All of which makes Octopath Traveler 0’s recent treatment of these hoary old doomed hometown tropes kind of fascinating. As we noted in our earlier write-up of Square-Enix’s semi-new JRPG, this re-polishing of older mobile game Octopath Traveler: Champions Of The Continent is a surprisingly solid entry in the franchise, shucking layers of free-to-play awkwardness while keeping some genuinely interesting refinements to the series’ already-good take on turn-based combat. (Notably, keeping track of and building a party of eight active combatants makes for enjoyably chaotic battles against pleasantly punishing foes.) When it comes to the new material added to make the game a bit more cohesive, though, Octopath 0 falls back on tradition—and then manages to expand it out into something significantly more robust.
You will already know, from about two minutes into the game’s intro, how things are going to go for the town of Wishvale. If the entire community wasn’t already completely fucked by the discovery that its people are kind, hard-working, and largely keep to themselves, the reveal that it’s the home of a young hero with suitably angelic parents would seal the deal. (If you live in a fantasy town and your young next-door neighbor has a mom who makes him and his dad their signature favorite dish for dinner every night, you might as well save time and just take your cyanide pill early.) And, wouldn’t you know it: Wishvale winds up getting obliterated from three different directions one fateful day, becoming the target of plots by all three of the villains that the game starts by sending you after. Buildings burn, parents get tossed on the garbage heap, and the whole town is reduced to wreckage. You have seen/read/played/dreamt/doodled this story before.
Where Octopath gets interesting—as it often has throughout the franchise’s seven-year run, which has often tucked more interesting stories inside stock fantasy premises—is in how nuanced it allows things to get in the aftermath of its own apocalyptic clichés. After a suitable period of enigmatic mentorship by the local Macguffin vendor, the main character and their childhood friend Stia return to Wishvale, and embark on a quest to rebuild the town. And while this does involve some requisite town-building gameplay, as you scavenge materials from the countryside and decide what color to paint all your new houses, the game takes the notable step of making the actual quests that spring from this rebuilding as robust, if not moreso, as the concurrent battles for vengeance that make up the bulk of the game’s play.
With a focus on rebuilding that goes beyond just plopping down structures—as useful as those can be, giving you access to resources you’d otherwise be denied—the resurrection of Wishvale tells a surprisingly thoughtful story about people wrestling with survivor’s guilt and attempting to put their lives back together in the face of sudden, unprecedented tragedy. Many of these stories, admittedly, still fall back into some cliched storytelling moves, as you work various survivors through their mental hang-ups about the town’s destruction. But even when convincing the local hunter that he probably couldn’t have fended off an entire army of murderers, or repairing an old woman’s trauma-induced dementia via cathartic corn-growing, the Wishvale segments still do at least one radical thing: They treat the doomed hometown as an actual place to be, rather than just a place for the hero to have come from. Octopath 0, then, becomes a story not about leaving home behind to find your place in the world, but discovering that that place already existed, and struggling to protect and improve it. Not bad at all, for a game that had to be rescued from mobile game slot machine hell.
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