G-Review: One Piece - Part 2

One Piece: Unlimited Cruise 1 – Treasure Beneath the Waves!
Review by Thomas Newman

RECAP

In my previous review I talked about a Nintendo Wii game related to One Piece, back from when I remember playing it before I was denied access to it. Now I take you on a review tour on the sequel game that I have just finished completing.

It should also be noted, whilst I will try my best to explain in detail about the game to an extent that this review can be self-contained, it would be much recommended that you read my previous review “One Piece: Unlimited Adventure” first, as I will be explaining some tweaks and changes made.

STORY

Apparently this game is canon to the Manga and Anime, as the story was set up and designed by Eiichiro Oda, the creator of One Piece, I am not sure if he was part of the first game, but knowing he is in charge of this game really helps create a compelling story that grips me in the same way the Anime does. From what I can see, it takes place after the Thriller Bark arc, as right from the first cut-scene we can clearly see Brook, who recently joined our heroes as a new crewmember.

The Crew have braved a heavy storm, and Luffy was sent flying into some light, and was told that if he and his crew had completed a set of ordeals then they will get a present. To aid them, a small cute demon has been created to help guide them, named Gabri, and they search 4 Islands to face ordeals, before going to the centre Island to pick up their prize.

Its somewhat the same plot to the first, instead of an orb to open pathways, Gabri seems to do it for you, should you give him the right items and energy to do so. Gabri seems to be this game’s incarnation of Popora from the first game, only this time he is more involved, and instead of Seals creating Bosses, they come out of these weird plants that open up to dump a seed on the ground, which then open to reveal a boss.

I wont spoil the ending, but after defeating the end boss I was treated to a gut-wrenching cut-scene, followed by a massive “To Be Continued” message and a trailer advertising the next game, that said, this game is the first of a two-parter, but to be fair this game is somewhat self-contained.

One Big thing about this game is that it isn’t dubbed by Funimation, the whole game keeps all of the original Japanese voices, which is accompanied by subtitles to help understand what’s going on. This is both a good and bad thing, bad because there are no Funimation voice actors like last time, which made the first game so epic, but good because a majority of One Piece fans (myself included) have been watching the anime in the same fashion, so it doesn’t affect the game’s narration since we are so used to this format that we can understand what is going on.

Another big thing is that whilst the English Unlimited Adventure was American only (hence why a Freeloader was needed to run it), this game is the opposite, and is European exclusive, for me this is excellent since I don’t need any peripherals to run it and can just put the disk in and play, but its bad because it also means the Americans are missing out. And that’s my big rant right there, its understandable why Unlimited Adventure never made it to the UK, but of all countries why didn’t America get its own version? And this ladies and gentlemen is why I hate the god-awful concept of Region Coding!

CHARACTERS

Since I mentioned in my previous review about all the main characters, I am going to simply explain the modifications done to each character. Each character has new costumes like they did in the first, only this time their costumes resemble animal themes, which I will list as I go along.

Monkey D. Luffy (Lion): He is still the heavy-hitter, with some attacks changed to make the game a little different from the first, when hitting AAA he now uses Gum Gum Axe instead of Gum Gum Bazooka. His Dash move is a lot harder to control, as he may run past enemies by accident and get hit. As he levels up, his moves will get stronger if he has low HP

Roronoa Zoro (Dragon): He now has his third sword which he obtained whilst fighting at Thriller Bark, whilst this doesn’t contribute to his moves it shows they kept detail. So far I haven’t notice much change in his attack pattern.

Nami (Tropical Fish): Her attack pattern has changed, Thunderbolt Tempo is still her finishing move, but is also useable in combat as a normal attack by holding A to create clouds and Jump+A to activate it. A Disadvantage is that some enemies are smaller, so when she jumps to use Thunderball on its own it may not hit them. As she levels up, items will be easier to steal when attacking them, which helps make item-finding from enemies less of a chore.

Ussop (Owl): He now uses the Impact Dial as his Shake move, whilst interesting I would have preferred the old move on One Piece UA. Like in the first, he is your Weapons developer, same thing, give him items he will make tools and weaponry. He no longer has Sogeking as an alternate costume, rather Sogeking is his finishing move, upgrading his attacks much like Luffy’s Gear Second moves or Chopper’s Rumble Ball.

Sanji (Goat): Except his attacks he hasn’t changed at all, he is still the cook and its still the same as the older game, give him items and he will cook food to upgrade your characters HP and Stamina.

Chopper (Dinosaur): I haven’t really noticed a lot of change in Chopper, he still creates medicine when given the right items, but one of his finishing moves involves making sure Ussop is still active, and they commence the “Hammer Shooting Star” move they used in the Alabasta arc, nice homage there.

Robin (Butterfly): What a HUGE improvement, as I said before, Robin was the hardest crewmember to control, but she has been modified to allow better flexibility, her attacks no longer “end” at cliffs, and so long as you are on target with your enemies and are close enough, she can take down 3 enemies at a time. One thing I don’t like about her, when walking up hills you can get a glimpse of her panties under her skirt, I have never been a fan of fan-service and wish they kept her reasonable like they did in the first game, but other than that, I have nothing against Robin and she was fun to play as.

Franky (Rhino): Since Ussop is now your main developer, what does this leave Franky with? Well, when you travel around the Island you will come across dead-ends in the form of giant gaps and huge boulders blocking your path. Give Franky the right tools and he will build bridges and tunnels to help get across, basically acting as a secondary path-opener when Gabri can’t help. His special move is his giant nun-chuck, which he used in Thriller Bark.

BROOK

(Costume resembles a Swallow)

Since Brook is the new crewmember and additional playable character in the game, he deserves his own page. Sadly he doesn’t cook or create items like most of the crew members, as he is the crew’s musician, but in battle he can be quite versatile. He uses a long sword drawn from his cane, which he can slice enemies with, large or small he can beat a lot of enemies quite easily. His Dash move though, “Humming March”, is ridiculous, he prances around left and right as he moves and if enemies are in dead centre, he is going to miss them.

Another useful thing about Brook is that Zoro is no longer the only character capable of cutting trees and vines, now you have two characters suitable for resource collecting. But the biggest helpful feature is the dash, not only is he the fastest crewmember going, but as he levels up, it will take less Stamina to dash, and on top of that, when dashing he can walk on water! Course you need to get on land before the stamina runs out or he drowns, but it’s a helpful feature when trying to make it to small islands.

During cut-scenes he has to be the funniest character going, he is the same guy from the anime, making jokes about the fact that he is a skeleton (revived from the Revive Revive Fruit), asking Nami and Robin to show off their panties, and his unique laugh “YOHOHOHO!” is enough to make any anime fan laugh.

When this game was rumoured to be dubbed in English by Funimation, it was rumoured that Brook was to be voiced by Barry Yandell, but so far there has been no confirmation to back this theory up, and it will be a while before his voice actor is announced (the English airing of Thriller Bark at latest, which is still far off). Sadly, until we hear official word from Funimation, Brook’s voice actor is herby unknown.

GAMEPLAY

The same as the first, resource gathering, enemy thrashing, catching animals and fishing for fish, though some tweaks have been made from the first game to make things easier.

You no longer have a camp to set up as a main base, your main base is now the Thousand Sunny, so now you can travel around their very own ship, Sanji cooks meals in the Kitchen whilst Chopper makes medicine in the Ward. Sadly, Franky locked all the doors and lost the keys, so he has to make new keys to new rooms as you progress.

One huge improvement over the first game, Stamina now recovers within time! When you Dash and waste all Stamina, it will now slowly recover a few seconds later, making combo-moves less stressful. Granted, certain moves now use Stamina as well so you still need to wait until it recovers to pull off moves, and finishing moves take up Stamina permanently which means recovery items are still needed. Stamina also doesn’t regenerate when in the harsh cold. Whilst these methods of wasting Stamina are trivial, the fact that they recover at all is extremely helpful, especially when using Brook to dash through landscapes.

Unlike in the first game, animals and fish are now in 3D, as opposed to just simple images representing what they are. One reason for this is that the fish can be put in the fish tank so when you go to the stern, you can see the fish swimming in the tank, an impressive display of graphics indeed.

Exploring Islands is also less stressful, not only does Franky help in building shortcuts, but Ussop can also make a catapult, which you can use in certain areas that will take you right to the beginning. Franky also makes a “Wherever Cannon”, which helps blast you to marked areas, eliminating the need to travel far distances to get to certain areas.

As you have noticed, tweaks have been made in order to improve the game and tackle mistakes from the first, Robin’s moves, Island Exploring and Combo-attacks are just few improvements to enhance the experience. Being Japanese with English subtitles doesn’t ruin the game at all, since it makes it more true to the original and just as entertaining as the anime.

ENEMIES

When facing enemies, once you pull off a combo move, rather than hitting heavy damage on one enemy, the “Break-Rush” now lasts a few seconds, allowing you to hit more enemies on the fly, leaving a better chance to knock them down and collect dropped items.

The enemies are the exact same from the old game, with few exceptions. Mud Puppets serve as the main enemies of the areas, transforming into other enemies on the fly, thus explaining why the Navy’s and Pirates are out trying to kill you on uncharted Islands. New enemies also occur, you now face the Enforcers, Goat-like people that have made an appearance in the Skypiea arc, nice to see some familiar territory. Then you have Spaceys, which I found trivial at first since they only appeared in a side arc in the Manga, small people who now serve Eneru after he was defeated, but in a boss fight it was explained that the tree gathered data from around the world, explaining why they are facing enemies they haven’t fought before. A Subtle explanation that works well, and hey, their inclusion was satisfying all the same.

Also appearing out of nowhere are Zombies, resembling enemies from the Thriller Bark arc, they are annoying when they rise up from the ground and hit you when you get too close, other than that, I can see why they were included, and rightfully so. The most annoying enemies are the Agents, which seem to be reminiscent of the Enies Lobby arc, they disappear and reappear in the most awkward of times with little time to escape until you are hit.

As for Bosses, many characters from Unlimited Adventure returned, such as Don Kreig, Eneru and Portagus D. Ace, but there are some new ones added too. The first boss you face is none other than Bartholamew Kuma, one good look at him made me go “Oh Hell!”, but he isn’t as hard to take down as I thought. The main Boss everyone is going to remember is Gecko Moria, since he is difficult, has a finishing attack that you cannot escape or survive from, he switches places with his shadow form to have you running after him, and on top of that, you also have to deal with Zombies coming after you in the same boss fight! What a challenge! And boy did defeating him feel so damn good! Heck Gecko Moria is one of my favourite villains, so when I first heard he was going to be in the game, my mind exploded!

Other bosses to mention, new bosses include Captain Kuro, Wapol and Captain Blackbeard, all equally as challenging, and then as optional bosses they finally decided to add Captain Buggy into the mix, someone I deeply missed from the first game. One boss that really caught my attention, they decided to throw in a watered-down version of the end boss from Unlimited Adventure as an optional boss. What an interesting Easter Egg! What a fantastic tie-in to the first game! This proves the games are canon with each other, and since these bosses represent illusions of people they fought in the past, his inclusion was so clever, it was totally unexpected and it made sense! As for the fight in general, despite being weaker than his End-Game counterpart, he was still challenging and had most of the same moves, good fun overall!

In the first game, Whitebeard was the hardest and most difficult boss to face, and since he isn’t in this game, that role has been given to “Nightmare Luffy”, basically its one of Luffy’s forms, and he was ridiculously overpowered, long story short, it took me over ten times to take him down, most involved me powering up my characters a little more beforehand to make sure I had an edge, but he still overpowered me, a perfect choice for a Lv5 Boss (Levels mean difficulty settings for certain characters)

GRAPHICS

Basically the same as Unlimited Adventure, with tweaks of course, such as new costumes and 3D fish and animals rather than still images. Other than that, its great to see new characters in this fashion, and that’s all I can say about the graphics without repeating myself.

EXTRAS

Treasure hunting is more involved, rather than just giving you a treasure map under certain conditions, you now gain map pieces as you progress through the game, Under rare conditions after beating enemies or stealing from them with Nami, you will gain a piece of a map. What’s interesting is that for each type of enemy, they have their own map you can obtain from them, stealing a map piece each from a Marine or a Zombie, both pieces will be for different maps, so you need to defeat and steal from more Marines and Zombies before you can uncover the full map, something Unlimited Adventure didn’t have.

In theory, you don’t need every single map piece in order to understand where each treasure is hidden, though I tried and you actually do need at least one map piece to dig in that area (walkthroughs are useless basically), but once you get an idea of where to look, you gain great rewards, mostly involving new menus and new moves for certain characters. Another interesting feature, whilst you don’t need every single map piece to find the treasures they unlock, finishing the map will unlock fightable enemies in the VS mode.

Speaking of, the VS mode returns, with most bosses being unlocked once you fought them in story mode, with few exceptions such as some need to be beaten in Hard Mode, and like I said collecting full map pieces can unlock enemies. Its basically the same as Unlimited Adventure, but with the added bonus of Boss Rush Mode!

Boss Rush is basically pitting your nine main characters against a string of enemies, including fightable versions of the nine playable characters, and basically the bosses you fought against with weaker HP. The object is to beat all bosses and enemies as much as you can without all nine characters dying, and see how far you get. Whilst it may seem like a pointless feature intended to test your skills, Boss Rush brings forth two characters Arlong and Calgara once you reach 10 and 20 bosses respectively, which are unlocked after beating them, which is enough to pull you in for the ride.

WEAKNESSES

My family hated this game! Simply because they found the Japanese voices annoying, whilst only a minor complaint, its strictly for One Piece fans who are familiar with subtitled content. Just because it’s in another language doesn’t make it a bad or unplayable game, its just not casual-gamer-worthy, and those who know nothing about One Piece or long for an English cast won’t get much out of it.

Something else to be mentioned, they don’t always subtitle the Japanese language, mostly involving on-the-fly fighting and Boss Fights, they don’t subtitle when you or they are attacking and speaking Japanese phrases, the subtitles are cutscene, text-box and menu exclusive only. Half the time I want to know what certain people are saying, the Zombies shout this “On-EE-Plurr!” when attacking, which gets rather annoying after a while. This is reasonable since there may be several characters talking at once, but what about when they use their signature attacks? Doesn’t that deserve some caption?

I said before, it’s a plus for me for this game to be European only, which helps me in the long run, but at the same time Americans are left out, something which may confuse gamers, and since this game has references to the first game (the End Boss of the first game being a fightable boss for instance), on one end of the world you have American gamers who are unable to play with the new features and characters, whilst the European side is new to the One Piece Wii game franchise. It’s a self-contained game and playing it without playing UA is do-able, but I don’t see why one should be without the other.

European exclusive as it is, you cannot buy it in shops, you have to order it online, maybe because it’s a game exclusive to One Piece fans, to which are fine with the Japanese voices, and wouldn’t be a product they would just hang on a shelf for newcomers to grab only to scratch their heads of the whole thing. That’s the best excuse for it, not saying it’s a good excuse mind you, a good game like this needs to be known.

Also, for certain items you may need to have a guide handy. Laugh at me all you want, but it was only when I was playing again on Hard Mode did I realise those clams were near the shore when fishing, instances like this need you to look it up to save you time on searching in specific places for certain items, rather than exhaust every inch of every island to realise where you need to go. It’s the same as in Unlimited Adventure, I’m not saying its bad, but a hint system would have helped.

OVERALL

The game was entertaining, stimulating and had me hooked so much that I gladly played the game again in Hard Mode, which only made a few differences from normal mode, like the fight with Bartholamew Kuma was a lot harder, though considering it passed over the attacks I learnt from the previous save, it was pretty much a secure game.

Now for the Pros and Cons…

Pros
- Graphics are alike to the first game, but improved.
- Gameplay was fun and had me hooked.
- Maintained the building system with more items.
- The ability to play as all the main characters, with the new addition of Brook!
- You don’t die easily with 9 characters to use
- Stamina is now Recoverable!
- Characters have been tweaked, Robin is no longer stressful to fight with
- Clever Map-collecting system
- Added Boss Rush mode
- Hard Mode has more to offer, that said, Replayable at least twice!
- Lots of Fun to play
- Its in Japanese with English subtext, which many One Piece fans are familiar with.

Cons
- No Funimation voice actors
- European Exclusive and Online Exclusive
- Doesn’t Subtitle everything
- If all 9 characters die, it’s Game Over with no Continues
- May need prior knowledge
- Constant enemies shouting Japanese phrases can get annoying.
- Only One Piece fans will get a kick out of it.
- Casual Gamers may find the game confusing.
- Exclusivity, Americans are left out, I want to know why!

THE NEXT GAME!

Believe it or not, this game is the first of a Two-Part game! This game ended on a cliffhanger followed by a trailer for the next game, which means that the next game will most likely pick up where this game left off. On top of that, the next game has a feature that will allow you to link the two games together, to trade experience over, add bosses to the next games boss list, and perhaps more.

The game comes out in European English this September, and after having so much fun with this game, there is no doubt I am hyped to play the next one. The only things I know of this game are that, whatever bosses not in this game, that were present in Unlimited Adventure, will fill up the boss list for the next game, followed by new bosses, some of which are characters from the Sabaody Archipelago arc. One of the main boss fights revealed in the trailer involves “Oz”, the giant zombie from Thriller Bark which, from the looks of it, is gonna be a boss fight to look forward to!

That said, I am assuming its mandatory to complete this game as much as you can and unlock as much as possible to have more to transfer over to when the next game comes out, which I intend to do, I will reveal more when I get the game, and intend to give my full analysis when I am done with it.

All I can say is, this game on its own was better than Unlimited Adventure, it made many tweaks that the first game was lacking, it was enjoyable from beginning to end, with a lot of memorable cutscenes and boss fights that have me coming back for more!

Also I just want to quickly mention, this streamline of One Piece Wii reviews will be extended from 3 reviews to 5, the next review will be on the new game when it comes out, with the other two taking on other aspects of the franchise, including a top ten list of potential bosses, should another One Piece game be in the works. I will explain more about this in detail but for now, it’s another perfect score.

10/10