It's on me that I didn't pay attention that this game is DRM trash. Can't even play on the go with my steam deck. Feels good to have to be tethered to the internet to play a game I paid for. Honestly GFYs.

Great game but I'm not doing work arounds to play away from the internet.

This review contains spoilers

TL;dr: Octopath Traveler 0 is a compilation of “best of” stories from the Gacha Champions of the Continent while introducing new overarching story, locales and characters to the game. The game suffers from its mobile game origin, but is still very meaty and quite fun experience. Recommended.

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DLC: The game had a pre-order DLC that is not available separately at the time of writing. The game also allows you to upgrade to Digital Deluxe version, which comes with few skills, consumable items, town decorations and digital art book. As per usual Square-Enix style, this digital art book is unfortunately only accessible via browser on their own service. The Art Book also features spoilers.

Achievements: The game has 37 achievements. All achievements are obtainable via single playthrough. Some of the achievements can only be accessed after finishing the game. Missing achievements is quite difficult, but as far as I know, there is only one potentially missable achievement.

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Octopath Traveler 0 is a retelling of the Mobile Gacha game Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent. It tells the story of Zero (that’s you!) who finds their village burned and with survivors scattered around. The Story consists of two major arcs: Rebuilding your village and finding out why your village was attacked.

As the story progresses in an episodic fashion, you will uncover larger plots that span throughout the entire continent of Orsterra.

During your travels, you will meet characters both new and familiar as certain characters from Octopath Traveler 1 make their appearance. This game largely takes place in the same area as the first game in the series.

The game works like previous entries of the series. You have character actions to get more information from the field, you fight in turn-based fights and scour around the world.

The big new mechanic is the fact that you now have up to 8 characters in battles and you can switch between back-row and front-row during fights. Certain passives also allow the other characters to take certain actions from the backrow allowing for new nice tactical options.

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Octopath Traveler 0 runs on Unreal Engine offering stable experience. The game offers a variety of settings to customize. During my time I did not experience any stutters.

The game is surprisingly heavy, especially running on Steam Deck with ultra settings, so be prepared to pare down some of the settings. Few areas have performance issues which can drop the FPS especially on Steam Deck. The Power Draw on Deck was quite high on higher settings, so don’t expect very long play sessions.

On ultrawide screens you will be met with black bars on side of the screens.

The audio is mostly stereo and while the music is quite nice, it does suffer from compression issues that were somewhat addressed with the earlier updates.

The game offers both Japanese and English voice-overs, but only certain sections of the story and battles have voice acting.

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Octopath Traveler 0 is a very good addition to the Octopath series. In my opinion, it builds well on the Octopath gameplay formula with the new additions to the combat system and the ability to use many more characters.

What I did not like, however, was how the story is structured. The Story is divided into episodes. For most part, you have 3 main story questlines going and you can tackle these main stories at whichever order you want. Do a Fame episode 2 and then jump to Wealth episode 1, granted you have completed the previous Fame episode 1 before.

This episodic approach is quite weak as the mobile game design of shipping story in parts is really obvious. Want to play the story for a longer time? Be prepared to get the “last time in Octopath Traveler 0” a lot.

The story also suffers from unnecessary padding, which becomes really evident in the final part of the game, which features largest proper dungeon of the game.

The episodes are largely built the same and by end of second main story quest, you can pretty much guess the story beats and how the scenario will go forward.

It’s a real shame, as some of the locales are left to be really unused as well.

One thing to mention on the story is that it tends to be quite a lot darker than Square’s other games featuring more adult topics. The writing definitely gets much better on the second half of the game, but the first half of the game you can pretty much see death flags all around some of the female characters you meet.

To its credit, the game offers you a quite a lot of content. It took me well over 70 hours (counting the demo) to finish all side quests, build my town and reach true ending. I did try the secret challenge boss at the end of the game, but did not find it fun enough to beat, so I did not reach all the achievements in this game.

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All in all Octopath Traveler 0 is a fun game and recommended. My score for the game is 8/10.

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The game is good overall so far. The heroes management at the beginning can be overwhelming, but you get used to it pretty fast.
Music: 10/10
Combat: 10/10
Plot: 7/10
Character building: 8/10
Graph: 8/10 like the past games IMO