One Piece World Seeker Review – A decent open-world title for the franchise, but it could be better

For anime fans (especially One Piece fans), we have been eagerly waiting for the release of One Piece World Seeker since late 2017. Now the release date (15 March) is fast approaching, and we are lucky to be able to get our hands on it ahead of the official release. Here is our One Piece World Seeker review, be sure to read on for our thoughts on the game!

Introduction

The story of One Piece World Seeker is set on Prison Island, which is now controlled by the Navy ever since a war occurred over the island’s rich natural resources. Residents on the island are separated into 2 factions – the Pro-Navy who supports Navy and their control on the island, and the Anti-Navy who long for tradition and reject the Navy’s presence.

Other than the characters we all familiar with, the game also gets 2 brand new characters designed by the artist of One Piece – Eiichiro Oda. One of them is Isaac, the Warden with enormous science power that acts as Luffy’s biggest foe in the game. Another new character is Jeanne, the leader of the Anti-Navy group.

The World

Without a doubt, you will play as Luffy in the game to embark on an epic adventure along with his crew members. One Piece World Seeker features a beautiful and seamless open-world that is so expansive that you can’t even see the edge of it.

The game gives you a lot of freedom, you are allowed to pick up missions and complete any of them at your pace. There are numerous treasures around the map that you can collect for various uses. The environment is interactive, for example, you can break wooden boxes and get materials if you are lucky, or you can talk with NPCs on the streets. Some of the NPCs may give out important hints for your missions.

The Actions

Luffy has melee and ranged attacks. The combat is smooth and easy-to-learn since it basically involves only one or two buttons for a combo or ultimate skills. However, you will get frustrated at times because Luffy just won’t face the locked enemy automatically. You will frequently miss your skill or fail to block an incoming attack.

Luffy’s iconic gum-gum abilities such as Gum Gum Eagle Storm and Gum Gum Red Hawk are available in the game too. Some of the moves are only usable in certain gear mode, so you will have to take note of that (well, guess the fans are clear about this).

Similar to Spider-Man, Luffy can stretch his hands to perform long jumps across rooftops and trees or swing into action. Luffy can also hide in barrels to sneak through enemies. Stealth killing enemies is a better choice, as it will be quite difficult to handle a bunch of them (especially when they have gunfire weapons). The enemies have a big detection range, they alert each other once they see you too so you will have to be really careful.

The Features

Not all Luffy’s skills are unlocked at first, you will need to learn them using the SP collected from missions. The game features a skill tree that separates into 5 categories – Battle, Armament Haki, Parameters, Explore and Observation Haki. There are a lot of them and the good thing is, the skills don’t really connect with each other so you can learn any skill you want as long as you have enough SP to spend.

There is a Karma system as well. You can increase the Karma level by completing missions for a specific character or faction. Once you reach certain levels, you can get access to unique cut scenes and missions. Your crew members will help you in many ways, for example, you can approach Franky to make stats enhancing equipment.

Verdict

As the first video game in the franchise to feature an open world, we could see the good effort put into One Piece World Seeker. Its open-world is massive and seamless, the missions are decently interesting, while the combat is smooth with easy controls. Most importantly, you get to meet your favourite One Piece characters and travel alongside them.

However, the game still has a great space for improvement. The missions often involve puzzle-solving, unfortunately the direction isn’t clear enough so you will probably waste time searching for the objective. The voiceover is disappointing too – we were expecting full voiceovers but in fact, voiceovers are offered in cutscenes only.

Check out our video review and gameplay: