After playing Octopath Traveler 0 for a single hour, I think it has one of my favorite turn-based combat systems ever, and that’s saying something in 2025. This new entry has brilliantly evolved the series’ already fantastic combat while providing some tantalizing new facets, like base-building. Square Enix’s HD-2D games have gotten progressively better over the last few years, and there’s every indication that Octopath Traveler 0 can continue the trend.
Octopath 0 is a bit of an odd beast — it’s not entirely a new game, but it’s not simply an upgraded version of one either. It functions as a prequel to the very first Octopath game, but adapts the stories of the mobile game, Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent, into a single-player format. These stories have been entirely retooled, and any worries I had about translating them from the mobile game have evaporated. This is a fully-featured Octopath entry.
You play as a customizable protagonist for the first time, and after the continent’s despotic rulers destroy your village, you set out on a quest to get revenge and find help rebuilding. It seems like the overall flow of the story will remain familiar to franchise veterans, with the player visiting different locales and playing out episodes of characters’ stories while building out their party. But the party system is Octopath 0’s big draw. It ties into a robust new basebuilding system, as well as an interesting change to combat. Eight characters participate in battle now, a bold change that drastically alters your strategy and the flow of battle.
Essentially, you have a frontline party of four characters and a backline party of four. The front is the party you actively use in battle with all of the familiar Octopath elements — attacking, boosting, defending, using skills. The back row will heal your entire party’s HP and SP, with the amount depending on their stats. But what’s really fascinating is that you can swap characters between the front and back.
Because characters in the back heal and get guarded by the front, you can mix and match your formations to help keep everyone alive. Every character also has their own boost gauge, which drastically widens your strategic options. You might have the front row expend their boost gauges to exploit enemies’ weaknesses, then swap in the back row and unleash massively damaging attacks.
I can’t overstate how much this dual-party approach changes Octopath’s battle system, especially in how it encourages quick decision-making. After taking on both a boss and a secret boss, and smashing them both, I found myself chomping at the bit to dig deeper into the combat. It seems like each character has their own set of skills, so even just the 12 characters I had access to gave me dozens of options for party composition.
As a tradeoff, enemies feel more aggressive than ever, with attacks that can hit multiple characters. That’s exactly why the way you build your party and swap them around in battle is important. Party members also have a function outside of battle, as you can recruit them to help rebuild your village. You can build various facilities, plant and harvest vegetables for meals, or just decorate. The system reminds me a lot of Ni No Kuni 2’s kingdom building, and even the Dark Cloud games. The story mission I played had a merchant join my party, bringing both a new element to combat and a new store to town.
I only got to see about 10 minutes of the town building, but if it has sufficient depth, I can see how it would tie nicely into the idea of exploring the world and building a strong party. That system, and the changes to combat, make Octopath 0 feel quite different from the past two games, even though it uses the same formula. It still packs in all the gorgeous HD-2D pixel art you’d expect, with battles feeling like grand affairs with all those characters on-screen. It’s fascinating to see how Square Enix has used the bones of a mobile game to create a fully-fledged RPG, and it’s a practice I’d like to see more of as mobile games and their stories, like NieR Reincarnation, fade from existence.
For now, the Octopath series has never looked and felt better, and that superb combat system has me especially excited to jump back into its pixelated fantasy world.
