3/5 ★ – beemancer's review of OCTOPATH TRAVELER 0.

Octopath Traveler 0 makes a lot of improvements for the franchise as a whole that I hope stick around for Octopath 3, but ultimately falls flat in some spots that left me unsatisfied. The big win here is the quality of life this game brought and the advancements to the already great combat system the series is known for. You can train characters that aren't in the party, you can quick travel to more areas than just towns, you can see how many treasure chests you've missed in each area, you get a map you can open up and see in the bottom corner and more. The 8 person party system is super awesome, and there's endless cool ways to build your squad. The way you can customize each character is extremely deep, although admittedly more than needed because the game is frankly not very difficult. The excitement of tweaking my party kept me going through a lot of this and made me want to collect every little thing. The music, as expected of Square, is excellent. Admittedly, there's a lot of reused assets including music from OT1. This game is clearly an appeasement to give us something while we wait for OT3 (and let people who didn't play CotC have a chance to experience it). A lot of the towns and characters are straight from OT1, which is kinda batchest but also kinda lazy and I'd rather have something entirely new. The story... isn't great in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, there's some good moments. Epic stuff happens, and there's some seriously sweet and tear-jerking moments. The voice acting is great (but not everything is voice acted) with the exception of a few minor characters that have VA that is off-puttingly bad. Unfortunately most of the good moments of the story come in the first half, with the second half being much weaker overall. The entire game is plagued with insane quantities of dialogue, including a mountain of politics involving a half dozen countries, which makes for a boring and drawn out presentation. The game took me almost 90 hours to complete everything I felt was worth doing, and way too much of it was listening to dialogue. It doesn't help that octopath puts these short pauses between every line of dialogue since they're tied to text boxes. This adds time, and also prevents the conversation from flowing normally. Characters can't interrupt or otherwise interact with each other. It's also worth noting that you are a silent protagonist. This is definitely a downside, but didn't bother me that much because the story wasn't that good. I just stared, emotionless, while the other characters monologued at each other for actual days worth of time. When they wanted address me the VA either goes silent for just that line, or they address me by my myriad of titles. I like that the game has ONE main character instead of 8, it just works better than what OT has tried to do in previous titles, but they should give me a gender neutral name and some voice acting so it doesn't feel like the game was made in 2005. The story is JRPG as fuck, by which I mean it hits every single trope you could possibly imagine. OT has pretty much done this in the past, but since they literally all happen to YOU in particular it feels extremely contrived and campy. The villains are also extremely one dimensional - there's no room to interpret how fucking evil they are. They just do the most fucked up thing they can think of at every turn. It's definitely not super well written, but it's at least kind of fun if you don't take it super seriously. The final chapters were so horrendously bad I was yelling at the screen. I understand every word they were saying, but nothing about it makes sense - the motivations are just so blatantly stupid on every end and it's extremely predictable. Gameplay-wise, I loved the new party system. Unfortunately, there's not much to do with it. OT has never been very hard, and this game at least starts out pretty interesting to play (and I'd argue the early game is a little harder than the other games) but by the time you get a full party and unlock all the mechanics you don't start with, the game becomes a cake walk. There was a "super boss" that I unlocked at about level 45 that recommended level 60, and I beat it with ease. OT has always had a gearing problem - most of the best gear is acquired from path actions on random townsfolk and are accessible very, very early. As soon as you get 1 weapon this way, you're pretty much set for the whole game. Octo 0 in particular is FULL of broken shit - I think every single job the protagonist can take is extremely powerful. In addition, if you do any side content you quickly outpace the game level-wise, because there's 3 simultaneous paths that are all about the same starting level (and don't scale up to your current level once you beat one, which is very dumb). Ultimately, I obsessed over my party composition and was really happy with it, but that effort was only useful for the superboss at the end, which I beat in three tries (one to learn the mechanics, one I had a bad start and just reset, and then one more to execute my strategy). Some more DLC bosses might help with this, but ultimately the game was simply too easy for how powerful the party system is. Even just having more hit points would make the bosses substantially more interesting - it just wasn't that hard to do over 100k damage with a single turn (and my party generally did not bother breaking the enemies). Dungeons are better than they have been in the past, but still not great. The "puzzles" are just "flip the switch to proceed". The last dungeon was a complete slog, because it was enormous but empty. You walk down a long ass path, pick up the treasure chest, and one-shot the random encounters because they're too high level to run from with equipping Evil Ward. Oh, and the Caits that award tons of XP, JP and leaves (that you don't need) are INSANELY fast throughout the whole game. I put EVERY speed-enhancing nut on the protagonist, and I NEVER outsped a cait the whole game, and they ran away on the first turn about 90% of the time. The game lacked polish, and had a lot of unused potential. But it's still an enjoyable experience if you love Octopath - just not something I'm really going to recommend to anyone that doesn't already glaze the series.