Octopath Traveler 0 Looks Massive, Even By Octopath Standards

Octopath Traveler has always been the kind of old-school, massive retro game that real RPG sickos can sink our teeth into. The original pitch–a sprawling game that tracks the individual stories of eight different party members, each with their own individualized skills in both combat and towns, who then come together to face some grave threat–can easily last dozens of hours, and so far has across two games. Octopath Traveler 0, a prequel to the other two games, takes that foundation and adds even more: expanded customization, townbuilding with farming, larger party sizes, and quests that feed back into all of the other systems. It’s enough to be absolutely daunting, but in the best of ways.

In a lengthy Gamescom demo, I was able to see the barest outlines of many of the new systems at play. For starters, Octopath 0 has a primary protagonist: a custom character you create yourself. We didn’t have a chance to tinker with the character creator, but our session did have a “created” character as the lead, who looked like she fit in well with the HD-2D aesthetic of the game. I’m curious to see more of this, especially how you can mix and match different features while maintaining the lovely pixel art style that the Octopath games have helped to establish.

I have a lot of confidence that it can pull off rich character customization thanks to another piece of the game: the townbuilding. In Octopath Traveler 0, you have a home base that you can customize to your liking with houses, shops, and even fields for crops. You can lay buildings and other structures anywhere on a grid, and it’s very cool to see the HD-2D style of building architecture merged with this customized dollhouse look. Once the buildings are set, the home base is unrecognizable from any other Octopath village, so it blends in seamlessly with the series’ look. And the farming and livestock materials give it a Stardew Lite appeal, since you can improve things like your crop yields or building materials by exploring the world and battling.

The real meat of the demo was an early quest, said to be roughly 10 hours into the game. While your protagonist is largely silent, there are lots of other characters providing dialogue and color to the world, fitting into familiar roles like hunter or priest. I was immediately struck by the newly expanded combat. You have eight party members at any given time, with even more available to swap out. So rather than focusing on eight characters total, you bring eight characters with you at a time. It felt overwhelming at first, but I quickly found the rhythm and actually came to really enjoy this expanded roster.

Essentially, you have a front and back line of four each, and you can swap members between their rows quickly during combat. So you may have your stronger offensive fighters in the first column, and more defensive ones in the back–but you could swap one of your fighters and defenders whenever you want. And functionally, this means you have tons of options during combat, effectively doubling your weapons and abilities. With this expanded roster, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which you wouldn’t have at least one weapon that can match your enemies’ weaknesses, giving you more flexibility to stagger them. On the flipside, the enemies seemed tougher and more hearty than the norm, likely because the game knows you have so much more versatility at your disposal. Combat is also where you get to hear some of the best standouts of the soundtrack, which once again is stellar.

The story sequence of the Gamescom demo was short and simple, focusing on trying to recruit a young but savvy shopkeeper to join you. It excels at the economy of language that feels familiar for classically styled RPGs, in which the script needs to deliver a lot of characterization with relatively short dialogue segments.

At the end of the dungeon and a lengthy boss fight, the shopkeeper agreed to join my town, bringing the whole experience full circle. The townbuilding aspect adds more variety to missions, as you never know if the character you’re recruiting will join your party as a playable combatant or your town as a vital settler. Octopath Traveler has made its name on unconventional class types, so it was totally possible that this story quest would bring the shopkeeper in as a playable character. I liked the feeling that this game will keep me guessing about the ultimate fates of the characters I encounter.

Octopath Traveler has always been an ambitious series. It may have been easy for Octopath Traveler 0 to offer more of the same, but instead it’s setting its sights higher. The tons of interlocking mechanics and systems look like they could be overwhelming, but from what I’ve seen so far, they harmonize so well that I’m not afraid to take them on.

Octopath Traveler 0 is coming to PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X, and Nintendo Switch on December 4.