Square Enix certainly has a penchant for taking its premium RPGs and turning them into gacha games for mobile, and Octopath Traveler is the latest to receive this treatment with the launch of Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent. As expected, it's a gacha game, a greedy one at that, and it's incredibly unpolished to boot despite the fact it's now globally released. Sure, it may look the part with similar graphics to the console/PC game, but in the end, it's a cynical cash grab filled with greedy in-app purchases, designed from the ground up to empty wallets instead of providing fun. So let's dig in and explore why Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent is a trash-tier release.

At first glance, the trailer above almost makes Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent look like it's a good RPG that lives up to the quality of the original Nintendo Switch title. It isn't.

Octopath pillarboxed

To start, the game is pillarboxed because Square only targeted a single screen ratio for a mobile game designed from the ground up for mobile devices, a platform filled with differing screen sizes. So that's strike one, as this is incredibly lazy, and I have no patience for platform-specific games that don't fit our screens. Honestly, if you're making a mobile game explicitly for mobile, that game better fit the vast majority of mobile screen ratios out there. Period.

Moving on, there is no English voice work despite today's release being developed for a Western audience. There's only one language available for audio, and that's Japanese. Another ding against the game perfectly illustrating Square's outright laziness. You get English text at least, but that's the bare minimum, in my opinion, a perfect summary of this game.

Once you get to the gameplay, you'll uncover a convoluted story that locks you into a forced tutorial. Once you get out of the tutorial, you're free to start your journey of building out your team. There are 64 different characters to collect, and you can hold eight on your team at one time. They all offer different star ratings, so expect a typical system where you collect, upgrade, and combine your characters to reach those lofty five-star units gacha games are known for. More or less, the battle system is similar to the console/PC release, but you'll hit your first gate quickly, so continual grinding is very much a prerequisite.

Then there's the game's performance, which is pretty pitiful for the simple pixel-based graphics. The entire game is capped at 30FPS, no matter what graphic settings you choose, and even on low settings, skips and lag are frequent. Worse yet, before you complete the tutorial, you can't change a single setting in the game, and since the game refused to recognize my phone (it's a ROG 5), the game defaulted to low graphics. This forced me to play through the painful forced tutorial (they literally explain how to swipe the screen for movement, that's how useless the tutorial is) on low graphics, and believe me, there are pop-up explainers galore paired with pointless text, and you can't skip any of it. You can't even fast-forward. So there are zero convenience features to be seen.

The one highlight is that battles work similarly to the console/PC game, utilizing the familiar break system where you can store points to unleash repeated attacks. The rock-paper-scissors mechanics remain, too, so each character will offer unique skills and weapons that are better at taking down some foes than others. So yes, Square was smart enough to keep the core gameplay similar, but sadly it's surrounded by a gacha system that's pretty greedy, with gated content locked behind grind walls.

As expected, Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent is free-to-play, so it contains in-app purchases that range up to $99.99 per item. Once you get past the forced tutorial, you can enter the in-game store sneakily named Guide. In the Guide is where you can purchase more characters, with the first listing you see guaranteeing one 5-star pull out of a 10-character pack that's priced at 290 Rubies, which comes out to $30 for a 330 Ruby pack, because none of the store prices match the number of Rubies you can buy, a convenient system to keep players confused about how much money they are actually spending. Ultimately this means the game is fully pay-to-win, and it isn't shy about it either, but since this is a solo experience, other players paying to win shouldn't affect you outside of the fact everything is monetized aggressively and gated to the hilt.

Octopath Square Enix Bridge

And the bad news doesn't stop here. There's no controller support, and the available cloud save feature requires you to use a Square Enix log-in known as Square Enix Bridge. This is to force players into Square's system (that at least supports log-ins from Facebook, Steam, Apple, Google, and Twitter) when Google already provides a native cloud save option for developers of Android games. Seeing I'm not keen on extra steps to take advantage of core features that should be expected of every game on the platform, this is another failure on Square's part where it ignores the wants of its users to once again give preference to itself and its own ridiculous systems.

All in all, Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent is the latest low-effort release from Square Enix, which is saying something as the developer is already well-known for its lack of quality across mobile and PC. Cut corners are everywhere, difficult to ignore, and since this is a game that relies on enticing players to waste money to advance past its many roadblocks, it's pretty amazing how very little effort was put into polishing this release. Just another day for Square Enix, I'm sure, resulting in yet another gacha game to be forgotten in the coming days. Don't say I didn't warn you, the game is junk.