I hadn’t heard much about the latest entry in the Octopath Traveler series, 0. They can’t use the word for the digit – Zero, Zed, Nil, Null – and this is weird, because I believe it’s the only digit with so many different words for it in the English speaking world.
The first two entries followed eight different heroes on their own journeys (well, travels, I guess), whose stories eventually intersect with one another and end in a fight where all of them have to use their unique abilities together to defeat the Big Bad. The series is known for its unusual character classes – Merchant, for instance, and Apothecary – NPC jobs that suddenly became useful for adventuring. Since the stories for each character intersected, you’d typically choose a starting character of your choice and play their story until you encountered another member of the group, and then you’d play their story to that point, and then they would become available to group with the first one, and so on.
The battle system was and remains unique. Enemies take little damage until their defense is broken, so breaking their defense is the primary job in any battle. Finding each monster’s weakness is a matter of trial and error. Bringing the right characters and abilities to the fight makes the difference between a win and a loss.
Aside from that, battles play out in familiar turn-based JRPG combat, without the time pressure the Final Fantasy series add by allowing the enemy to attack while you’re still choosing your moves. You could be selecting your move and go on a sudden trip around the world and when you came back, eighty days later, it’d still be there waiting for you.
In OT0, there are no eight independent characters; there’s just you. On the plus side, you can unlock all eight jobs yourself, and if history is any guide, you’ll be able to unlock advanced jobs that are a combination of two of them. I don’t know how that will play out in the endgame.
There are four story paths in OT0. The first, or 0th, is the path to rebuild your town with the help of your childhood friend. It was destroyed by agents of the Big Bad when you were both children. You were both raised in secret by a scholar, and are returning now as adults to a ruined town that has been swallowed up in wilderness. In this path, you clear land, build houses and shops, and scour the land for survivors to return to the village and make it live again.
Your foster father bestowed a divine ring upon you when you left home. (It is this divine ring that the Big Bads were looking for when they destroyed your village). There are three more, held by the three Medium Bads, and your three stories involve tracking them down and taking their rings.
With those collected, and your team built up, you can finally meet the Big Bad. In the first Octopath Traveler game, just finishing the eight stories was enough to roll credits. Finding and beating the Big Bad was an extended epilogue that took as long as the eight storylines put together. I expect the same will be true of Zed, here.
The demo for Octopath Traveler 0 is everywhere; I played it on my Switch 2. It’s going to be fairly expensive, and I have to admit that I have not finished Octopath Traveler 2 yet, so I might just stick with the one I’ve already bought. That said, the chance to tell my own story with my own character instead of experiencing the story of others is pretty compelling and fairly unusual in the world of JRPGs.