Genuinely disappointing. A step back in pretty much every area compared to the excellent third game. The new limited scenery destruction is good but only seemingly in a limited number of levels. I only ended up enjoying using one character, and others like Jinbei and Nami who I enjoyed in 3 felt extremely weak in comparison. It feels like these licensed Musou games are working the opposite way to how I expected; usually the sequels improve things after a shaky first game. This was a massive regression, and yet Persona 5 Scramble is excellent (albeit extremely long!)

I'm also going to take out my frustration on the embarrassingly poor translation here - the reason why I've knocked this down to a 1. It's absolutely full of errors and was seemingly translated by a disparate group of first-year students, judging by the basic grammar errors and mistranslated dialogue. I was spotting a translation error pretty much once every few minutes in the back half, ranging from getting the subject and the object of a sentence mixed up, botched idioms, just plain not understanding the meaning of words, reversing the meaning of words and even leaving a Japanese in-universe term untranslated right in the ending cutscene. It genuinely reminds me of the dreadful stuff I used to turn in when I was doing my first classes in translation - and then I had the excuse that prose is usually written in longer form. The producer responsible for this should be ashamed. The original writing isn't exactly amazing in the first place, with the plot culminating in a literal fan fiction episode at the end, but if it's for something which people will pay money for then you should take some pride in what you do.

I bought this on PC and didn't have access to the original Japanese text because they didn't feel like putting it in (likely because it cost half as much as the PS4 version on PSN) but I genuinely feel that the shoddy translation detracted enough from the experience that I should have put in the extra money and dealt with the inevitable PS4 technical issues. Next time I'll just buy it on console - second hand of course.

Warrior games have a certain niche in the gaming world as something that is universally seen as the same, but with more bells and whistles each time. Some warrior games have different gimmicks from others, and often with licensing involved they try to make everything work properly, but they usually come up short in some way or another. Leading to a lot of these games focusing more on the gameplay loop they have rather than any kind of story or any meaningful character interaction

One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 feels just like that. It has the same formulas and gameplay that a lot of the warrior games have, but the way they do it just doesn't really hold up as well as you'd want. While I will say that leveling up, and making yourself more powerful is certainly easier compared to some other entries in the franchise, One Piece: Pirate Warriors kinda just falls apart with the way they handle the story.

These kind of games are always doomed to make you play against a ton of enemies, and when you add a bunch of enemies to fights that don't really have that to began with, a lot of the weight and meaning of said fights tend to lose meaning. Add in the fact that they had an original plot for their take on Wano, and yet some how failed to deliver proper stakes that actual met Warrior standards is shockingly disappointing. Mixing all these characters together and kinda mashing them without any real point just ends up feeling shallow in the end, and Pirate Warriors 4 story just really leaves a bad taste in your mouth that didn't need to be there.

It really is a shame that they didn't take advantage of making something newer and more interesting rather than just breeze thru a spark notes version of the story without giving much weight to the meaningful parts to it. I get that there are budgeting issues and time and effort to make characters work, but legitimately I had more fun with the games scenarios over the campaign itself. If they just tried to add something newer or made their own thing it would change how poorly managed the licensing is, and give us something at least unique to experience for a One Piece fan.

Is there fun to be had? Of course, it's a warriors game, and there is something so addictive to comboing 1,000 enemies at once while playing as cool characters that do cool things. But if you look anywhere past the gameplay you just end up with moldly bread with some cheese on it. Sure, the cheese can be good, but that bread just isn't worth eating to get to it. One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 is simply just a missed opportunity that even One Piece fans will find hard to swallow.