One Piece Unlimited World Red - Review
One Piece tells the story of Luffy and his pirate gang as they attempt to find the treasure known as One Piece, however the story that is presented here does not touch on that fact at all.
The story begins as a man breaks out of a prison, destroying countless ships in the process. It then makes a jump to Luffy and his crew on board their ship as they help a racoon named Pato make it to an island.
Throughout the story, Luffy and crew will discover who this mysterious man is and what exactly he is after, but unless you know the characters from the show there is nothing at all to tie you to it. In fact multiple times, the game will make references to things that have happened in the show, but they don’t go into any detail. If you are like me and come into this without background knowledge of the show, a lot of the reasons the crews express for doing things won’t make any sense at all.
Overall the story tells a nice tale of friendship, loyalty and redemption but relies on its source material way too much to truly stand on its own.
The game takes place on a single island, which is experiencing many issues thanks to the arrival of the main villain, Redfield. Located on the island is the town known as Trasntown, this little village acts as the hub for your adventure and contains a lot of side quests, such as repairing the town, growing vegetables, upgrading items and more. The main quests will take you out of the town to regions that are being created by Redfield. The first area will see you fighting through a decrepit metal factory before moving onto snow, while there are a number of areas they don’t flow together at all. In fact each of the areas are drawn from the show again, but there is nothing that ties them together.
As you unlock more areas to explore, you can return to older ones in order to collect things behind locked gates, over water or underground. This gives each of the levels a nice bout of replayability but outside of the few treasures to collect there is nothing else to go back for. In fact the only reason you would go back more than once is to collect resources that you can use to upgrade your items and the town. And this is where the game struggles with itself, in repairing the town you can unlock new medicines or upgrade your fishing rod but these don’t impact the gameplay at all.
I spent a good portion of time going around and upgrading all I could, but never actually used the shops once they were done. Fixing up the second section of the town so more shops can be built did nothing for the game at all; it actually caused me to wonder why you would need to. The town is home to a variety of people that have little things to say, should you stop and listen but the only person that you need to deal with at all is the lady who runs the local inn as this is where you save your game and equip items to take with you.
Before you head out into the wilds, you can choose which members of your group you want to join you. You can only choose two others but in all the cutscenes, the rest of the crew is around anyway; which makes that choice a little pointless.
The reason that you may struggle with the choice is because you need certain characters to use abilities that only they have in order to unlock hidden areas or locate buried treasure and outside of those abilities, it really does not matter who you take into battle with you. Once you have selected your party, you can assign each member power words, which act as battlecry’s, which provide limited buffs to your party. As you progress through the game you unlock more power words, which you can swap out in town. Outside of the instruction on how to do it, I never swapped them out again and even when choosing new members to explore completed areas with, I never assigned them power words. Which begs the question, was it worth the developers time to put that into the game?
One place where the game shines in how amazing it looks, each of the characters look like their original tv and manga designs. Luffy moves with an almost bounding quality, which does suit as he a rubber man. Each of the areas that you will explore look and feel different from each other, entering the realm of Skypeia and being able to run through small tufts of cloud and make them disappear is something I never got tired of.
The cel shaded style that is used throughout the game does have a few little drawbacks, shadows behave a little strange from time to time, and clothes and such have a tendency to clip through other items, but these are minor things and don’t really detract from the overall impressive look and feel. The sound design is equally as impressive, each of the characters sounds believable, this would most likely be due to the length of time they have been playing them.
Musically this game is strange, the game has some really impressive scores that play throughout, but for the most part each of the boss fights uses the same track, over and over. Something like that can become a pain. In fact the only real pain is the limited amount of chit chat between each of the characters when they are in your group. They will say almost the same thing each time and if you use the same party, after your second wander through the wilds, you will most likely hear the same speeches and after the third time hearing someone question things and proclaim they are the best at what they do.
One Piece Unlimited World Red offers up a lot of content for the dedicated One Piece fan, however for the people looking for a way into that world, this game is not it. The length of the game will vary on how much you want to complete it.
The Score
7.0
Review code provided by Bandai Namco
The Pros
+The game faithfully replicates the animes look so well
+A new adventure for the One Piece crew
The Cons
-Some of the side missions are weird and for One Piece that is saying something
-The game does not ease newcomers in, so if you don't know who the characters are, you had best learn elsewhere
