Octopath Traveler 0 and the Sweetness of Twisted Apples
Come Together
Spoilers for Octopath Traveler 0’s “Master of Power” Chapter 2
Rinyuu’s voice is pretty annoying.
I think I get why a lot of people might just quit on Octopath Traveler 0 right there. It’s squeaky, pitched high, bending toward the register of a wide-eyed cartoon character. Is this a voice meant to quickly charm me? I wonder who it’s supposed to work on.
“Rinyuu’s stew is the best in the realm!” Velnorte shouts.
The couple insists we share a meal at their table. Payment, Rinyuu calls it. She prepares the meal herself and sets the bowl down on the table. There’s no hesitation in the movement. The thought of assistance doesn’t even occur to Velnorte. Rinyuu’s blindness—I almost forget it’s part of her character.
Earlier that day, a monster came out of the snow. I killed it because I could and because the game had already taught me how to fight. Velnorte and Rinyuu would not have survived otherwise. The stew is their thanks, and it is the reason we are still here, seated together as the light fades early outside the windows.
The stew goes quickly. Velnorte chats us up while Rinyuu clears the bowls.
He tells me who he is. He belongs to the Scarlet Wings, a military order assembled from former criminals and held together by a lust for power. Velnorte is an alchemist. The Scarlet Wings force him to work on a special elixir meant to give their leader ultimate power. The promise, as it is framed to him, is simple: finish the elixir, or Rinyuu will be punished.
There is something in the way he talks about all this. An exasperation that sounds like a death wish. The sense that he has already accepted everything this will cost him. Velnorte is a dead man walking.
“She’s not from these parts,” he says, nodding toward Rinyuu. “Her family is scattered across the continent. We live together as a couple now, but sometimes I wonder if I can truly make her happy.”
When Rinyuu learns the truth, she turns herself over to the Scarlet Wings so that Velnorte can be free. Without the threat to her safety, Velnorte can continue his life’s work on his own terms.
Her plan does not work. The Scarlet Wings use her as bait to get Velnorte back. Rinyuu is left near the summit of a mountain, beaten badly enough that I cannot help but wonder if she’s dead already. But we know what kind of story this is: Velnorte finds her alive. He reaches her just in time to believe everything is going to be okay.
The Scarlet Wings surrounds us and a climactic boss fight kicks into gear. The fight is long and challenging. We win because winning is the only direction video games go in. When it ends, I get the sense that the snow is falling harder than it was before.
Velnorte helps Rinyuu to her feet. He tells her that her sacrifice would not have let him continue his scientific work. The elixir that the Scarlet Wings so desperately want is one he only started to create to give Rinyuu sight. There is no version of his life or dreams that does not include her.
“I want to be where you are,” she says.
One of the Scarlet Wings is still alive. He pulls himself up from the snow and shouts after them, demanding to know why they should be forgiven, demanding to know what happens to the people left behind. “Don’t you care about anyone other than yourselves?!”
He charges forward and shoves Velnorte.
Rinyuu is standing just behind him. She loses her footing and falls off the peak of the snowy cliff.
“Rinyuu…?” Velnorte whispers.
The villain monologues about something none of us really hear.
When Velnorte screams, and he does eventually scream, it is as if he was falling off the cliff himself.
We dip to black.
Time passes.
When we return, Velnorte welcomes us into the house. He smiles and asks us to stay for dinner. He tells us that Rinyuu has something on the stove. “Her stew is the best in the Frostlands.”
I forgot about the stew.
Our character never tasted it and it did not become an item that healed our health pool. I don’t think anyone ever even remarks on its flavor. The stew does not exist for me in any mechanical sense.
Velnorte loved that stew.
“Rinyuu!” he calls, “Look who has come to visit.”
She does not answer.
“Rinyuu!...”
Maybe if he could hear that voice one more time, then he could find forgiveness in this house. Maybe if the stew returned to the stove, heat rising, scent blooming, the assurance that the evening would end the way it always had, then the world might stop punishing him for loving something so completely—and so ignorantly of the qualities I mistook for flaws.
He calls her name like Orpheus singing into the dark, trusting sound to do what the living body no longer can. He calls her name like Lear bending over Cordelia, begging breath to answer back, measuring the world by whether it will return her voice to him. He calls her name like Hamlet declaring love only once there is no one left to hear it, like Macbeth speaking into the space where meaning has already fled. He calls her name, he calls her name, he calls her name, and it pours into the air, into the spaces where he once imagined the outline of a life he was so desperate to share with her.
“Rinyuu!”
I wish I didn’t say that thing about her voice.
—
I am not saying Octopath Traveler 0 has a good story.
When people talk about story in this series, they are usually talking about the structure. Do the characters meet. Do their arcs cross. Do the separate paths eventually lock into something communal and legible for The Gamer. Octopath Traveler II is widely regarded as a dramatic improvement over the first game in the series largely because it answers that demand more directly: there are paired chapters and shared confrontations, alongside a clearer sense that these people exist in the same narrative space rather than just the same world map.
That framing has become the primary lens through which the series is evaluated. I believe this to be as close to a fact as a claim like this can be.
Like Octopath Traveler, Winesburg, Ohio is built out of discrete lives. Each chapter centers on a different character, briefly entering their interior world before moving on to the next. There is no single arc that gathers these people together, only the accumulating sense of a town composed of adjacent stories.
Sherwood Anderson gives us Winesburg as a place defined by what its people have managed to love without being undone. Over time, those attachments become fixed, and each life narrows around a single feeling or memory that can no longer be relinquished. Anderson offers an explicit theory for this early on. In the beginning, he writes, there were many truths, all of them beautiful. Trouble begins when a person takes one truth as their own and attempts to live entirely by it. That truth becomes distorted, and the person who carries it becomes what Anderson calls “grotesque.” This is not a judgment so much as a description of pressure. Love, faith, and desire are survivable until they become singular—until they crowd out everything else and demand to be protected at all costs, like a limb held too tightly until circulation is cut off.
What’s striking is how gentle Anderson remains toward these people. He does not mock them for their narrowness or punish them for their fixation. Instead, he insists on the intimacy of it. Again and again, he asks the reader to look closely enough to see what has been preserved inside these distortions, what sweetness has gathered in places others have learned to avoid. “Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples,” he writes. The apples are misshapen, but their sweetness concentrates in odd places, available only to those willing to taste what does not announce itself as good.
The book ends with George Willard leaving town. He boards a train and goes elsewhere, carrying Winesburg with him as a sequence of encounters rather than a problem he has resolved. The people he leaves behind continue on as they were. Their lives do not open into clarity, and they do not suddenly recognize one another differently because George has known them. The town remains intact, and incomplete, as he departs.
That is the pleasure Winesburg, Ohio offers: the recognition that what appears from a distance as failure or limitation may, up close, be the only way a person has managed to love at all. Seeing this clearly does not require fixing it.
—
Thanks for reading all that.