What if the popular manga and anime series One Piece is turned into a JRPG? That’s One Piece Odyssey, the latest game from developer ILCA and publisher Bandai Namco. The publisher sure has a thing going here, adapting popular series into JRPGs.
One Piece Odyssey is a fun romp and an absolutely good game, but it’s missing some ingredients that stop it from being great.
Presentation
One Piece Odyssey is running on Unreal Engine (The One Piece! The One Piece is Unreal!). Fascinatingly the world and characters look decent and as you’d expect from what you would see from the manga panels. The locations you visit like the main island of Waford are vibrantly coloured and inviting to see. The characters maintain the charm of manga author Eiichiro Oda’s art style. And that means folks with unusual proportions like long noses, lanky arms and legs, and massive pecs, as well as attractive females being portrayed as they are portrayed. I’m surprised that despite the people coming in all shapes and sizes (literally), they all are animated in a believable manner. Nothing jarring. Just relatively silly and/or cool-looking.
The non-human enemies are all silly looking, though. The crew is all panicking about getting attacked by a Sandora Dragon and all I see is a goofy giant lizard. Which is actually fine, this should make it more approachable even for the younger audience, somewhat.
There’s no English dub in One Piece Odyssey, so the only choice you have is what language you want for the subtitles. Thankfully, the voice performance is astoundingly great. From delivering emotional moments to really selling a joke with their overreactions. As well as the expected character banters fans know and love, it’s all here.
And yes, this is a shonen series, so there’s a decent amount of men shouting really loud after spouting their different ideals which leads to explosions.
What really hooked me in the game is how amazing the soundtrack is. It makes good use of its orchestra ensemble by still having earworm-worthy melodies and going hard in various genres. There are hints of Japanese folk music and flamenco being sprinkled around the soundtrack. Its wind instruments really steal the show if you ask me, the flutes, horns, trombones and trumpets were tooting and they were tooting tunes that really get you in the mood to kick some butt.
Even the UI presentation was given some extra love. The shopping and crafting menus look lively yet are still easy to operate. Though the menu when you pause the game is a bit off. Figuring out where is the menu where you upgrade skills, and where you slot in accessories while not accidentally switching to the other tab was a common occurrence. I never developed the muscle memory to navigate the pause menu without stumbling. It’s the little things, like how removing cubes (points) on skills and removing accessories are not done the same, that the game didn’t quite nail down.
(Side note, the UI on PC is usable with a mouse, which is nice.)
Minor UI stumbles aside, One Piece Odyssey presents itself well. Its graphics may not be why you get the latest generation console or max out a PC for, but as an adaptation from a manga and anime series, it looks good, without being jarring (like Jump Force was).
Gameplay
In One Piece Odyssey, the Straw Hat Pirates are shipwrecked on their journey to the island of Waford. The mysterious island is surrounded by unusual weather, and once on land, they discover two inhabitants and a mystery to solve.
On paper, One Piece Odyssey is an original story. But in practice, for story reasons Luffy and the gang will be travelling to select moments in their past adventures, like when they travelled to Alabasta and Water Seven. So it’s partly new stories, and partly a One Piece Greatest Hits compilation presented as a JRPG.
The Secret Of Monkey (D. Luffy) Island
You explore the world as one of the seven crew members of the Straw Hat Pirates. You’ll probably spend most of the time as Luffy, but you can switch to Zoro, Nami, Ussopp, Sanji, Chopper or Robin while navigating the environment. There’s some light climbing and jumping, so it’s not just walking in linear corridors.
Each of the mentioned characters has a specific ability when they are exploring the world. But most of the time you’ll be playing as Luffy as he can stretch his arms to grapple points to reach new areas. It’s less of a mechanic, and more of a gimmick I feel just because how you better off just sticking to Luffy and then switch characters when the game prompts you to do so so you can cut a metal door as Zoro or enter small spaces as Chopper. There’s not enough incentive to really switch characters for exploring all the time. Extra ingredients, money or finding collectibles are not enough.
The combat system (which also includes Franky and Brook as playable party members) has some neat ideas. It’s a turn-based system, but there are four areas where your gang and the enemy can be positioned. The positioning isn’t consistent, so sometimes you have one character alone in one area with all the enemies, or the battlefield is spread across all four areas. Any character or enemy can move to another area so long as no one is there to oppose them.
This need for positioning allows your party members to have skills with different ranges. Long-range attacks allow you to stay put but deal damage to another area, useful should you want to have that character out of dodge, or they just can’t move.
Some skills also allow you to hit enemies so hard they move to another area, or move characters to other areas via Bond Move.
Having to consider area positioning is a nice little wrinkle to an otherwise straightforward turn-based combat system. There’s a rock-paper-scissors thing where each character and enemy either have Power, Speed or Technique elements, where one is weak to another and beats the other. You can swap party members any time without costing a turn. The usual shebang.
There is another gimmick in the form of scenario battles. Sometimes, a particular scenario will trigger, like one enemy is preparing for a super-strong attack so you have a few turns to deal with them, or one character being surrounded by enemies. These appear randomly, and essentially are optional objectives that you can do for bonus EXP rewards. It’s worth doing, and from time to time, will make you consider not to leave auto-battle on.
Core Memory Unlocked
Interestingly, One Piece Odyssey begins with the crew being level 40 with a smattering of skills available at your disposal, to reflect them being already seasoned pirates by the time the game begins. But a turn of events will see the gang losing their abilities (back to level 1 with all skills unlearned) which got turned into memory cubes. And this is a setup for the other half of the game, where you explore Memoria.
Memoria recreates specific events in One Piece history that the crew has to relive. It’s not exactly a 1:1 recreation of those events, some of the characters or places may be missing or out of place, but it is supposed to be the Straw Hat Pirates reliving those moments back, happy and painful ones. For fans of One Piece, these are likely nice throwbacks.
In terms of building up the party, the game has you equip accessories as its main way to build the characters with different stats. These accessories take up space in a grid, and comes in different shapes but alas, there’s only light inventory tetris. The shapes are usually long straight pieces or box-shaped, I wish they went wild with this by having you to only min-max stats, but the space available. The systems are there, you can even rotate the accessories around to fit the grid.
There’s also some a crafting system to stock up on food (used for healing and support items) and pellets (status-inducing items used on the offensive), and a way to fuse accessories together. These systems are simple in its implementation, but ensures the game feels like a proper JRPG where there are options to play how you want.
Content
One Piece Odyssey can take about 30 hours to beat if you beeline the main story, with many more side quests and objectives that can be discovered by going back to places you last visit.
The story is… not good? The main plot feels like an OVA that was stretched into 30 hours. You can easily expect how the turn of events to be unfold. And as it exists as a side-story, the Straw Hat Pirates have to remain stuck in their character doing their usual shtick. Look, it’s fun to see Luffy’s rampant gluttony, Sanji and Zoro butt heads and argue, Nami going gaga over potential treasure, Franky saying his cathphrase “SUUUUPEEEER” in the most American way possible but when that’s basically most of personalities revolved on, the jokes get old quick. At early parts of the game it’s just the same character banter moments while you journey through a long list of objectives, which would be fine if the story keep players motivated. At least it’s not trying too hard, in other words, it isn’t cringe (unless you don’t like any anime).
But once you reach the mid-point, where the Memoria visits start going to more pivotal moments of the crew’s previous adventures, then it gets interesting. Seeing them being pushed at the limit against all odds is when I understand the appeal of One Piece: an epic tale of cool adventures that doesn’t take itself too seriously. And thankfully one character do grow over time, so that keeps the game interesting for me.
If you remove the nostalgia trips, then the adventure in just Waford is absolutely boring. Most of the awesome moments in the game are awesome moments from the manga and anime. Only in the finale things start to unfold in ways you’d expect. I wish there were more cresendos and down moments that are balanced out through this long game.
The other problem about the pacing is how often it starts and stops. Watch a cutscene. Loads into gameplay. Move literally a few steps forward and the the game fades to black into another cutscene. Worse is when those fade to black moments revealed that you need to backtrack somewhere first. I am not against backtracking in general, it can be a nice way to not only reuse locations, but also let players see the same locations in the same context. But the way the game handles its backtracking comes across as trying to pad playtime, unfortunately.
That said, if you are in for a JRPG, for better and for worse, One Piece Odyssey is a JRPG. Some of the criticisms I’ve made can be easily scoffed as the game just being true to its genre, and if you’re fine with that, by all means, you’ll like enjoy the game more than me.
Personal Enjoyment
I have mixed feelings about how much I enjoyed One Piece Odyssey. For one, I’m no One Piece fan, this is the first media from the series that I actively consumed. So more or less I’m in the same boat as Lim, the new character you’ll meet that tags along with the pirates as they relive their memories.
The first third of the game I was indifferent, annoyed even. The pacing is off, the stakes aren’t there, and the gang has been doing the same jokes over and over as they enjoy their little nostalgic trip in the middle of a desert that kept going on and on.
Then, after 10 hours in, things ramp up exponentially. The stakes I ordered finally arrived and now I think I ordered too many. Lim also got her character development (finally) at this point.
The final act was a bit drawn out, but the story wraps very nicely by the end that I cannot not walk away happy with the time spent getting to know these chuckleheads who for some reason call themselves pirates. At the end of the day, I’m a sucker for a story where the power of friendship prevails (see Midnight Suns) and One Piece is exactly that.
If I play this game on my own time I would’ve dropped it when I reached Alabasta and said this game is mid. Thankfully I didn’t, and I feel like I had more fun with it when the story truly gets going.
But it does go to show that One Piece Odyssey isn’t exactly the best way to convert a new fan. I feel like you would appreciate the game more should you be familiar with or are actively following Luffy’s journey.
Verdict
One Piece Odyssey could’ve got much higher (so high) with its systems and mechanics and be something special, but it settles as being a standard JRPG with neat gimmicks. While it’s not a must-play for everyone, it’s still a really good game that does exactly everything you’d expect from a JRPG with a shonen story.
Fans of One Piece should definitely check it out, try out the demo and see if you like to sink in the time for this adventure.
Played on PC. Review copy provided by the publisher.
One Piece Odyssey
One Piece Odyssey could've got much higher (so high) with its systems and mechanics and be something special, but it settles as being a standard JRPG with neat gimmicks. While it's not a must-play for everyone, it's still a really good game that does exactly everything you'd expect from a JRPG with a shonen story.
Fans of One Piece should definitely check it out, try out the demo and see if you like to sink in the time for this adventure.
- Presentation 9
- Gameplay 8
- Content 7
- Personal Enjoyment 7