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What’s home for you? For much of my childhood, the back of a station wagon on the road between wherever the Navy stationed my old man. Then it was Florida. After I escaped, it was a small apartment in New York, then a slightly bigger apartment, and finally, a house. We tend to define ourselves by where we live at any given time, our memories of a time, of who we were, of the people who made those moments memorable, tied with a cord of steel to a specific place, for both good and ill. People fight for their homes. They rebuild after wars, famine, natural disasters. They preserve places, because those places are a part of us. What wouldn’t you do for your home, your community?
I haven’t played a ton of Octopath Traveler 0 yet, but from the jump I know the ideas of home and community were core to Square’s latest entry in the venerated HD-2D series. That’s probably because the first thing I did was build a house. Octopath Traveler 0 is a revenge story. See, your hometown of Wishvale was destroyed, and you’re (understandably) real mad about it, so you set out to get them who wronged you and restore Wishvale to its former glory. That means literally rebuilding the town, so that was the first thing I did.
Octopath Traveler 0’s townbuilding is honestly pretty neat. [Editor’s Note: We have since learned that the size of your town will have different limitations depending on which platform you’re playing on.] I’m the kind of guy who spent a lot of his time in Age of Empires building beautiful cities, so it clicked with me immediately. You can build houses and other buildings of different design, assign who’s going to live where, make cobblestone paths, plant flowers and place benches, craft gardens to tend to, and find just the right place for storage crates to hold the lumber and other materials you’ll need to make stuff. There’s also trees, wells, chests, and all kinds of other things, and there’s plenty of freedom to make the town you want.
But rebuilding Wishvale is only part of it. You can also do stuff in town, too, like cook food that you can use later and chat with the townspeople, and even upgrade the buildings for additional functionality. It’s pretty neat, and even though I only spent about ten or so minutes with it, I appreciated the joy (and serenity) of building a neat little town.
After that, it was time for a more traditional Octopath experience. My assigned protagonist, who is the only character that can change classes in Octopath Traveler 0, and seven of his closest buddies were in the sandy town of Sunshade looking for a merchant named Ludo. The long and short of it was that we needed a merchant to help us establish trade. After my buddy Phenn put his foot in his mouth and mistook Ludo for some random kid, which went about as well as you’d expect, he turned us down flat. Not because he was still mad, but because Wishvale had been destroyed before. Why do business with a town that couldn’t protect itself?
Instead, Ludo made us a deal: if we took out the pack of lizardmen that had been terrorizing the new trade route, he’d consider helping us out. With no other options before us and a love for our town as motivation, my merry band set out to do just that.
There was only one problem. As we made our way out of Sunshade, I saw a woman hanging out by herself. When I preview a game, I try to play it like I would if I were playing normally. And years of JRPG-playing have taught me that if you see someone, you should chat with them. So we sauntered on over. The woman in question asked to see my protagonist’s ring. A little weird, but okay. After admiring it, she asked if she could keep it. Uh oh. I knew where this was going, but there was no way out of it. I said no, and then she said she’d take it from us anyway. Cue fight.
This is where I got my first glimpse of Octopath Traveler 0’s combat system. If you’re played the previous two Octopaths, you know how 0 works. Essentially, your job is to find out what attacks your opponent is weak against, use those to wear down their defenses until they break, and then use limited boosts to charge up your attacks and lay on the hurt while they’re vulnerable. It’s a good system, but 0 adds a couple of unique twists on top of that. First, like I said earlier, the protagonist is the only one who can change their class. Everyone else comes with their class, and it doesn’t change. Like Henry Ford said about the Model T, “you can have it in any color you want as long as it’s black.”
The other big change is the ability to swap characters from your front to your back line at will. Characters in the back line can’t attack, but they regain health and skill points every turn. So if someone’s taking a beating, it’s probably a good idea to swap them to the back line and let them catch their breath. This required more micromanaging on my part, but when I got the hang of it, it reminded me of getting into a groove when you’re bowling and everything you throw is a strike. You just flow.
The other benefit of this system is that, because every character comes with their own boost charges, you have a lot more opportunities for big damage when you finally break someone’s defenses. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. I spent so long on the Woman Who Really Wanted My Ring that I was beginning to worry I wouldn’t have enough time to play the actual demo I’d been sent here to play. But eventually, she went down and I sprinted off to deal with the lizardmen, who were holed up in some nearby ruins.
These fights went much more smoothly. After my would-be Ring Thief, a bunch of lizards who walk on two legs wasn’t that big of a deal. Through it all, I was impressed by how fast Octopath managed to feel without ever sacrificing how good its tactical gameplay feels. I was always making interesting decisions, even in more minor fights. And that battle theme had me vibing in my chair as I played.
Then I got to the Lizardmen Leader, who looked like he wandered in out of a Ray Harryhausen joint, and I was like, “Oh.” And man, that fight was tough. He had two minions, a ton of health, and he hit hard. But I stuck to what had gotten me to the dance. I found his weaknesses, exploited them, and when his defense was broken, I hit him with boosted attacks or a flashy Ultimate Technique. I wanted to pour it on as much as I could before he could shore up his defenses again. It wasn’t easy; several of my party members fell, and I had to use my items to bring them back, but he hit the floor just as my demo wrapped. Oh, and we earned the respect of Ludo, who followed up and stepped in to help when things looked bleak. Put one on the board for the good guys.
When I put my controller down, I was really impressed with Octopath Traveler 0. Its combat feels like a step above its already excellent predecessors, it still has that gorgeous HD-2D look, and the soundtrack is fantastic based on what I’ve heard so far. All of those things are great, and I hope the whole game is as good as the little slice I got to sample, but honestly, the thing that stuck with me was Wishvale. Often, RPGs have enormous stakes. The fate of the world is on your shoulders. Here, I was just trying to rebuild my village and punish the people responsible for what happened to it. I like how much smaller that focus is, how much more intimate. Maybe it doesn’t stay that way. But as far as motivations go, fighting for your home is a good one, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in rebuilding Wishvale when the time comes.
