Welcome to our review of the latest game in my favorite manga franchise, One Piece World Seeker!
Come Aboard and Leave Your Compass Behind!
Set sail on an all-new ONE PIECE adventure in ONE PIECE World Seeker! Luffy and the Straw Hat Pirates are back in a new story that puts players’ into Luffy’s point of view, as he battles and explores an expansive and seamless world. Open landscapes provide many paths for players to experience Luffy’s gum-gum abilities and swing into action.
Based upon the most successful manga series of all time in terms of sales figures and popularity, beating out classics like the dragon ball franchise and other greats, World Seeker is the most typical of One Piece storylines, created by the author Eiichiro Oda himself. It takes place on the island called Jail Island which is located in the New World.
If you do not follow the manga or the anime, you will not have any issues following this story as it is a side story from the main storyline following Luffy and his kaizoku on their quest to find the One Piece. It might feel odd seeing so many characters you are unfamiliar with, One piece is a massive project in itself to start reading/watching and if you have not read it, I can only recommend it.
Side characters like Smoker are properly introduced without boring the player, which is quite the achievement considering the amount of reading you will have to suffer in this show. World Seeker does provide us with the occasional voice acting from the actual voice actors that do the anime voices, but most of the time, it will be a few words or a grunt. Half of the time, you will be going back and forth between two semi-still images while the plot reveals itself.
The plot itself is your typical One Piece delight, Luffy fighting against the usual oppressor. Without going in too much detail, we all know I dislike spoilers, the story was great. It’s even something I would love to see as a special episode or movie. Without going in full details, I can only say it was touching!
As this game is open world or should I say open island, there is a lot to do in this game and at the same time, it often feels empty. If you keep following the storyline which clearly guides you from A to B to C and so on… But if you leave the path, the enemies are not that frequent and with the stealth attacks, you can often take ‘ out easily.
Like in the manga, Luffy can use Haki, from observing everything around you to helping you land bigger and more impressive blows on your enemies, especially the level bosses will need a decent amount of pounding in order to take them down. The game being divided into levels is actually a bonus as you can actually feel the progress happening, I enjoyed it very much to say the least.
World Seeker does have some downsides though, aside from the incessant reading at times, it also has this incredibly annoying thing happening when opening a chest or a door. It feels like it takes forever to open anything. It started as “wow, this is long” and ended up being “do I need to open this chest?”. I just skipped opening chests along the way just to avoid this useless waiting. A really negative point that really managed to irritate me.
So how does this game compare to the other One Piece games?
You could say it is somewhere in between Unlimited World Red and the last Pirate Warriors. The feeling of Unlimited and the fighting feeling of the musou games. Storywise it felt more true to One Piece than any other of the games, battlewise I would say the Warriors games are better but I suppose my love for musou games is talking here. This is a great step in the direction of actually getting a decent all-round One Piece game!
In conclusion, World Seeker suffers from some minor downsides like the endless reading and horrible waiting times but it is clearly a step in the right direction. I can not wait to see what the next installment of a One Piece game will be like!
