From TV Animation One Piece: Tobidase Kaizoku-dan! is a Japan-exclusive role-playing game created by Bandai for the PlayStation. It is the fourth game to be based on the One Piece manga and anime. This game's introduction uses the theme song Believe from the One Piece Anime.
Also in series
Reviews View More
A few months back, my partner picked up One Piece Odyssey, the new One Piece RPG, and I watched her play through just about all of it. It got me thinking about One Piece a lot again, and as a bit of a joke, I picked this game up so I could play a One Piece RPG alongside her x3. Schedules got busy, though, so it ended up being quite some time before I could actually sit down and play this with her, and this last weekend I finally saw the bugger through to the end. It took me some 20-ish hours (the game doesn’t count playtime) to beat it in Japanese on my PS2, and I didn’t touch the post-game content at all.
The story premise for this is actually something my partner and I theorized about the potential of when I was watching her play One Piece Odyssey. You’re not playing as the Straw Hat crew, the licensed characters from the show. You’re playing as an original character alongside them on an adventure. I don’t wanna be Luffy, I wanna go on an adventure with Luffy, so to speak. You play as an original character plus two original friends (a boy and a girl) of theirs on a pirate adventure to collect all six legendary gold fragments of a mysterious treasure. The Straw Hat crew are also out to find them, but they’re attacked and split up from each other in the intro cutscene by a mysterious and powerful new enemy. After your rag tag crew is rescued by Ussop, you set out to help reuinte the Straw Hat crew and find all the pieces of this legendary treasure!
As for where this game takes place in the One Piece story, it’s a side-story taking place in between them defeating Aaron and going to Loguetown (and the post-game involves them meeting Chopper, I believe). As a general piece of writing, it’s really nothing special, and it’s paced pretty terribly. There are some fun fan service-y segments like when you meet up with Buggy (still missing his body parts after his fight with Luffy) that made me laugh quite a bit, but overall the game is really wanting in that department. It’s cool just how much VA they got in the game, but it’s just not hitting the mark of a licensed fan service-y game like Banpresto is so good at doing. The writing is definitely the reason to play the game, but between the game getting in the way of itself and the generally lackluster pacing on top of that, it’s far less than stellar, and it’s honestly not enough of a draw to recommend the game on these merits alone (unlike a game like Super Hero Operations, which I played earlier this year and is from only a year or two before this).
Mechanically, this is technically an RPG, but in a more loose sense. It’s more like an adventure game composed of various mini-games with some vague trappings of an RPG like leveling up and getting equipment. There are six different locations in the main game (with another one or two in the post-game), and each of these is one big isometric map that you sail around on completing objectives. These objectives are usually indicated to you via your compass’s needle, but often times you’ll need to just sail around and try your best to find whatever it is you’re looking for (and the game isn’t particularly interested in reminding you of what that is if you forget, not that the directions you have are all that helpful very often anyhow). A lot of this, especially around the game’s midpoint, devolves into a ton of somewhat aimless scavenger hunting, and it is DRAINING to say the least. The game has a TON of padding around making you either aimlessly or even not aimlessly sail around the world back and forth between different locations, and it’s the biggest culprit when it comes to how bad the narrative’s pacing is. This game would be a lot better if it were 30 or 50% shorter. That is just how much padding we’re talking here.
The other activities you do along your scavenger hunting and sailing around the map are different forms of fighting. The one the game has the most mechanics around (buying equipment, accessories, and leveling up) are the roulette-based 3v3 fights with other pirate crews. Weapons you buy in shops not only have procedurally generated stats in accordance with their weapon level, but they also determine the layout of this roulette (they use the word “roulette” but it’s more like a single-wheel slot machine) timing mini-game . How many hits (and how strong they are), how many misses, and what extra modifiers (like buffs for your team, debuffs for the enemy, and even whether or not you’re hitting a single target or the whole enemy team) are determined by your weapon.
I generally found that combos (by hitting the right mark for it) are the way to go, and more damage makes the roulette spin faster, so slower weapons like bats and knuckle weapons are really the only sensible way to live. As a result, most weapons I found were basically useless, and vendors swap what they sell constantly, so it was mostly just a game of going from vendor to vendor on each map and seeing if they happened to have a better version of what I already had. These 3v3 fights are probably the best thought out part of the game, but even then, they’re far from perfect, and they also don’t have enough sprites in-game to have you fight anyone but generic enemies (generally composed of the same sprites you could’ve potentially used for your non-main character original pirate crew).
How you actually fight big name bad guys like Arlong or Krieg are in several forms. First you have ship battles, which aren’t very special, but they’re the most fun of these sorts of fights. You’re shooting their cannonballs out of the air and shooting specified spots on their ships in simple rail-shooter segments, and while it’s not amazing, it’s a fun enough change of pace. Then you have what I’ll call the word battles. This is how you fight giant sea monsters (by hurling big furniture off of the deck of the ship at them) or big bosses (via your list of silly special moves) by picking a word from a procedurally generated list, and the longer the word, the more damage you do. There’s a little bit of strategy here, as you’re trying to hit them down to about exactly lethal, as if you overshoot they’ll likely get back up and not actually die, but you also effectively can’t die yourself in these segments, so it’s mostly just silly, flashy fun, and they’re a clever and efficient way to give the player fights against big bosses as well without making a ton of bespoke assets for it.
The biggest loser of these extra modes is what I’ll call the choose-your-own-adventure fights. There are three of them, and they’re conceptually the Straw Hat Pirates fighting against big enemies and you’re picking moves for them from a binary list each time. Picking the right option will progress the fight down a particular dialogue tree, making this a glorified visual novel segment. However, the big problem here is that there is almost never any indication of what move is actually the right move. Even moves that “do damage” (there are no health bars in this segment) might not actually be the correct move because it’s not progressing the dialogue trees the right way. These devolve into trial and error slogs of just trying to select the correct choice to let you be free of this awful mess. These are so bad and unintuitive (not to mention I couldn’t really find guides for them on the Japanese internet even) that they alone are what make the game completely unrecommendable. I wish that were not the case, but they were so miserable and so devoid of actual mechanics that it’s just impossible to overlook them in any meaningful sense, especially in a game that’s already such a mixed bag with the good struggling very hard to outpace the bad.
Speaking of mixed bags, we also have the game’s presentation, which fits that description to a T. The graphics, when they’re there, are generally either pretty okay 3d models (outside of the rail shooter segments which look better) or visual novel-style segments. The VN segments use a ton of art from the show and manga (as well as some completely original stuff), and while here and there they’ve picked some quite uncanny screen caps of the crew, it generally looks quite nice, and the Straw Hat crew in particular have a TON of different sprites they’ll use for different attacks or emotions. The audio quality also isn’t great, being a PS1 game, but quite a large amount of the dialogue is also voice acted, at least for the licensed characters. It’s honestly quite impressive just how many of them (some of which have barely any lines) they managed to gather the voice actors together to get them to record for this game for. While it’s not exactly Atelier Marie, where literally all spoken dialogue is voiced, it’s still a remarkable amount of story-important dialogue given voice. The music, though, is extremely basic and not very good. It’s all incredibly forgettable and doesn’t really scream “One Piece” at all, and it’s an unfortunate low point for a game with otherwise quite competent presentation.
Verdict: Not Recommended. Even for the most die hard One Piece fans, I think this game is going to be a really tough pill to swallow compared to the sheer amount of far more competent One Piece games out there. Sure, it’s an original story, but it’s so underwhelming and poorly paced that even that can’t save it, especially with how downright awful or boring so much of the gameplay often is. I’m glad to have it out of my way, but at the rate we’re going, this is probably going to be the worst game I play this year. Of all the licensed Japan-only games you need to know Japanese pretty darn well to actually play, this is one you can very safely skip.
The story premise for this is actually something my partner and I theorized about the potential of when I was watching her play One Piece Odyssey. You’re not playing as the Straw Hat crew, the licensed characters from the show. You’re playing as an original character alongside them on an adventure. I don’t wanna be Luffy, I wanna go on an adventure with Luffy, so to speak. You play as an original character plus two original friends (a boy and a girl) of theirs on a pirate adventure to collect all six legendary gold fragments of a mysterious treasure. The Straw Hat crew are also out to find them, but they’re attacked and split up from each other in the intro cutscene by a mysterious and powerful new enemy. After your rag tag crew is rescued by Ussop, you set out to help reuinte the Straw Hat crew and find all the pieces of this legendary treasure!
As for where this game takes place in the One Piece story, it’s a side-story taking place in between them defeating Aaron and going to Loguetown (and the post-game involves them meeting Chopper, I believe). As a general piece of writing, it’s really nothing special, and it’s paced pretty terribly. There are some fun fan service-y segments like when you meet up with Buggy (still missing his body parts after his fight with Luffy) that made me laugh quite a bit, but overall the game is really wanting in that department. It’s cool just how much VA they got in the game, but it’s just not hitting the mark of a licensed fan service-y game like Banpresto is so good at doing. The writing is definitely the reason to play the game, but between the game getting in the way of itself and the generally lackluster pacing on top of that, it’s far less than stellar, and it’s honestly not enough of a draw to recommend the game on these merits alone (unlike a game like Super Hero Operations, which I played earlier this year and is from only a year or two before this).
Mechanically, this is technically an RPG, but in a more loose sense. It’s more like an adventure game composed of various mini-games with some vague trappings of an RPG like leveling up and getting equipment. There are six different locations in the main game (with another one or two in the post-game), and each of these is one big isometric map that you sail around on completing objectives. These objectives are usually indicated to you via your compass’s needle, but often times you’ll need to just sail around and try your best to find whatever it is you’re looking for (and the game isn’t particularly interested in reminding you of what that is if you forget, not that the directions you have are all that helpful very often anyhow). A lot of this, especially around the game’s midpoint, devolves into a ton of somewhat aimless scavenger hunting, and it is DRAINING to say the least. The game has a TON of padding around making you either aimlessly or even not aimlessly sail around the world back and forth between different locations, and it’s the biggest culprit when it comes to how bad the narrative’s pacing is. This game would be a lot better if it were 30 or 50% shorter. That is just how much padding we’re talking here.
The other activities you do along your scavenger hunting and sailing around the map are different forms of fighting. The one the game has the most mechanics around (buying equipment, accessories, and leveling up) are the roulette-based 3v3 fights with other pirate crews. Weapons you buy in shops not only have procedurally generated stats in accordance with their weapon level, but they also determine the layout of this roulette (they use the word “roulette” but it’s more like a single-wheel slot machine) timing mini-game . How many hits (and how strong they are), how many misses, and what extra modifiers (like buffs for your team, debuffs for the enemy, and even whether or not you’re hitting a single target or the whole enemy team) are determined by your weapon.
I generally found that combos (by hitting the right mark for it) are the way to go, and more damage makes the roulette spin faster, so slower weapons like bats and knuckle weapons are really the only sensible way to live. As a result, most weapons I found were basically useless, and vendors swap what they sell constantly, so it was mostly just a game of going from vendor to vendor on each map and seeing if they happened to have a better version of what I already had. These 3v3 fights are probably the best thought out part of the game, but even then, they’re far from perfect, and they also don’t have enough sprites in-game to have you fight anyone but generic enemies (generally composed of the same sprites you could’ve potentially used for your non-main character original pirate crew).
How you actually fight big name bad guys like Arlong or Krieg are in several forms. First you have ship battles, which aren’t very special, but they’re the most fun of these sorts of fights. You’re shooting their cannonballs out of the air and shooting specified spots on their ships in simple rail-shooter segments, and while it’s not amazing, it’s a fun enough change of pace. Then you have what I’ll call the word battles. This is how you fight giant sea monsters (by hurling big furniture off of the deck of the ship at them) or big bosses (via your list of silly special moves) by picking a word from a procedurally generated list, and the longer the word, the more damage you do. There’s a little bit of strategy here, as you’re trying to hit them down to about exactly lethal, as if you overshoot they’ll likely get back up and not actually die, but you also effectively can’t die yourself in these segments, so it’s mostly just silly, flashy fun, and they’re a clever and efficient way to give the player fights against big bosses as well without making a ton of bespoke assets for it.
The biggest loser of these extra modes is what I’ll call the choose-your-own-adventure fights. There are three of them, and they’re conceptually the Straw Hat Pirates fighting against big enemies and you’re picking moves for them from a binary list each time. Picking the right option will progress the fight down a particular dialogue tree, making this a glorified visual novel segment. However, the big problem here is that there is almost never any indication of what move is actually the right move. Even moves that “do damage” (there are no health bars in this segment) might not actually be the correct move because it’s not progressing the dialogue trees the right way. These devolve into trial and error slogs of just trying to select the correct choice to let you be free of this awful mess. These are so bad and unintuitive (not to mention I couldn’t really find guides for them on the Japanese internet even) that they alone are what make the game completely unrecommendable. I wish that were not the case, but they were so miserable and so devoid of actual mechanics that it’s just impossible to overlook them in any meaningful sense, especially in a game that’s already such a mixed bag with the good struggling very hard to outpace the bad.
Speaking of mixed bags, we also have the game’s presentation, which fits that description to a T. The graphics, when they’re there, are generally either pretty okay 3d models (outside of the rail shooter segments which look better) or visual novel-style segments. The VN segments use a ton of art from the show and manga (as well as some completely original stuff), and while here and there they’ve picked some quite uncanny screen caps of the crew, it generally looks quite nice, and the Straw Hat crew in particular have a TON of different sprites they’ll use for different attacks or emotions. The audio quality also isn’t great, being a PS1 game, but quite a large amount of the dialogue is also voice acted, at least for the licensed characters. It’s honestly quite impressive just how many of them (some of which have barely any lines) they managed to gather the voice actors together to get them to record for this game for. While it’s not exactly Atelier Marie, where literally all spoken dialogue is voiced, it’s still a remarkable amount of story-important dialogue given voice. The music, though, is extremely basic and not very good. It’s all incredibly forgettable and doesn’t really scream “One Piece” at all, and it’s an unfortunate low point for a game with otherwise quite competent presentation.
Verdict: Not Recommended. Even for the most die hard One Piece fans, I think this game is going to be a really tough pill to swallow compared to the sheer amount of far more competent One Piece games out there. Sure, it’s an original story, but it’s so underwhelming and poorly paced that even that can’t save it, especially with how downright awful or boring so much of the gameplay often is. I’m glad to have it out of my way, but at the rate we’re going, this is probably going to be the worst game I play this year. Of all the licensed Japan-only games you need to know Japanese pretty darn well to actually play, this is one you can very safely skip.