Having played Pirate Warriors 4 awhile back when I hadn't even read One Piece yet, I figured now was the best time to try out Pirate Warriors 3 since I fully caught up on the manga. It's a pretty solidly fun musou game, characters all feel like they have thier niches, some better than others, and it does a decent enough job at adapting up to Dressrosa's midway point. The Dream log was also enjoyable, if not just a wee bit too long. My main gripes with the game really just stem from the grind for crew levels, as well as having to replay the same maps over and over for coins to upgrade your character's Special Attacks (Looking at you Sanji, Zoro and Usopp). There is one thing for sure though, I'm never platinuming this game ever again.

Just a really fun warriors game, if you know warrior games you kinda know what you're getting into but this is definitely one of the better ones that I've played.

This is the first One Piece PW game I played though and OP just works really well in this genre. Locations are diverse and every character plays very differently thanks to the devil fruits, haki and other combat styles.

Not much to say, just a fun time

No one will believe you if you say this is your favorite Musuo.

Good "theming": One Piece story's most dynamic beats get their box checked. Great stage variety visually and mechanically as you more from Romance Dawn to a simpler time when a Warlord of the Sea was the arc villain.

Great Mechanics: Presents a good mix of genre conventions and innovations to match the theme. Combos balance flashy animations with slight variation in utility. Leveling character accommodates the wide cast and gates progression in single player to a solid degree of pacing.

A nice soundtrack to wrap it all together. That's a one piece video game I can stomach playing. Back to you Jan.

Just... Not really one of OF's best, I'm afraid.

There are some good things on display here. I'm really fond of the game having traditional heavy attacks, they help pad out movesets and offset the relative rigidity that's inherent to this type of musou. Level 2 specials are an excellent idea. The story mode is fairly all-encompassing, digging out arcs that most OP adaptations just straight up hate mentioning. Likewise, coming from PW4 it's actually nice to have more niche characters like Perona, Caesar and Magellan. Lastly, characters that suck shit in PW4 like Chopper, Tashigi and Shanks are very good here.

But the bad bits of this game are really bad.

The gameplay is solid, yes, but the Kizuna system very arbitrarily gates off many of your combo enders. For those not in the know, Kizuna Rush is a super mode everyone can enter after filling a bar - so long as they have allies. For a limited time, characters fight in their best state (Except Shanks, weirdly, whose Haki powerup still needs trigger) and get extra moves.

Not bad on p- Oh who the fuck am I kidding? It is bad on paper, and in practice. Fights essentially become a game of rushing to get Kizuna meter, and then frantically scrabbling to kill things for your S-Rank. The first few times you break out into Kizuna Rush and start slaughtering, it's great. The subsequent 5000 times, less so. It is a profoundly aggravating system, especially for anyone hoping to use powerups like Luffy's Gear 2.

And the story, god the story. The arcs it has aren't bad on their own, but they're deeply annoying to play due to the overuse of visual novel-esque storyboard cutscenes that break up the flow of the mission. If you've read my other musou reviews you may think "Ah, but at least it'll stop you outpacing the narrative!" and you'd be wrong. It is still posible to lose out on S Ranks for Clear Time due to dialogue going on far too long - though, mercifully, this has not happened to me. There are a lot of these cutscenes too, and doing side objectives can hoist more on you. This is perhaps the first game to disincentivize doing optional stuff.

Further reinforcing just how miserable this game's narrative is are the levels. More specifically, the movement speed. There's no horse or true dash or whatever, so your only option is to walk. Unfortunately, while this does use the early 2010s Corridor-Territory musou level format, there's still too much downtime between points of interest which is apparent in both Dream Log (due to constant backtracking) or Treasure Log (due to your allies often nuking enemies and snowballing). I don't know how OF fucked this up, the last two PW games, Hyrule Warriors DE and FE Warriors all managed to nail it.

And don't get me started on the progression. The coin system is annoying as ever, yes, especially due to how many characters/NPCs/stages this game covers, but the skill poster system is worse. They're both just awful, and require a lot of repetitive grinding to really go anywhere. That skills are locked behind posters and not simply coins or beli (as in PW4) is painful, especially for more vital ones like the million Kizuna buffs you need.

All in all, it's just an eh title. Feels like a file you'd find on the moddb page for Hyrule Warriors DE that looks ambitious but was abandoned by the mod after they got into FFXIV.

This is how a musou game must be, completely full of content. This game side content (Dream Log) is one the best after story content i've seen for a musou game. ´

The replayability is insane, the roster is big and the gameplay is fun. Every character has his own upgrade tree so you will have alot of things to do and farm, you really feel like ur time is rewarded.

Some people may have a grip with gameplay cause every character follows the same buttons but the true is, every character still feels different. Some character have their own gimmicks and the attacks are all so different between them.

In conclusion, its one of the best musou games and a perfect One Piece game for fans.