One Piece: Pirate Warriors review

Before reading this review, you should know that this game screams FOR THE FANS ONLY, I would not even suggest you try it if you are not a One Piece fan let alone an anime fan. That being said I am a huge One Piece fan. I love it, I love every second of it and I think that everyone else should too so when I heard there was a new One Piece video game coming out and that it was actually coming over to the U.S. I had to have it, it became quite literally a necessity in my life. So now that all of that has been laid out on the table let me tell you what I think about One Piece: Pirate Warriors. While some people believe that this may be Dynasty Warriors painted over with a One Piece skin I am here to say that this is not entirely true, while it is mostly correct there are some distinct differences between Pirate Warriors and Dynasty Warriors. Both are made by the same company and both have you capturing territories and defeated large waves of enemies who are for the most part cannon fodder and significantly weaker than your character across a large battlefield.
Pirate Warriors has a fairly well made combo system. More often than not you can easily get by with just randomly mashing buttons as you can in most Dynasty Warriors games, however, there are many combos that are modeled after some of the Straw Hat's more iconic moves that cause different effects. Gum Gum Gatling, for example will cover a wide area and dish out many hits often pushing enemies back and allowing Luffy to advance but it does not do too much damage. Gum Gum Bazooka however will do a lot of damage and push a smaller number of enemies back in one hit with the added advantage of causing shields and guards to break. Most of these combos are rather large and can get difficult to remember but considering that I used to love games like that and have not seen one in a while this is a welcome addition in my opinion. Another large difference from Dynasty Warriors is that there are many platforming and puzzle sections in the game.
Keeping true to the source material you will often have to use Luffy's rubber abilities and playful mind to get across puzzles and platforming stages. You can use Gum Gum Rocket to launch yourself across a gap, use Luffy's stretchable arms to swing, and use Gum Gum Balloon to bounce off of walls and redirect cannon fire. In addition to this you can activate any crew member in the vicinity as a partner and by inputting the correct combo you can initiate a powerful crew strike where Luffy dishes out his combo and then you are given control of the partnered crew member for a short time. Speaking of crew members, all nine members of the Straw Hat crew are available to play as in this game as well as four other special characters.
You do not often take control of anyone other than Luffy throughout the story but all crew members can be used in alternate modes like online and local multiplayer and Another Log which allows you to replay story missions as other characters.
One of my biggest issues with this game would be the camera control which is rather erratic and inaccurate, when centering, it centers toward the center of the screen not towards where Luffy is facing. You can also target enemies but the camera does not center on them it just centers Luffy's movement around them. When you are facing large numbers of enemies or deadly bosses you need to clearly be able to see where your character is in relation to them so that your attacks fire off in the right direction. Remember that this game is highly based off of Dynasty Warriors so the only real feedback you have that your attack hit when fighting a boss is that their health bar is moving down with the exception that you may startle them with certain attacks every once in a while.
My other huge issue with this game is that it skips a few very important arcs in the series. Jaya, Skypiea, and Thriller Bark are completely skipped as if they never happened and as a hard core fan this does not sit well with me at all. What does cater to my fandom is the few big story moments that are fully laid out in beautiful CG, Luffy's touching moment with Jimbei at the end of the Marineford War still made me bawl as hard as it did when I saw it in the anime. Truth be told, Pirate Warriors is not really such a great game, you can do much better as far as beat em ups go however for fans like me who really have been dying to take control of the Straw Hat crew in a new video game and use their powers and combat abilities, it can be one hell of a fun time.
6.5/10