When it comes to videogames there are always two instances where you should always be initially worried: 1) movie licensed games and 2) anime licensed games. When it comes to anime, especially, it seems a lot of companies want to deliver the same old game time after time, perhaps tweaking a little in the process, but ultimately it’s the same story anime fans are quite familiar with. Imagine our surprise then when along comes an anime property game that not only delivers a new story and experience for fans of the series, but a game that is quite enjoyable for non-fans as well.

THE STORY SO FAR
One Piece: Unlimited Adventure (One Piece from now on) follows the story of Luffy and his ragtag team of pirates, consisting of what seems like love struck chefs, shape changing reindeer kids, long nosed trouble sniffers, and expert swordsmen it seems. I’ve seen an episode of the series once or twice, but never enough to fully know what is going on and have a background story, though I know Luffy ate a piece of fruit and is ultra stretchy now. The point of all this is that though I know hardly anything about the series, the game still managed to be fun.

The story of the game sees Luffy and friends finding a glowing orb that called forth an island from underneath the water. The pirate gang is broken up to begin with and it’s up to Luffy to gather the crew back together. As the team explores the island, hoping to eventually come across some amazing treasure, they are constantly hounded by a rabbit looking creature who seems to make the Luffy gang remember stories from their past. What is going on?

Based on what I’ve read and heard, the game – though new – takes place somewhere further along than the anime English dub is currently airing, meaning there might be characters here you’ll be seeing that could technically be spoilers, so if you’re one of those who hate that sort of thing just remember that there’s a chance some minor story or character element could be spoiled by playing the game. Personally, though, it didn’t seem like much of anything would be ruined for you.

SINGLE-PLAYER: GAMEPLAY
The game plays like a mixture of a platformer, beat em’ up, and Zelda like adventure RPG all rolled into one. Once the game starts officially, you’ll find yourself in a HUB sort of land you can explore, and where you’ll setup camp to save and heal yourself up among other things. As you explore you’ll find your other party members – pretty quickly too – and then once they are at camp you’ll be able to do even more things at camp. As you advance through the story you’ll run across orb monuments, which transfer enemies from the past into the future and makes you fight them as bosses, and you’ll find orb access points where you’ll need to feed your orb enough power to activate it and even have some specific items sometimes to open the area, which will allow you to move further into the island and ultimately the end of the game.

You start with only Luffy to control, but eventually you’ll be able to have a team of eight players to control, each having different moves at their disposal, and you can switch out to any of them whenever you want. Most of the attacks are combos of constant A-button presses, though you will be using remote movement as well, and over time you’ll get even more moves to go with you. You’ll be able to upgrade moves by constant use and by going through the move list the game provides you, which allow you an ultra powerful breaker if you do everything the game asks of you. You’ll usually find a favorite character to use and then use them till they die and you need to switch out, but you’d be smart to upgrade and focus on every character a little.

You wouldn’t expect it, but resource gathering is a huge part of this game, as you’ll not only need to grab items to power your orb, but your advancement through the game and completing it 100% means you’ll need to gather things like tree branches, flowers, and honey, which you’ll be able to get by attacking said objects or knocking things down from trees like coconuts. Besides powering your orb you’ll use resources to build things like bug collecting nets and fishing poles, extra weapons like bombs, bridges to help you get to new areas, ingredients for medicine to heal you, and even meals that when eaten will increase your attributes like health. The resource gathering system isn’t terrible, but it can become annoying when you need some specific items, and so you go into an area, farm the area where the item is, get what you can, leave, come back, and do it all again until you have enough.

Another problem with the game is that it’s not uncommon to get lost and have no idea where to go, heading back and forth across the same areas numerous times until you just happen to figure out that jumping over a poison plant is where you needed to go. The game is definitely linear in that you can only go from point A to B to advance and beat the game, but the game is very non-linear in the fact that the path to get there is so wide and far that often it takes a while before you find the end in sight.

Enemies aren’t too advanced in terms of fighting efficiency, though they like to try and beat you by overpowering you with their numbers; most enemies attack hand-to-hand with swords, but there are some gun brandishing enemies as well that seem to be the most annoying since they can hit you from far away. The bosses, meanwhile, are quite hard in that they often have some pretty powerful moves to beat you down rather quickly; though with the number of heroes you have and the way you can upgrade them through cooking, completely losing every character – once you have them all – and getting the game over shouldn’t happen often or even ever for that matter.

Though the game has some issues with the resource gathering and exploration aspects, the single-player mode was still interesting enough to make us want to play the story through to completion and see what happened next.

MULTIPLAYER: GAMEPLAY
The One Piece games have always had a fighting game mechanic, though nothing ever as deep as a Street Fighter installment. The new One Piece game has a versus mode that either lets you go against the computer or against another player with characters you’ve unlocked (basically see them or beat them for the first time and they unlock). The characters control decently in the free-roaming environments, with characters being able to unleash the same moves they do in the game. The neatest thing about the versus mode is how you pick your teams, as you only have so many points you can spend on a team, with the more powerful characters costing you the most points, so you could either balance a strong fighter with several weaker ones or a medium or either have a team of mediums; being able to strategize your team like this is really cool, though it’s a shame the versus mode wasn’t any deeper.

GRAPHICS
The game looks sharp, featuring a great cel-shaded style that makes the characters look as if they were ripped from the anime. The characters all have a unique look and style, and the boss enemies are the best looking of the bunch. Though the characters look good, environments only fair moderately well, as they are brightly colored and look decent, but the areas are just too spacious with very little in the way of environment in terms of scenery.

AUDIO
Though some people complain about the quality of an anime dub, I still think there is a solid cast of actors working on One Piece, and they get ample opportunity to speak. The reason the actors work so well is because their voices are all so unique and really help make these characters all standout. The sound effects and music are also equally worthwhile. The only real complaint we have is that the audio files during the combat moments repeat too often with characters often shouting the same phrase over and over one attack after another.

IN CONCLUSION
Though One Piece: Unlimited Adventure isn’t a perfect game, suffering from some tiring resource gathering and having the player walk around without little information on where to go next to advance the game, it’s still a pretty fun game and one that should please non-fans as much as it will the die-hard One Piece fans.

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