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On December 4, 2025, Square Enix will be releasing Octopath Traveler 0, a brand new title in their popular Octopath Traveler franchise! Except no, it isn’t an entirely new game. This title is a reworking of the mobile game Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent. Adapting the story of that game as well as reworking the gameplay to no longer be a gacha-based title.
This conversion of a gacha game into a normal full-length RPG is unheard of. While there are a few video games based on gachas, such as Granblue Fantasy: Relink and Atelier Reselrina: The Red Alchemist and the White Guardian, these are spinoffs of their respective gachas intended for people who are already fans and not actual offline versions or adaptations of the source material.
With Octopath Traveler 0’s release getting closer by the day, I find myself thinking about prior attempts companies have made to have official offline versions of their gacha games, and how almost all of these efforts have been inadequate at best.
Now, before we get into talking about those other offline gachas, we should go over how rare they are. The idea of a gacha game getting an offline version after it shuts down is very recent and very rare, with a majority of games simply vanishing forever once their servers go down. Every year, dozens of new gacha games are released and just as many close their doors forever.
So, how many offline versions of gacha games exist? Finding this out can be quite difficult due to two factors: A majority of gacha games being Japanese-exclusive and the vague terminology used when describing these games. Doing this research can become quite difficult when spinoff titles like Azur Lane Crosswave are referred to as an offline version of their respective gacha, despite that not being the case.
Regardless of these difficulties, I have come to a rough estimate of about 30 different gacha games receiving updates at the same time as their end of service, which makes them theoretically playable offline. This is an incredibly small number compared to the number of gacha games that have shut down in the past decade. However, even describing them as playable is stretching the definition of that word to an outrageous degree.
Instead, a vast majority of these offline versions (about 2/3rds of the ones I found) are what is referred to in gaming circles as Gallery Browsers, where players who had already downloaded and played through these gachas could view the characters they acquired and rewatch story cutscenes they have already experienced. The act of actually playing the game, getting new characters, or progressing the story is never possible in these offline gallery browsers.
Because of how they’re designed, these gallery browsers cannot be downloaded by anyone after the day their patch releases, and those who delete their apps are permanently locked out of seeing their gallery ever again.
One gacha game that I followed very closely during its lifespan was Sakura Kakumei, a spinoff of the Sakura Wars franchise, which shut down within a single year. During its final weeks, I worked with a group of Sakura Wars fans to preserve as much of the game as possible.
If you were someone who only casually played Sakura Kakumei like I was, it was unlikely that you would even be able to see the ending of the story once the end-of-service announcement occurred, as the offline version of the game would only allow you to see cutscenes that you had already played through.
Those who hadn’t played the game, meanwhile, have no official way of accessing these galleries at all. They are exclusively for showing players what they personally pulled for when the game was alive, a museum built only for one. If you are someone getting into Sakura Wars beyond the year 2020, the only way you can experience Sakura Kakumei is through fan archival.
It speaks volumes to the quality of these gallery browsers that a small group of fans have made more of the game’s characters and its story viewable to players than the official offline version did.
But why does any of this matter? Every gacha game will end. This is an undeniable fact about the medium and one that every gamer has come to accept as just a fact about the industry. Whether it be from poor sales, a publisher being bought out, or the game simply meeting a natural end after years of updates. These are games built with an end of service in mind, and when that inevitably happens, an almost unquantifiable amount of human-made art is lost.
Have you ever thought about just how much work is put into these? While gachas are often rightfully referred to as PNG slot machines, we tend to overlook the sheer amount of art that goes into creating them, and I mean that in multiple ways. Not only do every gacha game contain a large amount of art, but they all contain a story written by human hands. Art that is tossed aside once the game is shut down.
To use a currently running gacha game as an example, what will happen to Fate/Grand Order after its climax and Valentine’s goodbye in 2026? Will the game continue into a new story arc, or will it simply shut down like many less successful gachas? If it is the latter, try to imagine how much writing by Fate/Stay Night author Kinoko Nasu and many, many guest writers will be lost.
Fate/Grand Order’s sixth Lostbelt chapter alone is over 300,000 words long. An entire novel’s worth of story that may only be experienced via YouTube uploads if the game were to shut down. To put that into context, that word count is greater than the Heaven’s Feel route of Fate/Stay Night.
Not that it would be out of the ordinary for material from this game to become lost aside from said uploads. For years, the game has had temporary events that last for two weeks and then vanish forever, with all that writing, music, and occasionally art being lost to the void outside of what fans preserve themselves.
Millions of words from Fate/Grand Order’s story are already gone and can no longer be played. The ways this affects the gameplay experience have already been showing their cracks as new players are expected to care about the tenth Shinsengumi event without any of the context from the first nine, as those now only exist via YouTube fan uploads.
One could argue that Fate/Grand Order receiving an offline gallery viewer like the ones Sakura Kakumei and many others received could exist as a means of preserving its story and the experience players had with the game over the past decade, but even then, it likely wouldn’t be enough when so much of the game is already gone.
In addition to this, the argument that these offline ports of the games are a passable means of preservation also falls apart when they just stop working altogether. Another Sega title, 404 Game Re:Set, which had its content converted to an offline gallery viewer in January of 2024, suddenly became nonfunctional for a large number of players in October of that year.
This mysterious shutdown resulted in enough confusion that Sega actually issued the following statement about this error.
“This is the “404 GAME RE:SET” management team.
We have confirmed an issue with offline mode, which was released after service ended on Friday, January 5, 2024, where some customers are unable to use the mode properly despite having saved memories.
We have identified the cause of this issue as data required to use offline mode is being stored in an area that is subject to deletion due to factors such as device capacity, and which may be automatically deleted depending on the device’s settings.
We have been in constant discussions to resolve the issue, but have come to the conclusion that, due to the fact that service has already been terminated, it is impossible to resolve this technical issue.
We sincerely apologize to all our loyal customers of Error Game Reset for making this announcement.
We would also like to apologize to all customers and those who have contacted us for the time it took to reach a conclusion, which is why we are only announcing this now.”
Putting aside how rare it is for a publisher to comment on a gacha they shut down more than half a year before the statement, how can one expect to be satisfied with the poor offline modes publishers offer us if we still have to live in fear of them vanishing like this?
I was personally part of the 404 Game Re:Set Community and was an admin of the largest fan Discord for the game. Witnessing the game die a second death and having to go through that a second time, with players being confused as to why it even happened, was heartbreaking and molded the way I see online games forever.
The answer to why we don’t get offline versions of gachas that preserve the entirety of their gameplay and are playable by all isn’t much of a mystery, though. For a majority of gacha publishers, it wouldn’t be in their best interest for gamers to expect the games to have offline versions later.
Gacha games, all of them, make their money off of the anxiety of not knowing if you’ll have a chance to pull for the character you want again. That feeling of needing to play and maybe spend money this very instant is what drives sales.
If it became common for gachas to have fully playable versions with all those characters after they shut down, would this feeling remain, and the cash keep flowing? Or would the audience simply sit back and wait for the less-exploitative version of the game?
The actual answer to that likely doesn’t matter, as even the possibility of losing some money is likely terrifying to most gacha publishers. It is common knowledge that many gacha games are supported by a small number of players who are willing to spend an incredibly large amount of money on them, also known as whales.
Imagine a scenario where even just a handful of whales got disillusioned by the formulas gacha games use to bait players, because it became common for these games to have actual offline versions. I doubt companies like Mihoyo and Cygames could stomach the possibility.
As grim as this all is, though, it’s exactly why a title like Octopath Traveler 0 is so exciting. Seeing a publisher as large as Square Enix take the initiative and provide what looks to be a complete version of the Octopath gacha with all of its characters, story, and even locations intact is almost unprecedented and has the potential to change the industry entirely if it is successful.
To my knowledge, there are very, very few gachas to even attempt what Octopath Traveler 0 is doing, and almost none of them have had the amount of focus and press it has had. The closest example I know of is Rockman X:Dive, an offline conversion of Capcom’s Megaman gacha game, which received a Steam release in 2024. Like Octopath Traveler 0, this is an almost perfect conversion of the game into a format that fits an offline experience.
At the end of the day, gamers and artists both deserve better. There is no reason for these games and all the work that has been put into them. The gacha game medium either needs to transition into having better offline versions that actually provide a method to experience their content or fully adopt the approach we are seeing with titles like Octopath Traveler 0 and Rockman X:Dive.
