I will preface my review by stating that I have never watched or read One Piece, so I'm not an existing fan of the franchise. I did however still really enjoy my time with the game.

The story is unfortunately the weakest part of Odyssey, being a mish mash retelling of various arcs from the series. The first big area you explore is by far the most fleshed out and really has a grand sense of scope, which I found really drew me into the game. From then on however the other areas feel considerably smaller by comparison. While I still found them all to be unique and fun, they just don't hit the same highs or carry the same weight.

As someone with no frame of reference for pretty much all of the characters, the game also has a habit of whirlwind introducing people with an intended sense of gravitas, but without providing any buildup or much context to earn it. I did like pretty much all of the characters, so it lends credence to the popularity of the manga/anime in my eyes, but it's easy to see the faults with this. People new to the series could easily become totally detached from the story, and fans could be disappointed by them trotting out these characters without giving them their due time in the spotlight.

Onto the good for me though, was the general gameplay loop and combat! I'm normally not one to try to collect everything in a game, but I actually really enjoyed exploring each of the towns and poking around in every nook and cranny I could find throughout the run. The variety of characters lends itself well to having many possible team composition options, and the combat is satisfying. Being able to speed up the animations helps save it from ever feeling too arduous, which I thought was a welcome addition. My biggest gripe would just be that the difficulty level is a bit too on the easy side - difficulty options would have been a welcome addition for sure.

I did also enjoy customizing the equipment for all of the characters and found the easy skill boost/reduction mechanics to be well done. It makes the game really approachable, providing great flexibility to play things how you want to. The game does struggle a bit with giving you too many skills that feel redundant, so on a lot of the characters I could have access to 15 skills and find myself always using the same 3 or 4.

For me, this game was a welcome surprise and a refreshing, light RPG. I think the best advice I could give is just to give the demo a shot if it interests you, and if you enjoy the combat just dive into the full game. I didn't go for the platinum since there's one particularly annoying achievement (collect 99 Yaya cubes), but I did everything else the game had to offer since I was still having a lot of fun by the time the story came to a close.

As someone that doesn't care about the multiplayer, this is the most disappointing Forza I've played, unfortunately. Extremely lacking in content, a few weeks of playing casually and I have nothing left to do (gold in all cups). A lot of obnoxious bugs, the worst being the softlock that occurs when applying upgrades after having changed your fuel/tyres in a previous race. I lost 1 practice+race of progress multiple times, and in the worst case scenario I lost 3 full races.

Seriously, how does the game not save every time you complete a race, every time you add upgrades to your car, etc.? It's incredibly stingy about autosaving, with no option to manually save, and for absolutely no good reason. It totally baffles me that anyone on the team could think this was an acceptable way to have in-game progress handled, especially with such a detrimental bug present.

It's not all negative, I still think the driving feels good and there's a good core underneath. I actually enjoy the idea behind the Builder's Cup and upgrading cars along the way, but it's not without flaws itself. There are too many restrictive cups in the currently available selection that leave you in the lowest tiers of cars, and often times you only get one race at the end of a cup to perform in a higher class. It's a good idea, but flawed execution.

They can patch this to make it much better eventually, but it is so severely undercooked right now. Unless you're really intent on playing it, I can't recommend it until they fix the progress-impacting bugs.

Started out alright, but really falls flat in a lot of ways, disappointingly. Even though I agree with a lot of the messages this game was trying to espouse, it lacks any semblance of nuance and delivers everything with such a heavy hand.

Maybe this would be better suited to a teen audience, but for an adult it's way too overt. I feel like it also falls into a trap of becoming predictable, as it persistently attempts to subvert expectations, but does so in a very obvious and repetitive manner (thus making it predictable again).

Not terrible, but definitely a step back from the first game.