One Piece: Pirate Warriors Review

The finishing moves to each boss fight, or more specifically the cutscenes with the odd QTE, are fantastic to look at though thanks to their inventive nature and our hero being able to stretch, expand and blow himself up like a violently possessed animal balloon.

Levelling up is an automatic affair, but you are awarded equippable coins during the game that can provide stat boosts for defense, stamina and attack. The difference is minimal for most of the game though. Some skill boosts are available if you link up the right combination of coins, but they usually have a downside and I found I preferred to have stronger coins without the extra skill.

The story linking the levels together is nothing short of a shambles. Huge chunks of it are merely relegated to narrated voice-overs during a loading screen and for the most part it feels like you’re simply playing random sections from the TV show that are nothing short of bewildering if you’ve never watched it.

It just doesn’t make any sense. For f**k’s sake, everyone dies at one point, and then we just have another level like nothing happened and everybody’s back. From what I could make out, you play as the leader of a group of pirates and the early levels seem to reminisce over how each crew member joined up. At some point we stumble into a new story involving the hero’s brother and their multiple dads and well, who knows.

The characters are all straight out of an anime cliché book. Every emotion is cranked up to 11 and every time there are tears, there’s so much snot and tears coming out you think they’re going to burst. The dialogue hops between cutscenes, talking heads and still comic cells so nothing ever really gels together.

The game maintains a Japanese identity with Japanese dialogue throughout, which I’d usually applaud, but an English option may have been handy too as characters prattle on mid-battle and you don’t really have time to look at the subtitle translation in the bottom left of the screen while you’re fighting dozens of enemies at once.

Multiplayer options come in co-op form as you team up to take on one of the levels from the main game with one of the many unlockable characters. Lobbies are simple enough, listing games with the stage and difficulty level. Hopping into games was a smooth affair as was the actual combat. I was free to fight alongside my online partner, or just attack the stage at will.

Post-game you’re chucked back to the menu after getting your XP and a few coins. I was disappointed to see that during and after the stage there was no mention of scores for each player, like how many kills each of us got, robbing the game of any competitive element at all.