First proper review of a 2023 game! I actually played other stuff, namely Atelier Sophie 2 (a game from last year) and Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider (came out last week I think). I won’t review either, but this is a bit bigger and a bit more interesting to talk about in a full review.

I’m a longtime fan of One Piece. Started watching a bit before it got to Skypeia in the anime. Watching the damn thing was nearly impossible back then (ignoring the awful 4kids dub), some episodes were just not subbed at all, and the quality of the subs were frequently questionable at best for a long time when you did end up finding an episode (hoping that the video file named “One Piece Episode 202 subbed.mpg” wasn’t Bible Black again)… But that didn’t stop me from enjoying the show. I eventually transitioned to reading the manga, though I’m way behind at this point (I’m probably a bit past halfway the Wano arc)… I need to catch up. I’ve played a few One Piece games, enjoyed some of them. This one looked pretty interesting, it seemed to have a pretty unique battle system. So I picked it up, kind of on a whim.

Let’s see if it’s good!

Developer: ILCA
Publisher: Bandai Namco
Release date: January 10th 2023
Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox X/S (PC version reviewed)
Genre: Console-style RPG

Review

This is a One Piece game where One Piece things happen. It takes place at least after the Whole Cake arc, apparently before the Wano arc, though it doesn’t really matter since it’s filler. It’s an original story, with a lot of reliance on old stories. Luffy and crew find an island, go to it, end up wrecking the ship, and have an adventure there. They meet Adio, a guy with the face of a One Piece villain, and a young girl holding a big bottle named Lim. Lim uses her powers by touching most of the crew (other than Brook who lost his body anyways, and Franky who’s away repairing the boat), which removes all their powers (reducing everyone to level 1 and losing all their abilities in battle). They still end up working with Adio and Lim to recover their powers, which means searching the island to find cubes that contain their powers. Bigger cubes don’t just absorb into the crew though, and Lim’s powers must be used to go into Memoria, a world that creates a world based on the characters’ memories. Along the way they’re also helping Adio fight the Colossus, who do hold some of the big cubes but also seem to be wreaking havoc on the island, definitely not for some ulterior motive.

Lim is travelling with the Straw Hats through memories of previous adventures, learning about friendship and family and courage and shit. The game goes through a few specific arcs, but they’re super simplified versions of the arc. First Alabasta, which only features 2 members of Baroque Works (Bon Clay and Crocodile). Second is Water Seven/Enies Lobby, but you only see 2 CP9 members (Lucci and Kaku). Then Marineford, which literally doesn’t feature any Whitebeard pirate other than Ace. And finally you go through Dressrosa, which features Pica, Doflamingo and Burgess… and Sugar appears in one cutscene which is more than you can say about most of Baroque Works and CP9. It’s all these really simplified versions of the stories where most of the villains don’t seem to exist (with the unpardonable crime of not including Kalifa), and even really important side characters aren’t really around (Dressrosa at least being nice enough to include Rebecca, Sabo and Law). The arcs don’t happen exactly the same way since you have a large party of characters at all times (so they might be around for battles/events they weren’t originally, which makes sense anyways since they’re just going through a world made from their memories).

So the story, it’s just kinda there overall. Not bad, but not something you haven’t seen from One Piece before… especially since it’s so reliant on old stories. I liked Lim as a character, but kinda wish Adio didn’t have “obvious villain” face so the twist wasn’t so obvious. And at least it’s something original. I just wish the past stories we do go through had a lot more of the detail… Like, Marineford with no Whitebeard is just… oof (in fact Marineford is just, like, 4 battles in a row with nothing else).

PC performance is very good. I was running this at 1440p, and in most areas of the game it would run at a minimum of 210fps. A couple areas dropped to ~180, but that was fairly rare. And a few areas went wild and ran over 300fps. Legitimately this was fantastic on PC. They could have gone a bit further, like including DLSS for even more performance, and having an FOV option (a bit weird to say about an RPG, but it would’ve been appreciated… or instead of FOV, just place the camera a bit further back). The one thing I wasn’t a big fan of was cutscenes running at 30fps, it’s REALLY noticeable when you’re going from 200+ fps and going down to 30, and since it uses the same models for the characters, it is a bit weird. The one real issue I had is that the game crashed if I overclocked my GPU, but a smaller overclock was fine. Oh and yeah, the game looks great, though I will say a lot of the textures are pretty dang low-res in the environment.

This game is a JRPG. I’ll talk about the battle system last, so let’s first get into the overall game flow and what you do outside of battles.

Most of the game has the camera set directly behind whatever character you’re controlling. Each character has different skills in the overworld, though generally you’ll want to keep Luffy up front since he’s faster as far as grabbing items and breaking objects. Everyone can break things but Luffy breaks them faster. Luffy can very quickly grab things from a distance. Zoro can slash open a few doors. Usopp can hit targets from far away (so can Luffy, but there’s a few things Luffy can’t). Robin, Sanji and Nami do nothing. Chopper is short so he can pass through places. I don’t think you can control Franky and Brook. Some of these actions you don’t need to manually switch between characters, the game will just ask you if you want to switch, but sometimes you do. There’s items all over the place to grab, so do that. It might be important.

In the overworld there’s NPCs to talk to (there’s not much reason to do that unless they’re part of a side-quest, or a shop). There’s gonna be symbols over them if you can talk to them, with the symbols being blue if they’re part of a sidequest, and red if they have something to say about the main quest. Other than that, certain areas will have enemies. Touching them from behind gives you an advantage in battle, and vice versa.

I do have an issue with many of the main and side quests, namely that a lot of them are really boring. But there’s some elements that make them really tedious. A lot of it is “walk back to somewhere you already went to talk to someone”, which is just not interesting quest design. There’s a few okay quests, some that require to fight minibosses and such, but they’re not the most interesting part. In main stories, some of these “go to this spot and talk to someone” objectives actually lock out the fast travel system, so you just end up walking for several minutes, avoiding battles along the way because there’s not really any reason to constantly be fighting. It’s just wasting time and it’s not fun. Exploring the areas the first time and stuff, that’s fine, but the constant walking from point A to point B and backtracking with the fast travel being disabled… it ain’t fun.

There’s a big focus on the camping system, where you can change your outfits, party (gives you bonus EXP for the next 10 battles), and making stuff. Namely Usopp can make trick balls (just usable items that do a variety of things in battle), Sanji can cook (he makes massively useful healing items for battles that both heal HP or TP and give stat boosts) and Robin can use a machine that is used to fuse accessories together (which is a must to get overpowered). One thing that kinda fucked me up as far as the camping system is that one of the arcs literally did not have any spots to do camping in the area with enemies (so you’d have to go back to Water Seven from Enies Lobby to “camp” at a tavern… which you might not even be able to do when the fast travel system keeps getting disabled). In the last world there’s a tavern as well, but at least it’s easily accessible.

Powering up your characters is fairly straightforward. Kill stuff, get EXP, level up. In the environments and as a reward for some battles, that being cube fragments. These can be placed in the characters’ skills. 3 of them brings the skill up one level, making it substantially stronger. Each skill can level up twice, though not all skills get to level up. As you progress through the story, you get new skills, but also open up slots in older skills. This is helpful because the earlier skills take less TP to use, and TP is a bit of a thing. Finally, each character has a really stupid grid that you can place accessories into. The accessories take a number of square from 2 to 5 (your first few accessories are big squares that take 9 spaces but that’s not the norm), most of them are either squares of 4 or lines of 4. You do unlock more spaces in the grid as you progress (one row and one column are added), though the accessories can’t be rotated (unless I’m dumb and just didn’t notice) so the column is largely useless beyond placing lines of 5 (which are rarely all that good).

Robin’s ability to use the machine that powers up accessories is extremely useful. Basically, it allows you to take common accessories and place their stat boosts into other accessories. At first accessories only have one or two slots, but as you power up Robin’s ability, you can place more shit into each accessory. The strategy? Buy the generic Attack+ accessories in bulk, and just stack those on everyone’s accessories. This will make you WAY overpowered. By the end of the game I had Luffy dealing more than half damage on enemies that were strong against him.

The battle system is a bit unique. Some things are fairly straightforward, but some aren’t. Turn order is not really determined by anything. You generally start, and when it’s your turn, you can actually select any of your characters to act. They can attack, use skills, switch characters (this is a free action, you can switch around anyone for anyone in any position when you want which is probably a bit ridiculous), or use items. I don’t think there’s a way to run. Once you’ve selected your action, each enemy has a meter that shows if they’ll act next. If not, you get another turn with one of your unused characters (so you can’t reuse a character that already acted that round). Characters have a “type”. Either Speed, Power or Technique. Enemies have the same thing. Power is strong against Speed, Speed is strong against Technique, and Technique is strong against Power. There’s some sub-typing going on as well, so some attacks are only good against certain sub-types of enemies (such as one of Robin’s attacks only being usable against male humans).

What’s pretty interesting about how this game functions is the targeting. Instead of just facing a bunch of enemies and choosing who to attack, the battlefield is split in I think up to 4 areas. Your party will be set (based on a thing in a menu I never changed) in some of those areas. Attacks can target in 4 main ways: Unit close-range (one enemy in your current area), Unit long-range (one enemy in any area), Area close-range (everything in your own area) and Area long-range (everything in a single area). There’s also a few attacks that hit everything in all areas. If you want to use a close-range attack, you must hit enemies in your current area. If there’s no enemies in your area, you can use the close-range attack to go to a different area. Meanwhile, long-range can hit in other areas regardless of if you have anything in your area. Enemies do have a tendency to have close-range attacks, so you’re likely to be fairly safe if you stay in an empty area, but if someone has a gun there’s a good chance you can get hit anyways.

There’s also an extra type of attack called Bond Attacks. There’s a team-wide meter, and there’s some side-quests you can do that make you learn Bond Attacks. They have the same kind of targeting as regular attacks, they’re just a little bit stronger and use a bunch of the big team meter thingy. There’s also one Bond Attack that all characters can use and it’s not actually a bond attack, but it does use that team meter, it enables you to attack another area while also moving to that area, regardless of if you’re in an area that has enemies.

I don’t think there’s a way to run from battles in this game. Maybe there’s an item that I didn’t realize actually did that… But I don’t think so. I checked all the trick balls and meals, thinking it would be one of those, but nope. Not that you’ll ever really need to run because most of the game is really really easy. Especially considering how easy this game is, and how much easier it gets as you progress and really start pumping attack boosts into your accessories. Eventually defense and HP stops mattering because you kill everything so fast.

There is a post-game. I haven’t played it. So I don’t know if it’s good. After the main game being 27 hours long, I was kinda done with it, since it seemed to have much revisiting old areas for no reason.

Overall

I had fun with the game. It has an interesting combat system with a few things that could be ironed out, the story is fine even though I kinda wish there was a bit more to the memory worlds, and it looks very good. There’s a lot of small things it could’ve done better, but overall what we have is still pretty decent. There’s some cool ideas here.

Overall I give this a minor recommendation. I feel a game like this is bound to get discounted pretty majorly, pretty quickly.