
My favorite touch, though, is a small one. There’s no punishment for not being able to read a random number generator’s mind, which can be an annoyance in traditional RPGs. Anytime I walk into an encounter and find I have a party with the wrong attack type equipped, I can simply switch to someone else and still attack on that turn.
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For instance, players can swap characters with another party member as a free action. The visual information is all crystal clear, taking out any guesswork.Ĭombat itself is just as player-friendly, taking great care to remove a lot of frustration from battle. When I choose a move and hover over an enemy, I also get arrows telling me if the attack will be effective or not. The chart of strengths and weaknesses is always displayed in the bottom left corner of the screen during battles, so I’m never left trying to recall what Power moves are weak against. Combat, for instance, uses a “rock paper scissors” system akin to Fire Emblem. Little touches like that are present throughout the game, making it easy to put down for a long period of time and return to. I can press a button to close the menu, but I can pop it back out at any time. I first got that sense when exploring in the third person, as a sidebar on the right side of the screen clearly lays out what every single button does. In fact, it goes out of its way to make sure players never feel lost. It’s a relatively straightforward turn-based RPG that isn’t bogged down by dozens of complicated systems. And except for the odd bit of dialogue that brings a smile to our faces, the approach remains the same for many, many hours.If you’re not a fan of the source material, One Piece Odyssey is defined by its quality of life decisions. Similarly, at the scattered campsites where the party can stop, we can consult the encyclopaedia of enemies, cook dishes and create ammunition to use as power-ups in battle. Skills are recovered and upgraded by collecting character-specific glowing cubes. There's only a strengths and weaknesses system to consider (a rock-paper-scissors formula with Strength, Speed, and Technique) that sounds just as silly as the comparison to the children's game. It doesn't bring any additional or fresh elements to the formula. The "open" world of Odyssey (I'll come back to this later) is explored by talking to characters, doing generic quests like "defeat a specific enemy" or "collect a specific number of items" and grinding enemies in turn-based combat with a scheme of options that has been in place since the first Dragon Quest: Attack, Use Skill, Use Item, or group options menu. And now we come to One Piece Odyssey, a completely original instalment with Oda-san's hand behind the design of two of the new main characters and the shaping of their story as the franchise celebrates 25 years.

Luffy's crew, others like One Piece: World Seeker failed miserably to deliver an experience that lived up to its name.
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And while less story-driven titles like the musou series One Piece: Pirate Warriors have managed to extract some of the essence of what it's like to be a member of Monkey D. The story of One Piece has not exactly translated well from the pages or the weekly episodes to the video games. In that time it has gone through different phases of varying quality in its story and animation, and I think that this idea can also be transferred to the video games adaptations of One Piece.

Eichiro Oda's magnum opus, a series about a boy who wants to become the new King of the Pirates, has been gluing me to the screen (and to a lesser extent, on the pages of the manga) for two decades now.

Now, well into my thirties, there is only one anime series that I admit to following with any regularity: One Piece. It's been more than 20 years of great stories, romances, fights and outlandish hairstyles with a whole range of themes, the result of the infinite ability of the creators to imagine whatever characters and plotlines that pop into their head. I have been watching Japanese animation since I was a pre-teen.
