So let me be entirely upfront by saying that I’m not qualifying One Piece Pony Warriors, or anything else I’ll be earmarking throughout the week, as the best games of the year. They’re simply the ones that stuck with me the most, the ones that made me the happiest, the games that left a smile on my face. Undoubtedly, those won’t match up with your likes and dislikes. But then again, I’m a bloke who puts raw coffee grains directly into yoghurt, so it’s probably widely understood that my preferences are going to be a touch different.įor all their faults, anime fighters these days look bloody goodīut sometimes things land at a decent time. And nothing exemplified that for me more this year than Koei Tecmo’s release of One Piece Pirate Warriors 3, a One Piece-themed spin-off of the Dynasty Warriors series. It’s not just because someone cocked up and priced the game for US69 cents on launch, although I strongly doubt I would have bought the game at launch without the generous discount. What was more helpful was the fact that the game released just 48 hours before I was due to get on a plane to Japan, the first holiday I’d taken in years and the first time I’d ever been to the country. But I put the game on ice for a few weeks because I hadn’t read through the currently available manga, and when I returned to Sydney’s sunny shores a few near the end of September, I’d read through nearly 800 chapters, been to three separate theme parks featuring One Piece characters and merchandise, and could instantly identify everything that flashed on screen. That helps immensely, because by Christ is this game stupid. It’s dumb in the way, I’ve since realised, most Dynasty Warriors games are. You never kill anyone, even though people die in the manga. Nobody dies in One Piece Pirate Warriors, even though you’re headbutting people’s skull with the full force of a meteor crashing into the Earth at a million miles an hour. The camera is also one of the most poorly designed I’ve ever had the displeasure of experiencing. Half of the game literally involves you spamming L1, just so you can re-center the view to see what Luffy is beating the snot out of.
Why the developers didn’t just let you zoom out the camera a little more I’ll never understand.Īnd that’s not to mention the amount of pop-in - it’s near constant on my PC, with everything on the highest settings - or the crashes in the very final chapter of the storyline that forced me to put the game on ice for over a month. And while I understand that Luffy (or Monkey D.
Luffy, as per his full title) is the hero of the story, the rest of the characters could have been better balanced to make the remainder of the roster more interesting to play.īut I’ve still had an absurd, inordinate amount of fun regardless. It reminded me of a weekend last year, when I was sick, grumpy and felt utterly soulless.
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