I am always disappointed when a beloved franchise puts out a mobile game entry. While I recognize the value of those games to some people, they rarely feel like a "real" entry in the franchise to me. When Octopath Traveller put out its own mobile game, which had its own distinct plot involving the world and characters, I assumed it would be a part of the franchise I never really got to experience. That is why I think Octopath Traveller 0 is so exciting. It's an attempt to take the plots and characters introduced in the mobile game and rebuild them as a more franchise-accurate, stand-alone RPG. The effort is deeply welcome, and Octopath Traveller 0 looks like it's doing far more than the bare minimum.

As mentioned, Octopath Traveller 0 is an adaptation of the mobile game, Octopath Traveller: Champions of the Continent. The story takes place on the continent of Osterra, which is scattered across many cities. The peace of the continent is ravaged by evil individuals who have been corrupted by their lust for power, wealth and fame. They've  gotten their hands on magic rings that grant them the ability to seek out their cruel desires. The player takes control of a young guard in the town of Wishvale, which unknowingly home to one of the missing rings of power. The ring's presence attracts the attention of the other holders, who ravage the village and slaughter its inhabitants — including your protagonist's family. In classic fantasy story style, however, this leads to your protagonist getting their hand on the final ring and setting out to get revenge.

In a pretty big deviation for the franchise, Octopath Traveller 0 opens up with only a single playable protagonist. Even more distinct is that this protagonist is fully customizable. You pick their gender, name, starting class, a handful of skills, and even a Dark Souls-style "starting gift" item that defines some of their earlier capabilities. Eventually, your protagonist will be able to swap jobs and roles. It should be noted that they're a mute protagonist, but you seem to get a lot of dialogue choices, and they still seem involved in the game's party chat and other plot moments in a way that defines their personality.

You'll follow several different primary plot threads that take you across the land, similar to the individual plots from the previous games. Our demo offers four potential threads to follow: The Master of Power, The Master of Wealth, The Master of Fame and the Kindlers of the Flame. The first three have your protagonist tracking down those responsible for attacking Wishvale, while the last involves rebuilding the town. These quests are divided into chapters, and you can tackle them in any order you like, but the further you are into a questline, the tougher the challenges are.

The game has a wealth of playable characters. Octopath Traveller 0 is set to have the biggest cast of characters in the franchise to date, including characters from the other games in the series and an entirely new group of characters. Our demo only let us run into a few of the available characters, but it's clear from poking around that there's a huge number of potential party members waiting in the wings. Unlike the previous games, you have an actual party of cast members rather than everyone being their own protagonist.

Rather interestingly, the characters in the demo share jobs. For example, I ran into a recruitable apothecary even after choosing that as my playable character's main job. My protagonist had skills based around healing and axes, while the other character had abilities more geared for debuffing and weakening enemies. Even if you have characters with similar jobs, they don't necessarily overlap. There are also jobs that weren't in previous Octopath games, like architect. You're also able to swap your protagonist's job once you've mastered a previous job, so you have more flexibility.

There's also a system that allows you to learn and equip both active and passive skills. These skills can be learned from quests, interacting with NPCs, or leveling up your characters. There are also character-specific ultimate skills that function like Limit Breaks in other JRPGs, so you can unleash powerful attacks after charging up.

Octopath Traveller 0 brings back the same combat system from the previous games in the franchise. If you haven't played those, the Octopath combat system is a turn-based RPG combat system based around the idea of breaking and boosting. Breaking revolves around the fact that every attack in the game has a specific element associated with it, ranging from sword to fire, and hitting the element or elements an enemy is weak to gradually breaks their defenses. Once an enemy is broken, they lose their next turn and become more vulnerable to attack. On the other hand, boosting lets you power up your next attack or buff up to four times, with one boost point being earned every turn.

In our demo, the biggest change to the combat system is that your total party count has shifted from four party members to eight party members in two rows. The characters in the back row can't attack or be attacked, and they gradually replenish their HP, SP and boost points. During a character's turn, they can swap with the character in the back row position immediately behind them. This allows you to adjust your party based on the current needs of the situation, such as bringing someone out to buff an ally and then swap to a damage dealer. We also saw some interaction with skills, such as one of the healing characters having the ability to heal and swap to the back row in the same action, or a warrior who had an attack that does more damage instantly after being swapped.

Path Actions from the previous games have also returned, but they seem more straightforward this time. As in the previous games, you can interact with basically any NPC in the game, during which you can choose a variety of options. Unlike the previous games, these are limited to specific options depending on the NPC's personality. A warrior might allow you to fight them, a nun might be vulnerable and plead for items, or a merchant might sell items. Most NPCs seem to have at least two options. Each option seems to be tied to wealth, power or fame, a measurement of ability that increases as you complete missions and recruit characters.

Perhaps the coolest example in the demo is the ability to hire NPCs to return to Wishvale, which is a totally customizable town. You're allowed to build houses and other facilities, customize their locations, staff them with NPCs, and customize the town as you like. Our demo only showed a bit of this, but what we saw seemed very interesting. I managed to find one NPC who regularly gives me healing supplies when I visit town, while another reduces the costs of shops. It's hard to say how complex this will get, but the demo makes it seem like there's a lot of potential for a level of customization that has not been previously seen in the franchise.

Overall, Octopath Traveller 0 left an incredibly strong first impression. It might be based on a mobile game, but it felt like a full-fledged new entry in the franchise. It adds some spice to the classic Octopath formula, and it's very easy to see elements of the game, like the town building and character collecting, being as addictive as the previous games. Here's hoping that the final version is as exciting as our demo was when it hits for all consoles on Dec. 3, 2025.