One Piece Odyssey surprises with quality and fidelity

When “One Piece Odyssey” was announced, I honestly had my doubts, after all, bringing a turn-based RPG from an anime game, and even more with so much content and characters, is not an easy task. Therefore, my expectations were very low for it, which gave me some surprising moments during its play. However, some aspects could be improved, especially in its RPG aspect.

“One Piece odyssey” is a visual treat from start to finish: from the very beginning of the game, we have a very well produced opening that introduces us to its story, in which Luffy and his gang are caught in a storm that drags them to our mysterious island where the game takes place, having their ship damaged and being stranded there.

During the exploration, we are introduced to two new characters created especially for this game: Adio and Lim. Both are very unique characters, charismatic and with a great distrust of pirates, especially Lim who will accompany you for most of the game and with that, we will see the development of the character with the crew.

“One Piece Odyssey” Modernizes the turn-based RPG genre, with some caveats

One of the first things that came to mind when I started playing is how well the game would distribute this excess of characters for a turn-based RPG. After all, try to imagine leveling up that many people. But the game does this in an excellent way, it’s easily something that really surprised me about the game. The battle system is pretty simple, which is a good thing. Despite this, it takes a while to understand the zone system during fights.

In your fight, characters and enemies are separated into zones, where they are limited to facing each other without interfering with fights in other zones. Unless you use a ranged attack, in order to move to another zone you must defeat the enemies in the zone you are in first. It sounds complicated, but it is not.

The combat in the game is beautiful! All attacks bring great references to the anime, both in camera angles, effects, and voices, all very faithful to the original material, which makes it hard to take your eyes off the screen during the attacks, not to be outdone by the super specials of anime fighting games. And with a touch of a button, you can speed up the animations for those who are already sick of seeing them or just want to speed up the fight.

As for the gameplay part, for an RPG, it gets kind of mixed. “One Piece Odyssey” has some good hits, but with some mistakes that current RPGs should not make.

The game is divided into two parts: the adventure on the unknown island where we help the new characters deal with elemental titans, and the memories of past adventures, which allow us to relive great moments of the anime from another angle and recover our powers, which were taken from us. This is where the game starts to present some problems, making you go back and forth many, many times through various areas, tiring the player out, especially in the first area of the memories, which is huge and slow.

This kind of broke the rhythm of the game for me, completing this session very slowly and this was visible in my live stream, how tiring this part was, both for me and for my audience.

The game does not have a very high difficulty, especially with an unbalanced experience distribution. There were cases where I spent several turns fighting an enemy with a lot of life and he gave me little reward, while enemies I killed in one turn gave me 3x as much. In this way, there was not much need to face common enemies in the game and I practically ignored them, because in a few quick fights my characters were already very strong.

Is the adventure exciting to play in a live stream?

The answer varies depending on the knowledge of the streamer and his audience with the series, because the game is a love letter to long-time “One Piece” fans. If there is prior knowledge of “One Piece”, it will be a very fun live stream thanks to the many references, nostalgia for classic and exciting moments, and super charismatic characters and enemies throughout the game.

However, a newcomer to the series might get lost, as the game takes a very advanced story arc already and doesn’t introduce you well to the characters for those who don’t know anything.

I played the Steam version and experienced no graphical or performance issues during the play. I was able to bring it live with no complications with my machine. It will take you about 35-36 hours to finish the adventure, so you will have plenty of content for lives. That’s without counting the time for side quests.

The game is also available in 15 different languages, including my native language Brazilian Portuguese, and it’s a great translation, the game it’s also well translated in English. For an RPG, these translations help a lot to make a good live stream. Despite this, the game is only dubbed in Japanese, which is only a warning for those who expect dubbing in another language.

Fezudu