Welcome to our review of my personal most anticipated title of the month, not DOOM, not Animal Crossing but none other than One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4
The Pirate Warriors series has successfully combined the popular anime ONE PIECE with the thrilling action of the WARRIORS series to create a worldwide phenomenon selling more than four million copies! Based on the concept of “fighting hordes of enemies while adventuring with trusted allies,” experience awesome One Piece action lifted straight from the anime!
One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 is the latest evolution of Pirate Warriors action! Based on the concept of “experiencing a real One Piece battlefield,” buildings will come crashing down during the action and attacks will throw up smoke and dust, placing you in the thick of the One Piece world! Injecting fresh elements that couldn’t be achieved in previous entries has now realized an even more thrilling brand of Pirate Warriors action!
So let u start with the obligatory explanation why I think this is the best game of this period and why it is a highly underrated series for lovers of the cult manga. One Piece is a phenomenon in itself, breaking year long and many standing records. Eiichiro Oda, the creator, is, in my opinion, a true storytelling genius. Despite the storyline being the very core of this game series, there are sadly also some things wrong with this game.
For me personally, someone who loves the entire Musou genre (dynasty warriors-like), I must say I love this game series. I had been streaming the third game on the Gaming Boulevard Mixer during the past few days. All other games basically follow the entire storyline of the manga and One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 is no exception. The sole difference is that the tutorial starts us off with Luffy, the main hero, and Kidd battling with Big Mom and Kaido.
Once you finish the tutorial, you are thrown back to the start of the series with Luffy meeting red-haired Shanks. Slowly moving the story forward but often taking proper steps to avoid a million useless fights to be had with all the small steps taken in the manga. You skip parts of the story but get to see them explained so if you are unfamiliar with the series, you will be aware who is who and how they joined the crew.
Because all this is done so very well, you relive the series that you have probably been following for years, much like myself. The nostalgia levels were very high and it needs to be said, this is exactly why I wanted this game in my grubby hands as soon as possible. As much as I know that AC and Doom Eternal are much better games, nothing they brought to the table could beat out that nostalgic feeling and well, storywise, the game truly delivers as it stays true to the manga.
But I am sure you can see me coming from a mile away…
Gameplay has changed quite a bit from previous iterations of the game series and while some were changed in a very positive way, others were not. So let us start with some of the improvements that I really liked and then some I did not enjoy very much.
What I really enjoyed, the tutorial immediately threw me into the action and it caught me off guard. Instantly getting to battle what I would assume are the two final bosses of the game. Full disclosure, I have not finished the game at the time of writing this review.
Another thing I really enjoyed was the way the enemies no longer seem to be beaten 100% and you can just run to your goal and “get it done”. I know it was not needed in previous games either, but they had the feeling that it was a must, in One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4, this feels very different and there appear to be fewer sidetracking missions so far. Thus allowing you to really focus on the fighting.
Graphically, One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 looks more like a real video game compared to its predecessor. No jab here towards the third game, just that this has that more mature feeling to it. Not sure if I would want to go back after experiencing this new approach. I just like this new style more…
Now for the bad parts and yes, for such a big fan as I am, I am possibly more strict when it comes down to pointing them out. First off, the game speeds up compared to the previous one and it does not always work out when looking at the camera controls. Playing it on Xbox One, I often felt that the camera approach was stuck on last-gen consoles. Like when you perform that fast jump forward attack, the camera does not even bother moving, often getting covered by walls, enemies, … The visibility factor is not the greatest even when locking on to an enemy. This could have been improved upon for real.
Next, the sheer amount of enemies does not decrease when you are close to beating out the sector you are in. In previous games, as you got close to beating a zone, you would just take it over but now, they introduced these rather weak “leaders” that you need to beat in order to take over the zone. I do not disagree with the decision, just something that might be at least a little more challenging.
Next are the controls, I already mentioned the lack of proper camera controls and it does not stop there. The weird decision to use the right thumbstick click to lock on to enemies while this genre is mostly button mashing the buttons on top. I feel another button could have been mapped by default for this. I may be asking too much, I know, this just felt unnatural even after 5+ hours of fighting my way through the fodder.
Lastly, the boss battles are not the hardest, but aside from that, at times you need to win a battle in order to proceed and then you end up losing in the cutscene. I made this comment before in other manga turned game-games and I just can not wrap my head around it. Win so you can lose, it just goes against my proper logic.
Now, I did write a lot about my dislikes and just a few likes, do not be misled by that. This game is a game from a series that I simply adore. The Musou genre in itself is usually very limited to really play around with and while they did do some more tinkering to the base system, like how you need to “break” the enemy before you can really dish out the damage, …
Sadly the genre is not for everybody and manga series do not always make for great games, One Piece does its best to break the mold in an often hated genre and in my humble opinion does provide us with a solid experience. The question is if this is due to the good story or due to the decent game mechanics… I leave that up to you to decide.
In conclusion, I love One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 but realize it has several ways to be improved upon and yes, this is lowering the score in my book. I thought about giving it a lower score, but I think the 8 score I am giving, is fair. This is the best game of the Pirate Warriors series even though I had my issues with some new aspects. If they somehow fixed those cameras, I would even go up to 8.5, but as it stands, 8 out of 10 for this game.
