Square Enix’s retro-inspired role-playing game series gets a prequel but does this new HD-2D title justify its lengthy running time?

Octopath Traveler 0 is an odd contradiction as a video game. On one hand, it’s intriguingly novel as, in Square Enix’s own words, it ‘is inspired by story elements and gameplay ideas’ from ongoing mobile prequel Champions Of The Continent, with all the free-to-play elements stripped out in favour of a more traditional, premium experience.

On the other hand, though, it is a disappointingly safe follow-up to the original Octopath Traveler from 2018 and its 2023 sequel, seemingly intent to stick to what it knows, with very few new ideas or innovations to make it truly stand out.

This highlights a problem when it comes to critiquing video game sequels that rigidly adhere to the formula of their predecessor. If it’s more or less the exact same game, but that previous game was good to begin with, is it fair to condemn it for its lack of originality when by all accounts it’s still fun to play?

As we explored in our preview, Octopath Traveler 0 will feel like returning home for established fans; where everything’s exactly as you remember it, except there’s a new air fryer and some of the sofa cushions have been replaced.

The turn-based battles work identically, as you break enemies’ shields by targeting their weaknesses and spend boost points to increase the damage of your attacks. We’ve always praised the battle system for how tactical it is, and the amount of freedom offered in how you build your party, which is only accentuated by the fact that you now have up to eight characters at once in a fight.

They’re divided between a front and back row, with only those in the front able to perform actions, but they can be swapped with whoever’s placed behind them where they’re safe from enemy attacks. This means positioning is just as important as who’s in the party and when combined with the more than 30 characters available to recruit, there’s a lot of room for experimentation.

We wondered if eight-man parties would make battles too overwhelming, but since each party member has their own distinct role, it’s easy to memorise who can do what. Even those that share job classes are built in different ways. For example, Phenn and Delitia are both hunters, but whereas Phenn is a tank who draws enemy aggro, Delitia focuses on attacks that lower the target’s stats.

There’s no multiclassing this time, but the game makes up for that by letting you acquire extra equippable skills, allowing party members to use attacks or passive abilities they can’t learn otherwise, to cover blind spots in your strategy.

It is immensely satisfying seeing your efforts pay off during boss battles. The random enemy encounters should rarely give you trouble as long as you’re sufficiently levelled, but boss fights are consistently tough, with each having their own strategies to contend with, like changing their weaknesses or inflicting status ailments that can only be removed by breaking their defences. They also hit like a stampeding rhino, so having eight party members instead of four doesn’t give you the advantage you might imagine.

However, this is all par for the course for this series. Even the story structure is the same, with multiple story routes to pursue that are all seemingly unrelated but start to come together by the end. Instead of playing as one of eight protagonists with their own storylines, though, you control only a single, customisable character.

The pixel art graphics mean character customisation isn’t super deep visually, when compared to something like Elden Ring, but it’s a neat novelty all the same, that almost makes us yearn for a dedicated Octopath tabletop game. No options are gender locked and you get to give them a little backstory that determines their starting skills and even their favourite food. And while you can go the whole adventure with only one of the available eight job classes, you can eventually unlock the remaining seven.

Unfortunately, in cut scenes, your character is completely mute, which means they’re devoid of personality and require other characters to explain how they’re feeling in any given situation. Ironically, despite being the fabled chosen one, they often feel like a glorified extra in other peoples’ stories, even when chasing after the villains responsible for their hometown’s destruction.

Speaking of, Octopath Traveler 0’s most distinguishing gimmick is getting to rebuild the town from scratch, which serves as its own storyline. You’re initially very limited in what you can build and where, but it’s quite layered since you can add plenty of cosmetic flourishes and even alter the terrain.

It’s well worth spending time on, since not only do your options drastically open up over time, you can invite villagers from other towns who, when housed, will regularly supply items or money. Plus, you can build facilities such as a ranch for gathering ingredients to cook stat boosting meals and a training ground to keep your benched party members levelled up. The game is also kind enough to tell you where you can gather the specific resources needed when you want to build something, which is quite the time saver.

That said, Octopath Traveler 0 is still a huge time sink. Between the different storylines, rebuilding the village, and multiple side quests, it will take hours (over 100 according to Square Enix) to see everything. This is a double-edged sword, since even after 60 hours we were growing exhausted, as so much of the story follows the exact same structure.

Nearly every chapter involves simply going through a small dungeon and fighting a boss at the end, with a visit to a new town thrown in occasionally, which is precisely what the last two games did as well. Twice we thought we had approached the end, only for the game to throw another story quest at us.

It doesn’t help that none of the storylines are particularly compelling. They have their moments, but we struggled to be invested in any of them when they’re filled to the brim with age old cliches, overwrought voice-acting, and nuance-free villains. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with one-note bad guys who are fun to hate, but the game goes to such extreme lengths to highlight how evil they are, it becomes more comical than horrific.

Anyone who just wants more Octopath Traveler will be plenty satisfied with Octopath Traveler 0 since, at its core, its functionally identical to what came before. But after three games with barely any innovation or meaningful changes to the formula, the series already feels like it’s running on fumes and is either incapable of evolving beyond one-game gimmicks or stubbornly refuses to step out of its comfort zone.

Even the HD-2D graphics, while still pretty (the sprite work for bosses is a highlight), have long lost their novelty now that Square Enix has made so many other games with the same engine. What was once a delightful nostalgic throwback has ironically become old hat.

It wouldn’t be a bad thing if Octopath Traveler 0 led to more mobile games being reimagined as traditional console/PC releases, devoid of microtransactions and gacha mechanics, particularly ones that have since shut down like NieR: Reincarnation. However, it’s just as likely that any success Octopath Traveler 0 sees will only encourage Square Enix to pump out another safe sequel.

Octopath Traveler 0 is by no means a bad game, and retains everything we like about the series, but apart from the lack of innovation it’s very repetitive and unnecessarily bloated. If the series is committed to staying in the past then we fear it’s only a matter of time before even the most avid fans start to tire of playing the same game over and over again.

Formats: Nintendo Switch 2 (reviewed), PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC
Price: £49.99
Publisher: Square Enix
Developer: Square Enix and DokiDoki Groove Works
Release Date: 4th December 2025
Age Rating: 12

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The publisher behind Streets Of Rage 4 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge returns with the greatest Marvel beat ‘em-up ever made.

Video games don’t need to be complicated to be fun or worthwhile. There’s equal artistry at play in making a good game out of a concept with only limited interactivity, as you can plainly see when comparing arcade lightgun games, 2D shooters, or the currently en vogue scrolling beat ‘em-up.

Thanks to indie developers, the idea of strolling left to right across a 2D level, punching and kicking everyone in your way, has never entirely disappeared from the video game landscape, especially as it’s never really had any kind of modern 3D equivalent. Although the genre’s current popularity is almost entirely down to one company: French publisher Dotemu.

They were behind the excellent Streets Of Rage 4 and the slightly disappointing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. The developer of the latter is also making this, but while their previous work was shallow even by the standards of the genre, Marvel Cosmic Invasion is about as complex as the concept can really get, without overcomplicating things. And it’s a ton of fun whether you care about superheroes or not.

They’re not usually clearly delineated but Marvel (and DC) has different levels of superhero intrigue, from fighting bank robbers with street level characters to sci-fi adventures in space and battling godlike beings in the cosmic side of the universe. This game primarily deals with the sci-fi middle ground, with the main villain being the insect-themed Annihilus. His incursions on Earth and other planets leads to a team-up of many different Marvel heroes, with up to four people playing at once.

We wouldn’t claim to be Marvel Comics experts, but the line-up does seem slightly odd, as there’s a lot of characters we wouldn’t associate with cosmic Marvel at all, like Wolverine and Iron Man, but it’s completely missing any of the Fantastic Four, Inhumans or Eternals. The Guardians of the Galaxy representation is also very limited, and while technically there is a Captain Marvel, in the form of Phyla-Vell, there’s no Carol Danvers. In comic books everyone goes into space at some point, but this does seem a borderline random selection of playable characters.

What’s great about the line-up is that all the characters are impressively varied, with some that can fly and all of which have different types of dodge or block moves. Their standard punches and kicks are all different, but there’s also a character specific hero attack (which can usually be charged) and a special move that can only be activated when you have enough focus.

So, for example, Captain America’s shield works great at blocking and countering, but is also super fun to ping between multiple enemies at once. Rocket Raccoon’s hero attack is an increasingly large gun, depending on how long you hold down the button, while She-Hulk has a wide area of attack for her various wrestling moves. Meanwhile, Phoenix can telekinetically draw enemies towards her, before she gets her punches in, and Beta Ray Bill (Thor’s alien pal) is the tank-like bruiser of the group.

Compared to a one-on-one fighting game it’s still simple stuff but for a beat ‘em-up it’s surprisingly involved and enough so that you’ll be picking characters based on their abilities, and not just what they look like. You actually choose two characters whenever you start and can tag team between them at any point, either to give them a chance to heal a recoverable portion of health or to unleash team-up attacks.

The game is very obviously inspired by the early Marvel Vs. Capcom games, with a similar 2D art style and as many cheeky nods as it can get away with. Although various other classic beat ‘em-ups also get references, such as beating up goblin-like enemies with a sack over their shoulder to get power-ups, just like Golden Axe.

Each level has three Achievement-like objectives to complete, such as making use of a specific character’s move or navigating a section of the level without getting hit, that both adds an extra challenge and helps to teach you the nuances of each character’s abilities.

The graphics are fantastic throughout: even better than Shredder’s Revenge and all the more impressive for the constantly changing settings, from the high-tech streets of Wakanda to a very welcome trip to the dinosaur-filled Savage Land or a planet being ravaged by Galactus.

In terms of Marvel sightseeing, it’s near perfect and while the storytelling is extremely basic there’s some occasionally funny dialogue, such as when She-Hulk – who in the comics was breaking the fourth wall long before Deadpool – quips about all the monster cameos in one level.

Most of the enemies are bug-related, which threatens to get monotonous but is still much better than Shredder’s Revenge in that regard. What’s also different is that Cosmic Invasion can be fairly tricky. You need to keep your wits about you at all times, but the boss battles in particular are often quite hard.

This becomes a problem when playing on your own because there’s no checkpoints and since you probably won’t struggle with the normal scrolling sections the second or third time, it becomes a bit of a chore to wade through those only to get beaten by the boss again. That’s more a consequence of playing on your own than anything else, because if you’ve got co-op friends with you then you can divvy up the responsibilities, instead of having to do everything yourself.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion seems about as complicated as a scrolling beat ‘em-up can get without becoming something completely different (something like Absolum, in fact, which is also published by Dotemu but is more of a roguelike, with light role-playing elements). In terms of taking the original concept of a beat ‘em-up as far as it can go, this gets almost everything right.

It has lots of variety, a modicum of depth, and it can be picked up and played by anyone, no matter their gaming experience, within seconds. If Marvel Cosmic Invasion had been an actual arcade game, back in the 90s, we would’ve spent a silly amount of money on it. And there’s no greater compliment you can give a beat ‘em-up than that.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC
Price: £26.99
Publisher: Dotemu
Developer: Tribute Games
Release Date: 1st December 2025
Age Rating: 12

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