It seems that no one is prepared for the town-building system in Octopath Traveler 0 once it releases December 4 – not even its devs, apparently. Game director Yasuhiro Kidera himself was surprised. Was it really supposed to be so elaborate? "The development team asked Suzuki numerous times if, 'We'll really be taking it this far?' But his stance was: 'absolutely,'" Kidera recalls in an interview with Automaton, talking about producer Hirohito Suzuki. "So we carried on with development as is." Suzuki maintains that he had his reasons. He explains to Automaton that Octopath Traveler 0 will allow players to place buildings, decor, and flora because, well, "I thought it would be only logical to make it like that." Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 devs love to see players "outsmarting" them with obscene builds that break the French JRPG wide open: "The best reward you can get" Octopath Traveler 1 and 2 are two of my favorite turn-based RPGs, but I'm not sure how I'm going to go back to them after falling in love with Octopath Traveler 0's town-building mode Super Mario and Legend of Zelda veteran says "implementing and playtesting is precisely what matters" at Nintendo, where devs don't just "make decisions based on what they see on paper" "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," he continues. "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." Suzuki would likely be able to empathize. "Now that I look at Octopath Traveler 0 once again," he says, "I feel like it kind of ended up being a blend of two different games in one – an RPG and a slow life simulator." Yet another JRPG behemoth is making me confront my mortality as Octopath Traveler 0 reveals 100-hour main story with 30-40% new content compared to the prequel it's remaking.