About the 78th time that Portgaz D. Trace ran me over with his irritating little land-speed-boat-thing, a super-move that he can repeat an infinite number of times in this match, I found that not only had my lifebar been crushed, but also my will to play. I let the Playstation controller drop to the carpet, analog light staring futilely skyward, while I weighed my options. I found myself frustrated, and not the pleasant sort of frustration you undergo when you're tugging at a complicated problem to solve or a tricky situation.

No, this was more of a Monday morning frustration, the knowing that in order to advance, you're going to have to do the same thing over and over again for a while, so you can get better at... well, doing the same thing over and over. You're either going to resign yourself to it, because it matters to you or you have no options – or you're going to walk away.

Now, if One Piece is a subject that matters to you, you may find enough motivation to keep coming back to One Piece: Grand Adventure, by Namco-Bandai for the PS2. And there's a lot of material in it to come back to. One Piece is a manga series that has been running for close to ten years in Japan, and has spawned an anime series as well as a massive fan following. You don't really need an understanding of the source material to play the game, though I did occasionally find myself asking questions like, “How is it that every single place I go to is an island? The entire planet is islands – can that really work? Isn't shipbuilding the sort of thing that would require a continental nation's resources to do? Have they been through some sort of massive global warming that raised ocean levels everywhere? Has no one warned them about the dangers of aerosol cans?” But I digress.

One Piece: Grand Adventure is the story of Monkey D. Luffy, at the very beginning of his quest to find the mythical One Piece and become the King of Pirates. It's a fighting/party game, and will remind gamers with a few consoles under their belt very strongly of Power Stone for the Dreamcast. Luffy isn't really very great with words, so most of the time when he is faced with a challenge in his quest, his basic solution is to punch this problem in the face. “Hey, you're a good navigator! Come work for me, or I'll beat you up some more!” “Hey, you're a pretty good swordsman! If I beat you up, can we be friends?” Et cetera. Grand Adventure, then, offers you a world full of face-punching action in the form of 3-D environments where Luffy and his press-ganged clan of pirate friends can run, jump, dash, punch, kick, and throw the opposition, as well as picking up clubs, burning lamps, crates, wands, and numerous other implements with which to throw, swing, or otherwise forcefully explain your point of view.

The game doesn't give you very much in the way of tutorial or explanation to get your feet wet. You can look in the instruction book, and often between scenes or at the end of fights, a description of a new type of move will appear. But if you're a total stranger to this type of game, you may find yourself a bit at sea when it comes time to start playing. Never fear. If you can move an analog stick and hit a button at the same time, you'll find your way soon enough. Fans of fighting games often refer to titles disparagingly as button-mashers, meaning that rather than memorize complicated combination sequences or learning to time a counter-attack to one exact frame of animation, that all you need to do is hit buttons faster to win. That is not an entirely accurate description of One Piece, but it's got some truth to it. And you know what, it's not a bad thing. Anyone can walk up to this game and play it from the get-go, and there is such a wide variety of characters available that you will certainly find one of them that fits your play style.

Most moves are a simple combination of either the X or Circle button in various orders; Super moves are activated by holding down the L1 button in addition. The trick in learning to play the game effectively isn't in learning the characters' moves – it's not a fighting game like Soul Calibur or Tekken, where the mechanics of play are intricate strategies that you apply against your opponent. Rather, to get good at Grand Adventure, you've got to learn to keep your wits in a free-for-all. If you can keep an eye on the three swordsman charging in at you from the corner, the honeycomb of angry bees that just got overturned in the middle of the ring, the platform that's collapsing under you, the giant chef shooting flames at everyone standing, and your opponent charging at you all at the same time, and manage to keep your cool, then you'll be doing okay. If you can pay attention to all that and also hit your super-move at exactly the right moment, you'll be sitting pretty. And for the technicians, the Accel-Heat technique will add a significant amount of depth to the system by enabling you to break a combo in the middle, and immediately launch another attack or super-move. The truly dedicated can use Accel-Heat to construct some extremely deadly combinations, but you'll find the need for such techniques will mostly arise when you're fighting with friends. More on that in a bit.

Arena and Tournament modes enable you to select from various options of simple, direct combat against friends or the computer. However, moves, costumes, new mini-games, and other features are unlocked primarily through the story, or Grand Adventure mode. This is the meat of the game, and also the area that will determine whether or not this game is a renter or a keeper for you.

You're initially presented with just Luffy's quest, which is simple, straightforward, and can be completed easily in under three hours. As you travel from island to island, you'll continue to unlock more playable characters, more battlefields, and more “Support” characters that can be summoned in mid-battle to add to the general chaos. With every victory, the character you're using gains experience, and when he or she achieves a new level, you will receive a point to add to their attack, defense, special attack, support creature, or item-handling skills. Once you've completed his quest, a number of new and more difficult full adventures starring other characters will begin to appear, giving you even further opportunities to unlock and power up more characters. Your powered-up characters can be used in the versus modes in your own game, or imported to your friends' memory cards by way of using a password system that will recreate your powered-up character elsewhere.

Now, considering you've got some twenty-four characters to potentially be powered-up, at least five full story-mode adventures to be played through, plus a wide array of unlockables like costumes, power-ups, and cards from the One Piece trading card game (you can't actually play the game, but you can check out the art), there's a certain amount of replayability. But to me personally, adding hours of repetition to the potential gameplay doesn't necessarily mean you're making the game more playable. With good fighting games, you can hone your technique; with puzzle and rhythm games, you can improve your reaction time. Even with standard RPG titles, even though you're mainly raising the value of your stats and gear, these things also change the way you play and the strategies you use. But with One Piece, when you're getting run-down by a successively repeated super attack time after time, and you know that pretty much all you can do to raise your performance level is just fight countless weaker enemies on exactly the same 10 battlefields (20, if you count the 'day' and 'night' views for each one), building up your attack and defense values one point at a time until you can win that bigger fight, just to repeat the process for the next boss who's five levels ahead of you – suddenly, it doesn't feel so replayable.

It has its' merits, though. If you find that you really don't get tired of the battles, if you're a big fan of the One Piece world, if you're young or your budget is low for other reasons, you might enjoy the game for some time to come. The vs. modes make this a really good game for parties, and if you get a lot of mileage out of playing the game with your friends, then the gradual progression of each character through experience adds a dimension to the play. You'll want to take as many characters through the single-player adventure as you can, to gain access to their better super-moves and stay competitive with the other players. The story-telling mechanisms are extremely simple – character portraits exchanging dialogue in text, with the occasional VO line accompanying them (that may or may not actually match the words in text) – but if you're okay with that, then you'll be happy that they pack a lot of little details in along the way to flesh out the One Piece story. I find the voice acting to be average, but at times extremely irritating, not unlike the music.

Graphically, the quality of the 3D cel-shaded world Ganbarion has created for you is consistent and cute, but there are so many games out there, now near the end of the PS2's life cycle, that are scraping the very limits of what the hardware can do, both graphically and in terms of unique, inventive gameplay. Among them, One Piece: Grand Adventure simply gets lost in the shuffle. The controls are responsive and the action is engaging for a short session of play, but when you get comfortable with them, you start to find that there are camera issues that are inexcusably frustrating in a game that relies so heavily on rapid action. It's a competent brawler that has a little appeal, but fails to excel at any particular thing. Nevertheless there is something eternally entertaining in its' brightly exploding cartoon violence, and the opportunity to light your friends on fire or smack them over the side of a giant ship is something that never gets old. I'd recommend giving it a rental if you must, and if you find it hooks you, then pick up a copy and you won't count the money wasted. For me, though, the Grand Adventure turned out to be a bit short-lived.

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