Octopath Traveler 0 (Zero), Square Enix’s brand-new mainline entry in the “HD-2D” JRPG series, is set to launch on December 5this year. While the title is positioned as a 100-long prequel to the series based on the Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent mobile game, it also introduces some new features to the franchise, such as town building and character creation. These features will give players a high level of creative freedom when building their hometown and character, and the developers say they decided to make these systems so detailed they could easily be considered a separate game. But fine tuning them wasn’t easy, and even the game director was initially shocked to hear how far they’d take the new features.
AUTOMATON recently had a chance to ask Octopath Traveler 0 director Yasuhiro Kidera and producer Hiroto Suzuki about why they decided to add such expansive simulator-style gameplay to the JRPG series.
According to Kidera, nobody in the development team – including the director himself – expected that Zero’s Town Building feature would end up having such a high level of freedom. “The development team asked Suzuki numerous times if ‘we’ll really be taking it this far?’ – But his stance was: ‘absolutely,’ so we carried on with development as is,” he said. The reason for this, as Suzuki explains, was the fact that the new prequel is an adaptation of a mobile game. He wanted to have a feature which would help justify it being a full-priced, standalone entry in the series, despite its origins. And in order to match fans’ expectations, there was no room for mistakes or compromises.
“I thought it would be only logical to make it like that (laughs). We took the rather unconventional step to make Zero into a full-priced mainline installment while basing it on Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent, a mobile game. But even if we wanted to go on a new frontier with the series, if we tried cutting corners during development, players would inevitably call us out for it. Town Building is especially meant to be a representative feature of the game, so I believed it should be refined down to the last detail. Because we decided to implement the Town Building feature, we had to make it so that the player can actually create a town they can call their own,” Suzuki explains.
“Both in the context of the game’s concept and as a product – I thought having the Town Building feature in Zero was absolutely necessary. It is precisely because we took it this far that the game can be called a proper mainline entry in the series. That’s the kind of fortitude we faced development with. That being said, I myself had no hesitation in creating and refining the feature through and through. But now that I look at Octopath Traveler 0 once again, I feel like it kind of ended up being a blend of two different games in one – an RPG and a slow life simulator,” Suzuki say through laughter. “I’m really grateful for all the effort the development staff put into the game.”
Octopath Traveler 0 releases on December 5 for PC (Steam/Windows), PS5/PS4, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, and Xbox Series X❘S.
