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One Piece returns with a new video game installment that sadly is not up to par. It does not manage to give the atmosphere of One Piece and neither that of a video game that can be considered complete.
One Piece is the most important comic book franchise in Japan, more even than the legendary Dragon Ball, at least when it comes to comic book sales. And at the global sales level it already surpasses Batman, waiting to be able to surpass Superman if sales do not decline too much. With such popularity it is normal for video games to arrive to try to get more out of the franchise and with that we come to One Piece World Seeker.
It is an attempt to give an open world to the world of One Piece, a series that in the comic we see how the members of the Straw Hats crew end up separated in various ways and then reunite at the climax of the narrative arc. In theory it should serve to be inspired by a story that meets the minimums that can be asked of a saga that depends a lot on its narrative load.
[amazon_link asins=’B07KPZQF2J,B079PC9JQ5,B019HDOFQU,B0797M9LRF,B079CB4YGT,B07BYP47YN,B00JECLNMO,B079PHKJLP,B075FF7W41′ template=’ProductCarousel’ store=’hardwa028-21′ marketplace=’ES’ link_id=’c2a2deea-d1b8-48b4-a262-b52d6a4da9d9′]Wold Seeker takes us to Prison Island
The game takes us to Prison Island, an island taken over by the Navy, where it exerts a disproportionate influence on the population thanks to its three prisons that it uses to detain the criminals they capture. Luffy and his team arrived looking for treasure, but it turns out that they are rumors created to trap the most greedy pirates and capture them. From then on, we will have to recover our friends and move on.
The story itself is not really bad, it puts us inside a known world with some changes so as not to affect the original plot. However, it is obvious that the team does not know how to build a narrative that is up to par. We will find numerous characters in the series who drastically change their affiliation without taking into account their previous history. The new characters, although they provide good designs, do not manage to convey enough personality to worry us and many times we face La Marina itself without taking into account what the main baddies of history do.
It also doesn't help that the missions are the vaguest endeavor we've ever seen, and that's what someone who loves One Piece Pirate Warriors 3 says where the missions are simply eliminating enemies. We find numerous cases where the missions are simply to get to a point and kill some enemies, many times having to go to a point where we had been five minutes ago. In an open world game, a genre that cries out for a solid story, they do not reach the minimum necessary to not feel that they are making fun of our intelligence.
The open world that they bring us is another of the serious problems it suffers. Although Prison Island is large and is supposed to be a living city, with its history and culture, it is dead. There is no activity in the cities or in the fields that makes us feel that things are happening, not beyond an enemy who wants to fight or things to collect in one of the worst systems of collecting objects and fighting that we see,
Is this One Piece? No, it is not
The fighting system is what ends up finishing a game that does not deserve the name of One Piece. To say that the system is simple is an understatement, since we can only attack normally, attack from a distance, jump, dodge and block. And there is no combo system, like many special attacks that we get by loading a special bar.
[amazon_link asins=’B0763ZK5TF,8468471534,8468471526,B00JJSWH0A,B01M67S2T7,1421560747,B01N6Q9G66′ template=’ProductCarousel’ store=’hardwa028-21′ marketplace=’ES’ link_id=’d6aa0262-02b2-415f-b91c-3adab5bcfedf’]Do you remember One Piece Pirate Warrior 3 that I mentioned? That game, which is a musou (one against a thousand) has a much more diverse, dynamic and fun combat system than a game that was so advertised and that was supposed to revolutionize One Piece games. A game that lives by having a simple combat system at the most, with two modifications to make it special, is much better than an open-world combat system that must live by giving the player several options.
A fight that comes to nothing
The combat in One Piece Wold Seeker reaches the point of being tedious at fifteen minutes to be limited, even with the possibility of unlocking movement options. These movements do not give you more options to fight, which is what other games do where there are different weapons with advantages and disadvantages, here they simply serve to make it shorter and make easy combats that would otherwise be impossible, without giving you the option to explore all of Luffy's abilities.
I could go on for a long time, but it boils down to the fact that we are not given any options, there is only one and it boils down to hitting until we have a special and then unleashing special moves. There are supposed to be two combat styles, but they don't explain to you that one is for direct combat (Armament Haki) and the other (Observation Haki) is the one you use in "stealth", very much in quotation marks because the stealth system is one of the worst there can be as there are no other options than walking behind an opponent and doing a takedown or entering barrels. We don't know the rivals' fields of vision and even if we do know them it doesn't matter because they see us from too far away without realizing that there are enemies there.
The only remotely good thing we get out of the game is the Karma system, where doing varied missions gives us scenes of certain characters. It's no wonder and they actually fill mostly automatically, so it doesn't make sense either.
One Piece: World Seeker or why not keep waiting for anything from licensing games
One Piece World Seeker reminds us of what we should never forget: Don't expect anything from franchise games. Usually the games are not that good, especially if they are manga or anime franchises. It is true that sometimes they release games that are fun, and sometimes they are even good, but knowing that the "Anime Arena" genre is based on simple and undeveloped combat systems, we should already know that.
World Seeker could be summed up as an Unreal Engine project by someone who has paid Eichiiro Oda and Sueisha a lot of money. And the sad thing is that it does not have a bad basis in itself, but all the decisions show us a game that we cannot consider to reach the Alpha phase if it were not for having a competent and consistent graphic section.
