One Piece: World Seeker falls flat. Its poor mechanics, sloppy combat, slow pacing, and repetitiveness all made me want to stop playing. The game has a decent story but was not worth the frustration. I would not recommend. 4/10
I was excited to play a One Piece Game. I thought, what a fun way to get more into the series. Luffy and his pirate crew seemed like an amazing group of characters and I wanted to see them all in action. One Piece should make for a perfect game. It has great characters, story, humor, and combat. Sadly, this game did not deliver any of that and was a total disappointment.
I will start with the positives. The game has a good story and does some humor well. Also, if you go to a tall tower or hill and look around the world (map) looks very pretty. If you want to have a new One Piece story and are willing to put up with all the negatives below, then you should get this game. Sadly, that is the end of the positive things I have to say.
One Piece: World Seeker struggles with: all aspects of gameplay, movement, combat, characters, and music.
After an hour of playing this game, I was ready to never play it again. With a title like World Seeker, you would think that exploration will be a major aspect of the game but moving is so difficult that you are not interested in doing anything you do not have to. Inputs feel laggy and nothing is crisp. Moving in this game feels like using a shopping cart with one wheel that will not spin. The camera moves extremely slowly and even on the most sensitive setting cannot keep up with the character. The game all around plays slowly. Opening doors and chests take an eternity. It takes 7-10 seconds to open anything and some missions do not tell you where something is so you must try to open all the doors and get lucky. While opening something all you do is hold down triangle. It is not a puzzle or a QuickTime event, it is just pressing down one button for 10 seconds. They did not even take the time to create an “opening stuff” animation for Luffy so you sit there holding down the same button while Luffy stands perfectly still on the screen doing nothing.
When it comes to doing missions and tasks the game is not going to mentally challenge you. You will spend all of this game following a blue arrow on your map, doing as little thinking as possible. While playing the game it encourages you to collect sparkly dots around the map. The sparkles feel like a reason to replay the game and to keep you preoccupied while running around rather something vital to the story. Sadly, I was never really impressed with what I could do with these items once I got them. They were all ingredients or pieces that you had to then get recipes and instructions to do anything with. This may have been a fun part of the game if moving places and getting things was not such a nightmare and if the prizes seemed worth it.
Combat is lacking in this game. Smash circle till your thumb falls off and maybe dodge big attacks if you feel like it. You can always run away and regain health if you are in a pickle. There are two fighting styles and both of them require the same level of thought. See bad guy and punch him. If he has a gun then tank his shots and then punch him. You can try to dodge shoots but their accuracy is pretty unbelievable. You are also given midrange attacks so if you are worried about an enemy you can repeatedly stun them from a distance as you approach to punch them. If all you like is punching then I guess this may be a positive for you.
You may be thinking, “I bet there are super moves or special of some kind though, right?” The game has you unlock skills as you go. You get skill points for doing a mission or beating bosses but they do not feel super necessary. You can beat people with just the basic combos and midrange stuns. They will help you in fights but often I would not have the power meter to do super moves and would forget I even had them. I never went to the skills page to unlock moves to help me beat someone but rather hoping I would unlock something that would make combat or moving around fun. I just wanted to feel cool when playing the game. I think I would have had more fun if the game gave you some of the movement abilities at the start. This would have made the game feel faster.
The AI is either godlike or struggling to get by. When one spots you then everyone spots you and their aim is perfect. I can not tell you how many times I would be running somewhere and randomly get smacked by a sniper from the way the other direction. I would act like any player and go to get them only to be sniped over and over again. When shot by a sniper (who is always on some kind of high ground) Luffy is animation stunned often leading to you falling to the ground only to have to climb back up to the sniper who shoots you again sending you back to the ground. After a while, I would just run past all enemies to objectives and after some dialogue and a new objective, they would all magically be gone. I was actively avoiding fights. Enemies that were not all that bright would spot me but would just stand there doing nothing. This was nice because I could give my thumb a break from smashing circle.
The game also chooses to have you fight flying robots which is as frustrating as it sounds. If fighting normal enemies on the ground is rough zooming robots with numerous attacks will drive you crazy. They are hard to hit cause the movement system is so slow so you have to just run around till you are close to one and hope you hit it.
You will only play as Luffy in this game. You will see all the other members of your pirate crew and talk to them but they will not be fighting with you or doing much of anything really. Hope you like Luffy. If you are new to One Piece, then you will have no idea who these people are or what they do but they are so underused that in the end, it does not matter.
There is so much silence in this game. Having good music in an open world story game is a necessity. It gives locations, enemies, and situations personality. The only song that was noticeable is the combat song. It plays any time you are detected by an enemy and is loud and gets annoying. Until you beat all the enemies or they forget about you it will repeat over and over again. I could not believe how many songs where on the game’s soundtrack because as I would sit there playing I would just be thinking, why is there no music? World Seeker also does one of my biggest game pet peeves. It will only have one-word dialogue bits for whole sections of text. As you are reading what is on the screen the characters are just yelling random expression or “Nani”. It completely removes you from the dialogue and story, makes the characters feel one dimensional, and makes me want to skip all game dialogue.
