“The place is like a museum. It’s very beautiful and very cold, and you’re not allowed to touch anything” – Cameron Frye
That quote basically sums up my experience with One Piece Odyssey. It’s a game that has all the wonderful fundamentals of your basic, everyday role-playing game, a solid story to drive and develop the characters, and it has some of the most gorgeous animations that you’ve seen in an RPG. The problem? It feels like the game is forcing a story down your throat rather than letting you play it. Its stop-and-go gameplay disrupts flow, fun, and engagement. I like stories, even when they’re being retold, but if it disrupts gameplay, then no thanks.
Let’s get right into it.
Story
The straw hat crew is on another adventure when suddenly a storm demolishes their ship and lands them on a very big, beautiful, and dangerous island. They’ve got to figure out how to get back to the sea while fighting a variety of creatures along the way. There are a lot of mysteries to be solved, lots of fights to be had, and plenty of story to go around.
The story in this game is good One Piece entertainment. While it is a little over the top with dialogue and reaction at times, the story still is creative, fun, and exciting at times. I’m not a big One Piece follower with the anime or manga, but I was entertained by what was delivered. I’m sure hardcore fans will nitpick this thing to death, but it was good enough to enjoy. The games, while probably not as deep as the source material, all had meaningful tales and deep, intriguing characters to make the voyages memorable. Odyssey is no exception to this sentiment. It’s very easy to follow and leaves just enough breadcrumbs to make you want to journey with it to the end. I mean, it’s not going to win any academy awards for best screenplay, but there is nothing too detrimental to the sanctity of the story.
Let’s discuss the beef in this ravioli.
Gameplay Design
The gameplay design of One Piece Odyssey is about as basic as can be when it comes to building an RPG. This game is a turn-based RPG that features all the usuals you would find in that particular genre segment. You have special moves driven by technique points (TP), usual attacks and defense, and items to keep everyone healthy and safe. All of these types of features have been a gold standard for RPGs over the years. My favorite RPG series, Phantasy Star had these back in the 80s, where you could attack, defend, or pull off a special magic move. It’s a trend that has carried over through the years/decades and it’s nothing particularly special or new to the genre. And that isn’t a knock against Odyssey for having the usual, rather it’s praise for at least meeting the status quo when it comes to a turn-based RPG adventure. It’s expected, therefore it is delivered.
Outside of the above, there is also a dose of third-person adventure to mix things up. You have plenty to explore and areas to enjoy. The game opens up when in third-person and allows you to make the experience more than just a turn-based RPG. The game’s environments, which are bold and brash as they are beautiful, help to sell the idea that the third-person component isn’t just a small add-on. The game also opens up with how characters are used to make the adventure a bit more look-and-see when you’re exploring. Adding secret goodies in the environments helps to encourage perpetual exploration, even when the mission doesn’t require it of you. Let’s talk about the latter first.
When you take control of the lead character of your choosing, and you have several you can rotate around with, they can do special moves outside of fights that help increase the exploration of the game and make it feel like there is more girth and worth to it. For example, Luffy can use his rubbery arms to swing from distant platform to platform. He gains access to places that other characters in the party cannot, which helps to open up the land a bit and also encourages you to keep your eyes out for secret items and spots.
Another example of character created motivation to explore is using the adorable Chopper, who is tiny in height, but can access crevices in caves that other characters in the party cannot. This deviation from the usual bump and grind with a turn-based action game helps to expand the gameplay experience. It also gives One Piece Odyssey a healthy chunk of third-person action to go along with turn-based fighting. Having a game that has cross-genre elements to it more than not makes the game more fun and engaging for the player. You want to hook and keep your player’s eyes and motivation pointed toward the gameplay experience. This brings them back repeatedly and gets them thinking about playing when they’re away. But you must do it properly or otherwise, you’re disrupting the flow of the game’s pacing. The combination of both these unique genres in this situation does not disrupt said pacing or flow. Surprisingly, the combination makes the gameplay even deeper.
Let’s dog-ear that page on pacing and skip ahead in the gameplay discussion and talk enemies.
One of the nicer parts of this One Piece experience is how creative the enemies are in the game, and how whack-a-doodle they can get. I have not been so fascinated by enemy types in an RPG since Dragon Quest VIII on the PlayStation 2. Odyssey really brings creative juices when throwing enemies at you. For example, there was an early point in the game where a rough-looking raccoon ended up fighting the straw hats. The raccoon looked like it had the face of a middle-aged man, and had seen some shit in its life. These types of beings and designs, the variety of attacks that they carry with them, and the gorgeous animation they sport make fighting so much more interesting. It’s like watching a piece of anime art unfold right in front of you, even if it is a horrifying middle-aged man raccoon that might have a cigar addiction. Kidding aside, there are a lot of enemies like the aforementioned and plenty of cool places around the island to find them. I was impressed with the enemy variety, and how they reacted to the players, and was anxious to find the next set of new ones.
Creative enemies aside, the fighting in the game, especially at the beginning, seems a bit too easy and unbalanced. Most RPG games of this type usually start you low and by the end of the first chapter of the game, the enemies have ramped up the difficulty that forces you to grind the gameplay out. It’s a structure that has been around forever. One Piece Odyssey apparently doesn’t believe in conventional structures. While the first few fights might be tricky, the game never really gives you a sense of danger or failure. Rather, it allows you to level up quickly, bulk up with badge buffs that can easily be acquired in the game (buffs that bring up attacks, hit points, and other interesting effects) that make your characters extremely overpowered at times, and feature strong attacks that allow you to take down enemies with ease. I know what you’re thinking, “So, what is the problem?” Well, it just doesn’t feel earned. It feels like the game wants you to sleepwalk through the gameplay so that you can make room for the story because it’s so important. Because it seems to think this way, the gameplay doesn’t offer up too much of a challenge. Honestly, I’m good with easy, but I want a bit more challenge in my RPG cup of tea. It just felt too easy.
Before we get to that story disruption business, let’s talk about some real positives, such as how the level design looks and how engaging that is while playing. To put it simply, the environments you explore in Odyssey are out of this world gorgeous. They’re large, have unbelievable draw distance to them, and complement the story very well. On top of that, those environments also come with their unique set of music to put you in the mood of the situation you’re playing within. Watching the game in the background right now, I’m stunned that ILCA could do such a good job of putting the player in the story with the environments. They did such a good job with their design and execution.
Now, the flip side to that coin is that most of the environments are limited with their assumed open-world exploration aspect, and other environments in the game are simply flat with their interactivity. It’s like going back to the Cameron Frye quote at the beginning of the review, it’s all gorgeous, but you can’t really touch anything. It’s the same with the environments. They can be so limited in their exploration and accessibility, though some throw you a bone here and there. It’s almost a waste, but it’s so pretty that you can forgive that aspect of the game, especially if the intention is to keep you on track with the story.
Now, for that tough part of the experience.
The great disruptor
Let’s recap real quick, you have all the wonderful traditional structure of an RPG, you have some gorgeous graphics and environments to run around in, and you have a variety of creative enemies to fight with a good backend system to keep you entertained. You also have a great story that pushes and reminds you that this is One Piece and it’s a badass pirate adventure. All of the elements can come together to potentially make the best One Piece game ever made. One thing kind of puts the kibosh on this whole experience and potential…the story.
I know, you’re like, “Dude, you said the story was good. You said the gameplay was good. What is wrong with the story if both are good?” It’s a valid question, and here is my valid answer. The story gets in the way of the gameplay. It’s true, individually they’re both great, but wow does the story kill the pacing of the gameplay. It’s like when you’re typing a review and your youngest daughter (9) comes into the room and asks you a simple question. You stop typing, you answer it, and then you continue to type. Well, that question could spurn another question a minute later, which causes you to stop typing, answer the question, and then get back to it. What if your daughter had 100 questions that were unevenly spaced out and had to be answered even though you’re trying to get back in the mood to type each time the previous question is completed? You would have to answer them because you’re a good parent, but the questions would completely mess up your train of thought and flow.
Related, you can get into the RPG and fighting elements of Odyssey easily. You’ll love them. Throw in the exploration for good measures. Lots of fun stuff to be had in the grind. Now, right in the middle of the good grind, the game will stop and insert a story or a large amount of dialogue that pushes the story’s plot points. Then you’re back to the fighting for about 2-3 minutes. Then the story happens again, you sit through dialogue, you are force-fed a story, and then back to fighting. This is incredibly repeated over and over again until you throw in the mental white towel to say ‘skip’ in the dialogue just so you can go back to the adventuring and fighting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that there are a lot of good stories to tell, but wow does it get in the way of the gameplay. And it’s fantastic gameplay at that! You know…when it is happening. Anyway, it’s frustrating to have your fun stopped so that the story can be given to you in small, disruptive chunks. It is frustrating to think about how close to perfection this One Piece traditional RPG came, but it honestly got in its own way by the pacing of the story and how it works with the gameplay. Most games of this type or any type that have a story to tell do it in large chunks during stopping points between missions. That is how it should be. Odyssey sprinkles small doses over many spots during gameplay. You never fully get in the flow of it. That just hurts the pacing quite a bit.
Anyway, I have said my piece, and I’m sad to report this is an issue, especially if you’re not all-in with the manga or anime. I could handle large chunks between checkpoints, but not smaller stop-and-go chunks. That’s just too many stops during the action.
On that note, let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion
One Piece Odyssey is a great RPG when the story isn’t getting in the way of its pacing. There is so much to enjoy about the gameplay with its action and creativity, as well as the turn-based structure that is typical of this genre. On its own, the story isn’t too bad either. It is fun and light-hearted with a small sense of good drama to keep it engaging. But the unbalanced space sharing between both gameplay and story causes such a stop-and-go pacing problem that in the end the gameplay experience is so heavily disrupted that it is tough to enjoy the game.
