I regret to inform you that, despite its reputation, octopath traveler 0 is another octopath game. everyone's entitled to their opinion and harper jay macintyre seems a decent sort but do not believe her lies. octo 0 is, unequivocally, the best in the series, which lays bare that octo cannot be tweaked into some sort of "good game"; what makes it octo runs too deep.

this is not, strictly, a flaw, because I don't play octo expecting a "good game," I play octo expecting octo, and octo 0 might be the most octo yet. I don't know that I want a "good game" from octopath traveler; as I quipped in my silksong review:

the mainline octopath games are so ideally-suited for playing depressed, I believe it incorrect to play them otherwise.

octopath is a comforting grind. it gestures towards melodramatic plot and epic stakes but they feel like an outline, as if the game is really a pitch document for a tremendously satisfying combat engine that someone's put some placeholder storylines in. when you are depressed and want the experience of disappearing into a story, a world, a series of complex systems, without actually having to care about anything, octo is there for you.

I attempted to play octo 0 not-depressed, but, for unrelated reasons, failed at this repeatedly. many a day was spent under a weighted blanket disappearing into octopath traveler 0 for 7 hours, depressed out of my fucking mind. it was like the game knew what was coming.

so: what is so allegedly different?

if you don't know the grind: octopath enemies have shields; each enemy's shield has a number of hit points and a series of weaknesses; the first you encounter an enemy type, its weaknesses are a mystery, and must be hit with a series of weapons and elemental attacks to find which ones whittle down its shield points; once the shield is broken, the enemy is dazed for a full turn and every attack deals greater damage; when the enemy type is encountered again, any revealed weak points are remembered.

this has been there from the first game, as well as the boost system: every turn, your party gains a boost point, which, if activated, allows regular attacks to hit multiple times, special attacks to hit harder, and buffs/debuffs to last longer. any turn you use your boosts, you do not recharge them the next turn, so you are constantly questioning, do I hit twice now, or wait and hit three times next turn? encountering a fresh enemy tends to mean a few turns of each character attacking with different weapons to find weak points, while also racking up boosts, so, once a weakness is found, certain party members hit many times til the shield is broken and the remaining boost their heavy hitting attacks to deal maximum damage during the stun.

octo 2 added ultimates, an additional meter that fills at different rates for things like damaging shields, doing regular attacks, and breaking. deploying a fully-charged ultimate is where your heavies deal the most damage, the thieves steal most successfully, the healers revive the fallen without spending sp, and so forth.

octo 0 adds the following: where, historically, the series has 8 characters form which you select a party of 4, you now get a party of 8 split into front and back rows, and they are selected from a growing pool of 30ish recruitable characters. front row attacks, back row does support moves, and the positions can be switched at no cost to your turn. both rows gain boost every turn, this means you pretty much always have at least one boost point to spend. also the ultimates have multiple levels of power, depending on how long you let their meters fill before deploying them, and the meter can only fill while the character is taking action from the front row.

this technically allows for some pretty complex and interconnected battle strategies. willow and I were playing the game at the same time, and willow got really into setting up merchant characters as "batteries," i.e. using their moves that maximize sp and then donating it to other characters, while also boosting the money and multiple types of exp the game offers. myself... I fell into very little of that shit. I got my two heavies, my healer, my magic user, and the rest was a potpourri of whatever helpful weapons/skills were missing. there are all kinds of ways to make the systems play off of each other, and almost no reason to do so: you spend 95% of this game horrendously over-leveled, with every single boss going down on your first try. the systems are there if you want to mess with them, but there is no incentive other than your own curiosity. and I don't play this series when I'm curious, I play when I'm depressed.

narratively, this is the best storytelling in the series: it's only kind of bad. the twist here is that, instead of 8 protagonists with 8 plotlines you can approach in any order, you have one protagonist and 30 additional characters with optional subplots. this focus does hold the story together, and actually allows for a handful of gently affecting moments. (a central plot is that your home is sacked and razed by evildoers in the opening hours, and you spend the rest of the game restoring your home, finding survivors scattered around the continent and inviting them back, and the culmination of this plotline is surprisingly gentle, hopeful even.) it's not better written than past plotlines, but the greater focus makes it work in ways the octo series usually can't manage. each plotline has 4-5 chapters, and it's historically uncommon - even unwise - to do a single plotline start-to-finish in the other games. you're supposed to jump between them. which means you'll forget what the hell osvald's story was up to by chapter 3 because you did 5 different chapter 2s before returning to it. the greater focus allows even a generic plot to sing as much as it can.

at the same time, the narrative is utter nonsense. not the storytelling, exactly, but the way it works as a game. the narrative and mechanics are not exactly dissonant, they just largely ignore one another. you have 30 different characters you can put in your party; certain plotlines are about certain characters; does that mean you have to have that character in your party to do that plotline? it did in octos past, but not this one! game just pretends they were in your party for the cutscenes. cutscenes also act as though the protagonist is fighting solo, even as combat always has a full 8-character party. entire subplots are about the evils of wealth, and these subplots also give you massive financial payouts with zero commentary. can't even call it ludonarrative dissonance, because the narrative also contradicts this: the thieves' plotline about the evils of wealth exist in a completely different moral universe from the merchant's plotline about how reasonable war profiteering is. it is the video game equivalent of the song two bass hit (dub) by squarepusher: one bass is in your left ear and one is it your right, they are in the same key and the same tempo and sync up from time to time, but are largely unrelated. every game asks you to roll with some shit; this one, more than most.

all this comes together to make an experience nearly impossible to care about or put down. it's the perfect platform for fanfic; comments under octopath videos on youtube describe the usual 8-character party as a found family with its neurodivergent dad and polyamorous mom and trans adopted child, and none of that shit is canon but you can instantly tell who each comment is referring to. players adding humanity to undefined characters like they did with hot ryu.

octopath can never be more than this. every game will have this same core issue: the systems are deep but the game is too easy to require engagement; the plot drags on for ages but never matters; the drama gets shockingly dark at time ("woman sold into slavery" is a repeated plot beat, and a random journal entry helpfully lets you know that a random NPC was SA'd by her adopted father) but its tone can never shake its low-stakes lightness; characters are so thinly-written that anyone can turn out to be evil at any time, but also the most bloodthirsty warrior can have a redemption arc and it makes as much sense as anything else. no twist will ever defy your expectations because you never expect anything. it is the only series I can think of to make "attacking and dethroning god" not only boring but cozy.

and, as ever, there is a secret final boss that (I assume) will be harder than anything the game has thrown at you by an order of magnitude. it will demand you have engaged with the game's systems in ways you have never once been required to do. it will demand you think about your party beyond "enh, I like delitia, I'ma keep her." I knew this would probably happen going in - it happened in the last two - and I challenged myself to play the game differently, to actually engage, to be really intentional and thoughtful about my party and the ways the systems interlock, to prepare myself to actually beat the secret final boss... and I couldn't do it. I tried and tried and tried to care enough to play the game well and I just didn't. I was in the endgame and, just playing normally, never once grinding, I was 20 levels over-powered for every battle. there was zero benefit to playing better. it was extra work for purely intrinsic rewards and I just do not have the kind of spreadsheet brain that enjoys optimizing for its own sake. trying to swap out even a single party member was agonizing, because it meant moving all kinds of equipment and learned skills around, possibly changing your main character's job class because now you're missing your only axe-user, buying underpowered gear because you just added a second knife-user to the lineup but you sold all your excess knives and the nearest store only has mediocre ones. recruitable characters keep popping up down to the final hours, but it was nigh-impossible to add them to the party because, while they are always leveled to match your existing party, there are a number of ways to boost party members' base stats beyond leveling, and these new characters haven't received any of those buffs, so they typically have half the max sp and 1000 fewer hp and their elemental defense is shit. and just, what's the point? what is even the point? you're going to wipe the floor with everyone no matter who's in the party. just so long as you don't go for that secret final boss, you'll be fine.

I didn't go for the secret final boss. for the first time, I didn't bother. got the first ending and decided that's the real ending. I'll watch the final boss on youtube same as I did for the last two games after giving up on them. octopath doesn't matter and I prefer it that way.