On Saturday, Square Enix’s acclaimed Nintendo Switch-exclusive Octopath Traveler was pulled from the eShop without warning, leading many fans to fear that the game had been added to the list of titles Nintendo has made unavailable recently. Today, however, Square Enix has promised that there’s still hope for the game: in a social media post, they described Octopath Traveler as “temporarily unavailable” and assured fans that they’re working on putting the RPG back in the eShop as soon as possible. They haven’t provided any reason for the game’s absence, however, leaving a lot of fans to speculate.
Square Enix Announces Switch-Exclusive RPG Octopath Traveler Will Return
Released in 2018, Octopath Traveler was one of Square Enix‘s first Nintendo Switch-exclusive games, coming out just one year after the console itself. The “HD-2D” role-playing game allows players to choose a protagonist from one of eight adventurers, each of which starts in a different area of the game world Orsterra. Each of the adventurers has a unique class – or “job” – that the player can use in different ways as they journey to complete their hero’s story arc, which grows more and more complicated as it tangles with the other adventurers’ and various NPCs.
Octopath Traveler was ported to Xbox in 2021, but it remains a hugely popular game on the Switch, which doesn’t tend to get a lot of RPG exclusives in this style. It’s not Square Enix’s most popular franchise either, but what fanbase it does have is extremely loyal, which lead to an uproar when the game mysteriously vanished from the Nintendo eShop earlier this week. Unfortunately, Nintendo fans aren’t unused to this kind of thing, and some fans were willing to resign themselves to Octopath Traveler being gone for good – but that’s not the case.
In an announcement on X (formerly known as Twitter), the official Square Enix account has posted an announcement, saying that the eShop version of Octopath Traveler is “temporarily unavailable” but that they’re working on the issue and will update fans when it returns. When, not if. They didn’t offer any clarification as to why the game was removed in the first place, but some fans have speculated that it may have something to do with the game’s publishing license, which seemed to have recently changed hands from Nintendo to Square Enix itself.
Given that nothing has been confirmed yet, the only thing to do is wait for Octopath Traveler to return to the Nintendo Switch—and be grateful it’s not actually gone for good.
