One Piece Odyssey: The Final Preview
After 25 years of hanging out with Luffy and friends, Bandai Namco aims to show the One Piece series still has a few tricks up its stretchy sleeves by converting the beloved pirate crew into a proper JRPG. But the challenge in taking one of the most popular names in anime and making it fit the mold of one of the most beloved game genres is not a small one, and so developer I Love Computer Art has switched up many of the fundamentals to make it better suited for the iconic pirate adventure. In my time with it, I was pleasantly surprised how many of these changes felt like improvements over the standard JRPG recipe, and more importantly, made things feel much more in line with what one might expect from One Piece. After three hours running around as Zoro and Chopper, I barely felt like I’d scratched the surface.
One of the major ways One Piece Odyssey mixes up the stock JRPG formula is by doing away with the standard turn-based battle system where your party squares off against a rival group of enemies. While combat is still turn-based with standard attacks, more powerful skills or special abilities that can be activated a limited number of times, and consumables that can be used up, each character was sorted into four different zones and faced their own slate of baddies instead of fighting as a group. Importantly, this did wonders to make combat encounters more closely reflect fighting sequences in the anime, where all members of the Straw Hat Crew are strong enough to swat aside numerous enemies on their own and show off their mad skills. It was also nice that every character got their time in the spotlight, as I was compelled to use them equally to get through encounters, whereas in traditional JRPGs it might be more
Read more on ign.com
