One Piece Pirate Warriors
It has been tough trying to write this review for One Piece Pirate Warriors because I’ve actually wanted to play the game more than I wanted to write about it. I genuinely didn’t expect to like this game and came to play it by random chance. I did have some knowledge of One Piece having watched the anime on Sunday afternoons about 5 years ago but little did I realise that One Piece is in fact the best selling manga series of all time with over 260 million volumes sold, the anime TV series runs to over 570 episodes + movies…
So, yeah. Not just a weird cartoon I watched years ago whilst drinking…
The general premise for One Piece is that a young pirate (Monkey D. Luffy) has eaten a GumGum fruit and now his body is hugely elastic allowing him to stretch/expand at will. Luffy collects a motley crew of pirates and sails to the Grand Line to recover the mythical treasure of Gol D. Roger. The game is fairly well crafted as flash backs which relive the anime episodes and so if you don’t know the story you will be up to speed fairly quickly.
First up let’s face some facts. This is a Japanese game and enjoys many of the stylistic qualities of manga/anime. To some this will be great and others will simply hate it. Unless you can embrace the style (particularly the shading and the way the characters leap off the screen) this game will just be a garish nightmare of brightly coloured characters screaming at you in Japanese… and oh yes, they will be speaking Japanese. The NZ version of the game is sub-titled only. To be honest it’s not a huge problem during the cut scenes however it does detract from the ability to watch and enjoy them. The biggest problem is that during the fights the NPCs will give advice and it is nearly impossible to read and fight at the same time.
The majority of the game play is a fairly standard fighting game (it immediately reminded me of Dynasty Warriors) with combination kick/punch with a boost gauge that unleashes powerful attacks. There are extras which build on this (e.g. linking with one of your pirate comrades and dash button that links attacks) but it is pretty routine. However being routine doesn’t stop it from being fun. There is no particular need for clever button combinations (randomly mashing seems to work just fine) but it does give some reward to those with a more measured fighting style. They haven’t revolutionised the genre with this game but they have avoided any serious mistakes.
Apart from fighting thousands of enemies (literally! one of the trophies requires defeating 100,000 enemies) there are also boss fights with cinematic event attacks and some basic puzzle sections where you use Luffy’s various abilities to navigate the stages. This is a distraction at best as it is ridiculously easy (approach the right place and it tells you what to do) but does provide some variety from the continuous hack and slash.
Along with the main storyline (Main Log) you can play as other characters (Another Log) however this is limited to the standard stage clearing style of mission. The different characters fighting style provides some variation and amusement although it does get tiresome it would provide some replay value if you are looking to spend a couple of hours button mashing. Along with this there is an online section and multiplayer (both again stage clearing missions) and a challenges section. So again, nothing revolutionary but all the bases are covered…
Overall I was pleasantly surprised by One Piece Pirate Warriors and although I think it will struggle to find an audience in NZ I can see why it is so popular in Japan and personally (being reasonably fond of most things Japanese) I enjoyed the game.
