The Octopath Traveler series began with a funny name and a bold concept: eight individual stories converging in one connected world, all presented in a retro “HD-2D” aesthetic that paid homage to Square Enix’s beloved 16-bit era. Octopath Traveler 2 expanded on the concept further, and this year, Octopath Traveler 0 is once again making the already-massive RPG even broader, using the core story of the mobile game Champions of the Continent and transforming it into a full-fledged Octopath prequel.
This time you’ll create your own customized protagonist character, and the game has an ambitious town-building mechanic that both enhances your options and fleshes out quests to have more reward. Combat options are also greatly expanded now that you can have eight party members in battle at once–four in the frontline and four in the back for support. We’ve been impressed by what we’ve seen so far, so we spoke with producer Hirohito Suzuki and game director Yasuhiro Kidera about some of our burning questions.
Octopath Traveler 0 is coming to PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and Switch 2 on December 4.
What are the core aspects of an Octopath game that you wanted to retain in Octopath Traveler 0? Are we still focused on eight individual stories?
Hirohito Suzuki (Producer): Personally, I’d say that “freedom” is the core of what I wanted to express with this game. Especially when it comes to the Octopath Traveler series, Path Actions are an important feature, and as you can tell from that, though there is a story that unfolds in the game, it’s really the player’s choices that helps unfold a different kind of drama. And so, with this game, that was really the core concept that we wanted to center the game around as we designed it. It’s essentially this idea that you’re starting from zero to create your own character through the character creation feature, and then similarly, starting from zero to rebuild and restore your town through the Town Building feature. We honed in on this idea to really expand this notion of player freedom.
When it comes to the focus on eight individual stories, similarly as the title suggests with the word “Octopath,” we did try to build a story that represents and captures this concept of eight. So, we do hope that that’s something that players look forward to and try to search too.
Our gameplay demo showed some of the ways that the town-building aspect feeds into quests. How do you balance the overarching story with those kinds of moving parts at play?
Suzuki: I really wanted to be able to make the Town Building feature something that helps to enrich the journey itself. And vice versa, as you’re going on the journey and progressing through it, it helps to make your town that much more enriched too.
More specifically, when it comes to Town Building, the more you progress and invest time into that feature, you start to unlock other features like cooking, and you’re able to build shops, fields and farms as well. All of these things help to make your journey itself more convenient, more accessible, and that much richer. It helps to provide a lot of different features that enhance your overall journey.
Conversely, going on the journey also allows you to meet new people, interact with them and even invite them back to your town through Path Actions. Through your journey, you can also obtain new types of information, new types of recipes to cook, new skins, new products in your shop, and even information for the products that get sold in the shops as well. In that way, the time you spend on your journey also comes back to feed into enriching the town as well.
What kinds of considerations or revisions did you need to keep in mind adapting this from the roots of Champions of the Continent?
Suzuki: It is true that when it comes to how we approached development for this game, we did take the mobile experience and took the overall storyline that was present in there and brought it into the latest installment Octopath Traveler 0. Within Octopath Traveler 0, more than half of the content is new, so trying to make that happen was certainly a challenge on our end.
When it comes to the overall new main story that’s been added, around 30% is new compared to the overall game experience that’s presented within Octopath Traveler 0. We did have a strong sense of confidence that the original story that unfolds in Champions of the Continent is a very good one. So, we really tried to make sure that we weren’t changing that core experience but still doing what we can and striking a balance to still make this latest installment exciting as a new game, without really changing the things that we did create.
One thing that we adjusted with this game is that we removed a lot of the gacha elements that were present in the mobile version of the experience. But we offset that through having over 30 new characters that appear, where you encounter them organically in many different formats through the story and the places that you visit throughout your journey. So that’s something that we did keep in mind as well.
Yasuhiro Kidera (Game Director): When it comes to level design and creating those levels themselves, we did start from zero. We threw out all of the data that existed for the mobile version of the game and started from scratch.
When it comes to our approach for combat, from the first Octopath Traveler to the mobile game, we did add changes to the concept of a turn-based battle. But then as we were thinking about what we could do to bring this mobile experience back to console, we wanted to be able to introduce new features as well. And so that’s when the Action Skills came in, as well as the Ultimate Techniques. Through those, I really do think you’re able to create an exciting experience that also touches on this concept of “freedom” for players as well.
How does having a “create your own protagonist” aspect shift the usual Octopath storytelling and game structure?
Suzuki: Regarding the overall shift that came with the approach of creating your own protagonist, because the players themselves become the protagonist, it was really important that we made it so that the story didn’t feel like anyone else’s story, but players’ themselves. I think that was a big shift that we had to implement with this game.
When it comes to the story or game mechanism changes that came from this, I do think in both facets, the player becomes the protagonist themselves. So, one thing that we did was, rather than trying to depict the protagonist solely–in terms of themselves or in context of themselves–we tried to depict all the other peripheral elements that are important to define the role that the protagonist plays. We really wanted to be able to depict themes of light versus dark, themes of good versus evil, as well as depict the world and the lore at large. That helps to create a silhouette of who that protagonist is supposed to be.
As for the story that revolves around the theme of restoration–this is about how at the very beginning of the game, the town that the player is residing in is destroyed. And then from there, the player must embark on a journey to restore it and rebuild their town. But they start to see that a lot of people who used to live in that town have been scattered throughout the world following this tragedy. So, it’s a process of interacting with them and inviting them back to live in the town again–to have the player build their very own town.
On the contrary, when it comes to the plot that surrounds the concept of revenge–the bosses who are the evil entities in this story, who stand against the world and who are also the people who destroyed the player’s town at the very beginning of the story, they become brought into the picture and you have to go against them as well. By depicting all these other elements outside of the player themselves, I feel as though this was the biggest shift we made with this installment compared to past iterations.
During the demo we noticed we had several combat options available at any given time. How did you balance combat design while giving the player so much more flexibility?
Kidera: One thing we thought very deeply about until the end of development was how do we ensure that everyone’s favorite characters are very usable and viable from a combat perspective until the very end. That was something that we really thought about and was the reason why we implemented new features such as Action Skills which are a new feature in this game. But these sorts of adjustments were very challenging. Even through the course of development, we had to make balancing adjustments three times on different occasions.
Essentially, when we conducted our first internal testing, our initial feedback was that combat was too easy. So, from there, we had to make enemies stronger, adjust abilities, etc. Each tester also did adopt very different combinations or formations when it came to formulating their party. So, making adjustments with that in mind was a very challenging thing to do as a developer, but also very fun to watch as well. I’m very excited to be able to see what kind of combinations and formations the players themselves come up with.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.