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.