[News] One Piece Odyssey Review - Filler Arc

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For decades, the adventures of Monkey D. Luffy and the Straw Hat Pirates have thrilled and enchanted readers and viewers across the globe. Turning such a beloved and long-running action-adventure series into game form has proven to be quite a challenge, with many developers stepping up over the years to try and gamify the magic that's made the One Piece anime and manga such a success, often to mixed results. One Piece Odyssey is the latest such attempt, and it takes the approach of transforming One Piece's dramatic battles into a turn-based RPG. While it does a solid job of getting the look and mood of the series down, One Piece Odyssey unfortunately offers little more than a very basic RPG adventure.

The game opens with the Straw Hat gang stranded on the mysterious island of Waford. Their ship, Thousand Sunny, lies in a wreck nearby and with no obvious way to repair it, the gang sets out exploring this wild new world. A strange young girl named Lim emerges and, fearful of the pirates, she removes all of the crew's strength and special powers. With the help of Adio, a rather suspicious adventurer who calls the island his home, the Straw Hats set out to recover their powers, learn the secrets of Waford Island, and escape to journey another day. Along the way, they'll also be able to relive the great adventures of the past.

The story shifts its focus from getting off of Waford Island to getting everyone's full power back with the aid of island residents Lim and Adio fairly quickly, and that remains the crux of the story for quite some time. Recovering powers means finding special cubes scattered across the island and held by the mighty Colossi. Fully restoring the powers contained in the cubes is a rather involved process: Lim must send the crew to a dreamworld called Memoria, where they relive some of the most important events of their lives--in other words, they venture into re-creations of past story arcs from the One Piece anime and manga, though events within them unfold differently. (The justification is that "memories are unreliable.") Only by fully reliving these events in Memoria--and in some cases, venturing even further into strange sub-worlds--can the crew restore what they've lost.

One Piece Odyssey's narrative is, sadly, rather disappointing. Over its lifespan, One Piece has given fans many wonderful, memorable stories and created a fascinating world filled with lore and intrigue. The idea of playing through an original story packed with action and adventure set in the One Piece world as an RPG is a very exciting one, but Odyssey mostly eschews that potential in favor of revisiting past story arcs in Memoria so the Straw Hats can recover their powers. These journeys into the past comprise the bulk of the game's 30-40 hour playtime. While there are some thoughtfully portrayed interactions from the present-day crew as they revisit places and people from the past, setting the game in dream-universe stories that have already resolved, even if they play out differently, robs them of their drama and impact--the conclusions are already known, the stakes don't feel compelling, and the characters are simply doing what's needed to reach the inevitable finale we've seen before. It doesn't help that there's a lot of fetch-quest and NPC-hunting style padding present, either.

Link: https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/one-piece-odyssey-review-filler-arc/1900-6418018/