TL;DR
I had a blast playing the game. It became one of my favorite games ever. There are so many characters, so many quests, and so much optional grinding to do, yet nothing really becomes repetitive. The story mode could be longer and have better presentation, but the amount of playable characters makes you ignore most of its flaws.
It’s not a perfect game, but it absolutely is a great one, and a fifth entry could be amazing. Overall, this is the best One Piece game money can buy, and you’ll have a ton of fun playing it.
For a bit of context, I was around chapter 900 of One Piece when I decided to drop it, but my girlfriend and I made a deal: if I caught up to One Piece, she would buy me this game, which I had wanted since long before reaching chapter 900. Well, as you can probably tell, I read it all, and to my surprise, I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected, changing my previous score from a 6.5 to an 8.
But let’s not talk about the manga now.
This game is a Musou game, with “Musou” meaning “unstoppable,” which is the feeling all the games in the franchise try to give the player. These are games where you defeat countless small enemies with some officers and bosses mixed in between. The whole point is to make you feel, well, unstoppable by mowing down hordes of enemies with your favorite characters.
One Piece fits incredibly well in this format. If you’ve read or watched even a little bit of One Piece, you know the characters are constantly fighting fodder marines and pirates, so this feels like a match made in heaven, and honestly, it is.
So the game consists of a couple of different modes:
Dramatic Log
Free Log
Treasure Log
Special Log
Dramatic Log is the main story mode of the game. It follows the anime until the Wano Arc, although Wano itself is game-original. It focuses on the most impactful arcs, starting with Alabasta and then moving through Water Seven, Paramount War, Dressrosa, Whole Cake Island, and Wano (kind of). It could definitely be much better in presentation, especially considering how much budget Bandai has, but it’s still fun.
Free Log is basically the main story mode again, but you can use any character for the missions. It’s useful for farming currencies needed to level up characters.
Treasure Log is a compilation of missions divided into three difficulties where you farm character currencies and pretty much just have fun after finishing the story. There are a bunch of missions with different objectives, such as capturing territories, defeating bosses, or taking down specific officers, who are usually playable characters themselves. There’s a lot of variety there.
Special Log is DLC content added into the game. It mainly exists to farm more currencies, push your characters to their limits, and serve as endgame content.
All of this took me around 60 hours to complete, and honestly, if I wasn’t already playing another Musou game, I’d probably still be playing this one because there are just so many characters.
Talking about characters, the game offers more than 60 playable characters with all DLC included, and more than 40 in the base game alone. Every character has a unique moveset and different abilities that you can mix and match to make them feel truly your own.
To make them even more distinct, the characters are divided into four categories:
Power
Technique
Speed
Sky
So chances are there’s going to be a character for you.
In my case, it was Gol D. Roger, with Yamato as a very close second. Roger is a DLC character that comes with one of the endgame DLC packs, and he’s insanely fun to play. Every attack he does is packed with massive amounts of Conqueror’s Haki and looks incredibly flashy.
(Unfortunately, I don’t have the latest DLC, so I can’t play Bonney yet T.T)
Having tried most of the cast, I can confidently say that Law plays completely differently from Luffy, especially with Luffy’s two Gear Fourth forms. Then Luffy plays very differently from Sanji, who is a Sky-type character focused on aerial combos and kicking enemies through the air. Sanji also feels completely different from Whitebeard, who is massive and incredibly satisfying to use since every attack wipes out hundreds of enemies.
All the characters are fun, it just depends on your preferences.
The game also encourages you to try everyone because of its upgrade systems, but more about that later. I genuinely can’t express how fun it is to experiment with new characters. Turning into a dinosaur with X Drake, turning enemies to stone with Boa, or doing whatever Gear 5 is supposed to be doing, laughing while everything goes boing, is just ridiculously fun.
For character progression, every character has two skill trees that you unlock using different coins. These trees unlock new special attacks and abilities.
Then there are the Soul Maps, which are another type of progression system with four pages you can level up. These increase stats across every character in the game. So if you max out HP nodes, for example, all characters will start with much higher HP.
As I mentioned before, this system makes trying new characters feel great because you don’t feel like you’re starting from level one every single time.
Overall, this is pretty much the best game a One Piece fan could ask for. There’s still some debate over whether Pirate Warriors 3 or 4 is the better game, but honestly, you can’t go wrong with either one.
I’m pretty sure you’ll have a blast with this game. It’s one of my all-time favorites, and hopefully, when we eventually get a fifth entry, it will combine the best parts of both 3 and 4 while also including every major arc in a properly told story mode.
I genuinely think the developers could pull it off, and I’m hopeful it happens once Elbaf finishes in the anime.
Overall, I’d give this game a 9/10. It could have been perfect, but like I said, if they really cook with a fifth entry, that would be the dream.
My Rating System
10 – Almost Perfect
9 – Amazing
8 – Really Good
7 – Good
6 – Nice
5 – Fine
4 – Kinda Bad
3 – Bad
2 – Really Bad
1 – Awful
