I wouldn’t fault you for being skeptical if a friend told you about the most amazing role-playing game, and one of the first things said was, “It’s a port of a moderately successful mobile gacha game, but trust me! It’s really great!” But here I am, your friend, telling you that Octopath Traveler 0 isn’t merely okay, it’s genuinely great. It takes a story previously locked on mobile phones and expands it into a masterfully crafted experience of earnestly told adventure that isn’t simply “good for an RPG” but great by any standard of the word. This is the best the series has ever been.
Octopath Traveler 0 is the platonic ideal of a role-playing game. Starting with a doomed hometown and a quest for vengeance against colorful villains, it builds to the genre-expected epic battles and world-shattering plots. You’ll leap from story arc to story arc, exploring dungeons and facing off against bosses in turned-based battles; you’ll pause between these big story moments for some comfortable town-building and brisk side quests.
This is not a game that reinvents the wheel and yet I can’t recommend it enough. Using only this simple framework, Octopath Traveler 0 consistently impresses. It stands side by side with all-time classics and somehow manages to do this in spite of a truly odd development process.
I’ve played much of this game already and knew this story before downloading it because it started as a mobile gacha game called Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent. Released in 2020, Champions of the Continent was a very solid RPG prequel to Octopath Traveler that supplemented development costs, as many mobile games do, with microtransactions and a gacha “pull” mechanic where players could spend in-game currencies on a random smattering of heroes. This was particularly strange because it was a solo game with no real multiplayer component. But the bigger oddity wasn’t the tacked-on money mechanics but the fact that Champions of the Continent was honestly a good RPG.
Back-of-the-box quote:
“Marvelous!”
Type of game:
A Goddamn Role-Playing Game
Liked
Classic stories told with clear passion, crunchy combat and fun team building, some of the best music in all of gaming
Disliked
Some party members don’t really get a chance to shine, town-building is charming but somewhat limited, there’s some stuff from the mobile game I really wish was here.
Developer
Square Enix
Platforms:
PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Switch 2, Switch, PC
Release date:
December 4, 2025
Played
Final save file time was 88 hours and 50 minutes. Still hunting for some final secrets
That story, focused on the trials of a “Chosen One” facing off against villains wearing a variety of magical rings, fleshed out the franchise’s somewhat underwritten setting of Orsterra and featured consistently compelling story arcs. The pixel art was great even on mobile, and it had all the production value of a full-priced game. Which raised a question: why the hell was this a gacha game locked away on phones? It was simply way too good to be a mobile game.
Half a decade from the initial launch, Square Enix seems to have reached a similar conclusion, releasing Octopath Traveler 0 as an updated port for consoles and PC that greatly rebalances combat encounters and adds a fresh, new framing device to the experience.
In this version of the game, instead of commanding gacha-pull heroes, players create their own character. This adventurer lives in the small hamlet of Wishvale, which is prosperous and safe until a triumvirate of ring-bearing villains plots to burn down the village in search of yet another power-granting ring. A classic setup if ever there was.
This version of the game, which removes all of the mobile version’s paid mechanics, turns out to be the sharpest and most compelling Octopath Traveler thus far. Packed with some of the finest boss encounters and sweeping storytelling in the franchise, Octopath Traveler 0 stands up in an oddly sharp rebuke to its progenitor title and answers the question “Did we really need those microtransactions?” with a resounding “no.”
My Final Fantasy
I can’t say it emphatically enough: I love this game, I think it’s phenomenal. Yet if I’m forced to “ponder the orb” here, I find myself trapped in a fatal loop. Octopath Traveler 0 can’t exist without the mobile gacha game coming before it, and yet the sheer craftsmanship on display, the frankly astounding talent packed into every pixel and each story moment, also screams out to tell me what I already know: So many of the games that we are playing today that try to sneak in ways to slowly bleed us of our cash, could simply be normal video games. We don’t need that gacha shit! You can tear it out and still have one of the best role-playing games of the decade.
Because dear God, what a video game this is. What a wonderful little thing!
Square Enix
As you might expect, combat is the central focus, and Octopath Traveler 0 makes a few adjustments to the series’ battle system that help it stand out. The most obvious is the increase from an active party of four characters to a total of eight. This might seem like a beefy party size, but there are some benefits to be had.
Shifting away from a focus on character customization (party members only ever have one job instead of a combination of two) gives your fighters distinct roles in combat, while the large roster of characters means you’ll spend much of the game adjusting party compositions to cover potential weaknesses. In battle, four “active” characters stand at the front and can be swapped out with their partner in the back. Battles are a fast-paced affair where you constantly shift out characters to hit enemy weaknesses or else pull in your healers or buffers to bolster your powerhouses. There’s very little downtime in the middle of a battle, and clever teams can cover all your combat needs.
This is draped on top of the usual systems that have come to define an Octopath game. Enemies have a variety of weaknesses, and hitting them with the correct weapons or elements chips away their shield until they are stunned for multiple rounds of high-damaging hits. Characters gain Boost Points every turn that can be spent to increase their damage, turbocharge their healing spells, or do things such as extend the duration of debuffs they toss on targets. The ideal boss battle finds a balance between spending just enough of these points to speed up damage to the enemy’s shield while keeping enough in reserve to dump into your attacks when the enemy is stunned. If you’re smart, most fights in the game can be cleared in two breaks of your opponent’s shield.
Managing character health, swapping out your travelers, and figuring out exactly what damage breaks an enemy’s guard gives the first half of a fight a playful tone. You’re poking and prodding and puzzling a path to victory until suddenly it all becomes clear and the stars align for a powerful round of dominating decisions. None of this is particularly complex. There are no timing buttons to parry attacks or pseudo-action systems augmenting the experience.
Square Enix
This RPG action is supplemented by more casual intermissions where the goal is to explore the world, meet townspeople, and plan out the newly revived Wishvale. Your hometown, lost in the opening hours like many RPG starting villages before it, lingers heavily in the hearts and imaginations of many characters throughout the game. While most of Octopath Traveler 0 is focused on dungeoneering and combat, a sizable chunk is also focused on rebuilding your home and wandering the world to find citizens that you can invite to populate the village.
In the prior Octopath games, your party members would have various “path actions” that allowed them to interact with townsfolk in different ways. For instance, Therion the thief could steal items from people, while Olberic the wandering knight could challenge certain characters to duels. This was a good way of gaining access to special equipment without simply spending money in a shop. Certain characters could even be recruited to join you as summonable help in battle. Octopath Traveler 0 retains this but ties path actions to one of three disciplines—Wealth, Fame, or Power—and allows your created hero to do all of them. Depending on how many points you have in the corresponding discipline, your chances of success will increase. Gain enough fame, and recruiting someone becomes easier. With enough wealth, you’ll haggle better
There’s nothing stopping players from attempting to perform these actions anyway, which is part of the appeal of exploring any Octopath game. Find someone with an incredibly good sword that you only have a three percent chance of stealing? You can still try it. Hell, if you’re stubborn, you might even save-scum until you get it. As a result, although much of the narrative is focused and guided, you still have a lot of incentive to explore beyond the bounds of the current moment, pressing through high-level areas until you arrive at a town where you might find some retired hero with just the right loot. It’s yours if you defeat them in a duel. Does it matter if you’re fifteen levels lower? Maybe if you’re smart, you could set yourself up for a long time.
This aimlessness is a key component of the Octopath experience that you can access whenever you need a break. Inquiring about the people in a town might reveal funny stories. You might find a gardener with a crush on a local noble or even someone who once had a party of seven companions like yourself. There’s an entire side of these games that’s about these strange bits of character fluff and the joy of breaking the game by stealing the right dagger far sooner than intended. It’s easy to get lost in the joy of wandering.
I’m A Wanderer, I Roam Around
In Octopath Traveler 0, here’s even more reason to wander off and explore towns. Snooping around will lead to recruitable townspeople that you can invite back to Wishvale, and most characters have special benefits that they bring to your town. Someone might be better at working the farm, while recruiting another to work your general store could lower prices on healing items. The town-building in Octopath Traveler 0 isn’t too complicated but there’s a lot of joy in arranging houses and shops before finding just the right people to handle each new facility is a lot of fun.
Wishvale is where the game’s heart resides. Your character, along with a core group of friends, takes tragedy and from those ashes builds something better. The process of returning from a story chapter to spend a fresh hour or two on Wishvale’s development gives Octopath Traveler 0 a surprisingly comfortable mood. It’s not Stardew Valley, but it’s still a welcome reprieve from the high story stakes. As villains loom on the horizon and the path of heroism seems steeped in blood and pain, there’s always a home to return to and wonderful people to meet.
That’s the entire “deal” here. This is not a complicated game in terms of themes, but in the face of terrible dark forces and vicious tyrants, Octopath Traveler 0 ultimately concludes that even the worst times are temporary. Even the most evil of kings can be deposed. All it takes to bring about radical and spectacular change is enough like-minded people. Whether that’s the cast of characters you invite back to Wishvale or the vibrant adventurers that join your actual party.
Square Enix
The Power Of Friendship
When people talk about Octopath Traveler, the refrain seems to be “It seems cool, but why aren’t these characters talking to each other?” and it’s in those moments where I both agree with the criticism and recall the series’ inspiration. Structured like 1994’s RPG powerhouse Live a Live, the mainline Octopath games have tried to balance eight separate character stories that players can engage with in any order while still weaving a larger tale that satisfies modern audiences. It’s been a difficult act. Live a Live managed it by having a wide range of genres represented in its stories; one chapter was a western, while another could have been a riff on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Every chapter was wildly different.
The Octopath games, lacking this kind of variety, have tried many ways to satisfy players. The first game tried to weave a subtle connection between plotlines, but a lack of character interaction held it back and made most stories feel contained in their own small bubbles. The sequel adjusted by implementing chapters where the main characters would team up for miniature adventures together as they unravelled the larger plot. It mostly worked out, but still didn’t grab audiences seeking traditional RPG party banter—even if the dialogue writing was great.
Octopath Traveler 0 tries something a bit different, and I think it is the series’s most successful story structure yet. Each chapter focuses on dealing with a different villain, pairing the player with a charismatic ally and side pals as they unravel the mystery of one of the divine rings. Many of these stories seem self-contained genre romps—one is a mafia adventure akin to Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Golden Wind, another massive midgame stretch turns the game into a Fire Emblem tale of warring nations. By the end of the game, a core party of eight “main” characters will have emerged to face the final threat.
Supplementing this are a dabbling of recruitable side-characters to fill out party slots. Only a few of these characters have recruitment quests, while many more simply leap to join your adventure with little prompting. These characters are not really present in the plot but rather rounded out through the optional “party chats” that add fresh ways to banter when you return to Wishvale. In the best moments, these scenes will pop up in dungeons or during overworld travel to give characters a chance to chime in on happenings. This is particularly well-used in the final dungeon, which is packed with party discussions about the journeys they had and the strange sights they faced.
While playing Octopath Traveler 0, one word continuously rings out: charming. There is not a single cliche or trope that this game doesn’t use— and sometimes it uses them multiple times within the course of a single scene. This is a game written by and for people entranced by melodrama, done with a deep and earnest love for storytelling that allows these archetypal moments to land. A traveling companion reveals themself to be a royal in disguise, or someone leaps into the middle of a climactic battle to tell the villain that they underestimated the power of friendship, and I’m still hooked. It always leaves a smile on my face.
Square Enix
When Words Leave Off, Music Begins
The glue holding all of this together is the music. Composer Yasunori Nishiki leaps from style to style with an almost insulting ease. A story arc diving into criminal syndicates and vengeful anarchists becomes defined not only by the blood being spilt but by the brassing saxophone wailing that accompanies it. Once the game’s final villain reveals himself, his powerful marching leitmotif starts to suffocate, his evil seeping subtly into dungeon spaces and story scenes before exploding into what might be the most astounding suite of final battle music I’ve ever experienced.
All of this music, all of this remarkable beauty, was previously locked away on mobile devices. It is an amazing relief that this music has now been preserved in a more accessible game. No other modern RPGs, not even titans like Metaphor: ReFantazio or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, are operating quite on this level musically. We should be talking about Nishiki in the same breath as other pioneers of the genre like Yoko Shimomura or Yasunori Mitsuda.
Octopath Traveler 0 (and really all turn-based RPGs) functions like a stage musical. Players move through a variety of plots—political dramas, operatic stories about demons, and much more—and wait with anticipation for the moment where two characters reach an impasse, or someone wants something with such deep passion that mere words are not enough. On the stage, this would be the moments where characters burst into song. Here, we are thrust into lavish battle sequences that are equally as musical.
I know that the developers understand this because a key moment in Octopath Traveler 2 turned a singing competition into a turn-based battle. The game transforms into a flat, proscenium view where heroes stand on one side and villains line up on the other, hurling words and special attacks at each other. At key moments, an ally might leap in to give you miraculous buffs. Underneath this, there is music.
Square Enix
On The Cutting Room Floor
Because this is an adaptation of a long-running live service game, there’s a wealth of content that could have been carried over. Hundreds of recruitable characters, special event quests, side stories, challenge fights and more have been added to Champions of the Continent over the last half-decade. Octopath Traveler 0 is in the strange position of having to prune all of that into a tighter package.
As a partial remake of Champions of the Continent, this game occasionally makes some odd decisions about what to preserve and what to rework. Some changes are quite good. Reworked difficulty and dungeons streamline the gameplay and make this much smoother to progress through. There’s brand new content here including some mysteries that more casual players might never unravel. But there’s also some important things left behind in the original game.
While there’s still a sizable crew of travelers to choose from—I finished the game with about 35 characters that I could use at my leisure—some more prominent characters from the mobile game aren’t here. Chiefly, the initial group of vaguely “canonical” heroes, such as Viola the Thief or Fiore the Warrior, is missing. These were iconic characters such as they might exist in a mid-tier gacha game, and not having them feels strange.
Plus, a large amount of character content from Champions of the Continent simply isn’t here and only a few key travelers have dedicated story content. From character quests to high-pressure coliseum challenges, there are pieces from the original game that aren’t here, resulting in some half-baked party members. Even if they’re still great in a fight.
My favorite party member was Alexia the Scholar. She’s tossed at players quite early without much of a recruitment process, allowing you quick access to powerful magical spells. Unlike some new characters, she doesn’t have much personal story content and yet her ability to hit bosses with devastating magicks has made her not only my MVP in fights but maybe my favorite scholar in all of the franchise. I wish I knew more about her. I like to think maybe I just missed a side-quest but I suspect that’s not really how this all works. Not everyone gets their moment.
There are also moments where the grandeur is simply too much for the game to handle. Playing on the Nintendo Switch 2, there were key moments where the console struggled to keep up with everything happening on screen. A massive war sequence featuring a redesigned dungeon is dragged down by all those fire particle effects. I loved expanding my town and building out facilities, but as Wishvale grew, I encountered the occasional hitch while running around.
Adapting a game that was made with considerable hardware limitations in mind also means that there are moments where the environmental design and the overall color palette can seem limited compared to, say, 2023’s Octopath Traveler 2. Some pockets of the game world can feel a bit sparse at first, and the initial dungeon forays are little more than brisk cave adventures.
Square Enix
What Is Done In Love Is Well Done
The scope of Octopath Traveler 0 changes drastically as time passes, however. That story, whose stakes eventually rise to the very heavens, is told with such fervor that my grin was always wide even if I’ve seen these kinds of stories told countless times before in dozens of games and I can’t count the number of times I stopped mid-battle to simply appreciate the gorgeous sprite work and astounding music. There is something magical here and a surprising challenge during my playtime was peace with how much I had fallen in love with this game. Was that allowed? Was it okay for me to feel so enraptured?
Terrence McKenna, American philosopher and lover of magic mushrooms, has a phrase (advice for people experiencing a powerful psychedelic experience) that I’ve been turning over in my head as I walk away from Octopath Traveler 0: “Don’t give into astonishment.” AAA games often try to hide their flaws behind mountains of graphical enhancements and production value. Dazzled audiences eat them up regardless of what messages they hold or value they bring simply because they are dazzling. The job of a critic is to slow down a little.
Nevertheless, I stand here astonished. Octopath Traveler 0 is such a powerful distillation of everything that I find appealing about role-playing games that I cannot put my sentiment aside. There’s the occasional shortcoming, a performance issue here or a feature lost in the adaptation, which I personally miss, but anyone thinking this is some half-assed port of mobile gacha trash would be terribly mistaken. The average player can enjoy anywhere from 80 to 100 hours of gameplay, much of which will be graced by some of the most astonishing storytelling in modern gaming.
There is a price for this ride although it’s nothing too terrible. Octopath Traveler 0 simply asks you to leave your cynicism at the door. There is a tendency in modern audiences to try to outsmart games. We’ve seen it all and are often very proud of the fact that there’s nary a plot twist we can’t see coming or a detail we can’t ring the “sin” bell about. Gamers are irony-poisoned, and consumers often compete with art, aiming for a chance to say “I knew that was coming.” Does that make you feel clever? I’ll be over here enjoying the show.
When a piece of media as earnest as Octopath Traveler 0 comes along—packed with wandering swordsmen, villains ascending to the Heavens, and more—it’s hard not to end up smitten. There is a belief that so long as you tell a story with your head held high and love for your audience, everything else will work out. And the damndest thing about that is that belief is correct. Meet this game with your own child-like sense of earnestness, and you will have an experience that you’ll not forget anytime soon.
