So I’ve been a One Piece fan for the better part of 20 years. I started watching it in late high school/early college, as the anime was going through the Skypeia arc. I kept following the anime since, though at some point (maybe Impel Down? I don’t exactly remember) I switched from anime to manga. So yeah, I’ve been in this shit for a while.

When this was announced, I figured it was probably one of the worst candidates for a live action reimagining. And, having seen previous Netflix attempts (namely Death Note and Cowboy Bebop), it was clear they were very competent at completely fucking up anime adaptations. But I love One Piece, and figured I’d go against my better judgement and give it a chance anyways, even as trailers came out and it didn’t look good (legitimately the trailers were not solid).

So let’s go and see if I was right, or if, for once, an american live action adaptation that’s actually good actually happened.

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!