the map, but the order you handle them is left entirely up to you and will take you to different main sections of the starting continent. Roaming the land, daring to go to areas just a bit too strong for me, recruiting NPCs to summon in battle, Octopath Traveler 0 has it all. It slots in very well into the pre-established formula. What I’m curious about from the later hours is if it’ll reach the complexity of those games. Path actions seem simplified, with your protagonist being capable of using any of the actions available for a specific NPC. I enjoyed certain actions being locked behind recruiting characters, and I hope that comes back in some way. The early hours are keeping the scale small as it eases me into the experience, so I’m (im)patiently waiting for it to hopefully open up and give me the depth Octopath Traveler 2’s open world ended up offering.
Part of rebuilding Wishvale involves quite literally doing just that. New to Octopath Traveler 0 is townbuilding and management, as you’ll spend the Kindler’s of the Flame questline. For those wondering if you should expect the freedom given in most farming simulators, Octopath Traveler 0 is taking its time to introduce the concept to returning fans who might not play games like that. Progressing in this will see more plots of land and more buildings to craft. So far, this is pretty standard, if not a bit light, but I’m hoping it can really ramp up the further into the game I get. The idea of getting to enhance JP or EXP growth by recruiting certain NPCs is exciting to say the least.
For console players, the biggest mix-up to the combat is the introduction of party rows. Your eight party members are all in battle at once this time, and can be switched in and out to the front or back on a whim. This is supposedly a carryover from the mobile game, and one I think is really smart conceptually. Being able to keep a character in the back row to store up BP to unleash on enemies in a Break state is fun, but I hope it doesn’t skew the difficulty too close in your favor. Everything else is the same gameplay you know and love, where battles are decided by exploiting weaknesses as fast as possible.
Despite coming from a mobile game, Octopath Traveler 0’s writing does not feel noticeably lesser than its predecessors. At least, based on what I’ve played so far. Octopath Traveler defined itself by having memorable, despicable antagonists, and you’ve got that in spades for the main trio of villains. These three characters are truly vile, with endless tragedy lying in their wake. Just like before, the T Rating on the box is being pushed pretty far. Alongside this villainy and tragedy are some pretty emotional story beats with the support cast. What I’m hoping for more than anything, though, is to find that same quality with the subtle storytelling of past games, usually hidden in Inquiring into the backstory of NPCs that populate towns.
I’m playing Octopath Traveler 0 on the Nintendo Switch 2, which just felt right. I was there playing the original game on launch, desperate for RPGs to play on my Nintendo Switch. There was so much potential in HD-2D, and I think after all these years, we’ve seen it used to its fullest. The only thing I wanted from the games was to just run well on portable hardware, and I’m mostly getting that on Switch 2. There’s now a 60 frames per second target, and despite occasional traversal stutter, it feels smooth enough for a turn-based RPG. Octopath Traveler 0 on this hardware feels so much snappier than the Switch versions of the previous two Octopath games, with much sharper image quality as well.
Octopath Traveler 0 is looking promising from this little sliver of game I’ve been allowed to preview before launch. What I’ve been given access to seems to show an Octopath Traveler game that could either be a mechanically lighter spin-off or blossom into a full mechanical successor to the past two games. I’m not exactly sure where it’ll go, but I can’t say either of those possibilities would be bad. I’m curious how this new change to story progression will go, especially without any proper character to center the main story. Octopath Traveler 2 is a really wonderful game that sets my expectations kind of high, so I hope the rest of Octopath Traveler 0 shows that this charming little series is only just getting started. This is promising, but only time will tell if it lives up to that potential.
Octopath Traveler 0 will be released at retail and digitally on the Nintendo eShop for both Nintendo Switch 2 and Nintendo Switch worldwide on 4 December 2025.
