One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 - Review

Ahhh One Piece. It feels like it’s been around forever — and it kind of has, with the manga running near-continuously since 1997, and the series gaining prominence in the West following a truly awful 4Kids English dub in the early 2000s. It was one of the very first anime I ever laid my eyes on, as well as the very first manga I ever read, and even to this day, some 20 years later, it’s a huge part of my life; I even have a One Piece tattoo! So when given the opportunity to review One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 on the Switch, I thought that maybe, just maybe, this would be the game that would finally get me to enjoy musou games. After 40 odd hours with the game, I can confirm that it did exactly that… but I found myself wishing I’d played on another platform. 

So let’s go over the background of One Piece as a series, just in case you’re reading this review and are somehow unfamiliar with it. One Piece follows the adventures of Monkey D. Luffy, a headstrong teen pirate in the second golden age of piracy. Spurred on by the promise of treasure by the dying King of the Pirates, Gol D. Roger, Luffy takes up his straw hat, collects a ragtag crew of weirdos and misfits, and heads for the Grand Line, the most treacherous part of the seas, to claim the treasure and become the new King of the Pirates. 

In the world of One Piece, there exists a set of magical fruit called Devil Fruit, the consumption of which gives special powers of countless different types. For example, our protagonist Luffy ate the Gum-Gum fruit, which turned his body into rubber, allowing him to stretch, expand, and generally do rubbery things while fighting in battle — think Mr. Fantastic from the Fantastic 4. Some other members of his crew and pirates throughout the world have similarly strange abilities; one is a skeleton, possessed by his own spirit after consuming a fruit that prevented him from dying, another is a run-of-the-mill reindeer who can transform all or part of his body into human parts, and another yet has the ability to spawn endless body parts such as arms, eyes, or legs anywhere she pleases. There are simply hundreds of different abilities that come from these Devil Fruit, both good and bad, but the main thing that connects them all is a major weakness to seawater. Touching seawater immediately negates Devil Fruit powers, as well as drastically weakening the physical ability of the fruit user, to the point of near-instant exhaustion — not great for the best of situations, but even worse when you’re a pirate. 

As of the time of writing, there are 929 episodes of One Piece, each lasting 23 minutes long, plus a little over a dozen feature-length films. The episodes alone take over 350 hours to watch from end to end, and One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 has the unfortunate task of condensing that 350 hours of content down into a roughly 20 hour story. How does it do this? Well, the short answer is: “inelegantly.” The long answer is that it’s a bit more complicated. 

While past One Piece games have tried to cram as much of the story in as possible, Pirate Warriors 4 took to the series with a very trigger-happy pair of blunt scissors. This means that there are some story arcs kept relatively intact, like the Alabasta Arc, while others like the Skypiea arc are glossed over entirely, replaced with one or two stills presumably taken from previous games and a couple sentences briefly describing what happened. I initially thought this was a strategic choice — by skimming over some of the earlier arcs, you could focus on properly telling the story from newer arcs — but by the end of the game I found myself frankly confused by the choices made. One particularly affected victim of the butchery is the Whole Cake Island arc, the second-most recent arc in the anime and perhaps one of the most interesting and compelling arcs in the series to date. Pirate Warriors 4 strangely cuts half the characters, some of which (like Pedro) are deeply important to the storyline, cuts half the story events themselves, and leaves behind a few weird choices that highlight everything but the parts of the arc that made it interesting. The big important story beats are still there, they’re just a little less interesting without the surrounding context. The story does run through to the latest arc, the Wano Country Arc, but given when this game was developed, and that the arc is still very much in the early stages even in the manga, most of the story told is original to the game. I’d personally have preferred to wait for the next game to experience this arc, but I understand the appeal of having current characters to promote the game, so it’s not keeping me up at night. 

Let’s talk about the gameplay itself, because here is where things get really complex for me. I’ve always desperately wanted to like musou games, known as the Warriors series in the West. There’ve been dozens of games, from the main series Dynasty Warriors (spun off from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series), more traditional spin-offs like Samurai Warriors, and even some Nintendo-themed spin-offs like Hyrule Warriors and Fire Emblem Warriors. I’ve bought most of them, and had a fair go at every one I bought… but somehow, it just never really grabbed me for more than a couple hours. One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4

Musou games have you hack and slash your way through thousands of nameless, endlessly respawning enemies in the hopes that you defeat enough of them that the leader of these nameless enemies pops his head out, at which point you hack and slash through him too. Doing this captures the region in which you’re fighting, and then the endlessly respawning enemies stop respawning, and allied forces start spawning instead. This kind of regional control is key to the series, and it sees you splitting your attention between the battle and the war, so to speak. It’s all well and good if you’re having a good time beating up a big boss, but if you’re losing territory then that might have dire consequences for battles in the immediate future. It’s this kind of balancing act that has attracted me to the series in the past, but as appealing as it’s been, there just wasn’t enough to keep me playing. Enter: One Piece. 

As I said, One Piece is one of my biggest guilty pleasures, and it’s one of the very few pieces of media that I’ve pretty consistently engaged with throughout my life. It’s a silly, ridiculous series where a rubber man fights side-by-side with a possessed skeleton as they battle against a mochi-infused shark-man with a passion for donuts. This kind of absurdity lends itself spectacularly well to the idea of mindlessly bashing your way through an unrealistic amount of enemies, and the series’ rich history of vibrant locations means you’re not just fighting on a dull brown field most of the time. It’s a match made in heaven. 

So how is the gameplay? Well, pretty good, all things considered. You have a light and a heavy standard attack, which can be combo’d together to bring out all your favourite attacks. You also have access to four special moves, locked off by a meter that fills while executing standard attacks. Unleashing one of these special moves starts a little cutscene, showing off some of the more signature abilities from the series, and sometimes even transforming your fighter into a different form, such as Luffy’s Bounceman, or Ace’s Flame Body. The combat is about as fluid as it could be, even on Switch, with a fairly solid 60fps-ish feeling behind it. I say “-ish” because I can’t say for certain that it’s actually running at 60fps — it sure feels that way at least. The camera is a little wonky, particularly in split-screen multiplayer (which works wonderfully), but given how often you’re likely to be bouncing around at breakneck speed, I can understand why developing a good camera might be a little bit tough. Unfortunately, the Switch is still a handheld device, so there’s going to be compromises, and the Switch version has two big ones: visual fidelity and load times. 

The visual fidelity is… fine, I guess? Look, it’s not great. It’s a bit jaggy, a bit muddy, and the draw distance is a little too low for my liking. It’s not enough to stand in the way of having a good time, but it’s massively jarring to watch a beautiful pre-rendered cutscene and then suddenly swap to in-game models that look like they’ve been pulled right out of a 3DS game. Okay, that’s probably a bit too far of a comparison, but it really is quite jaggy. It’s disappointing, but understandable, given the power of the Switch. The bigger crime here is the load times, which can stretch to upwards of a minute — but only sometimes. I’m not entirely sure how Pirate Warriors 4 handles its loading, but it seems to be wildly inconsistent. Sometimes, I’ll load into a level and spend no more than 10 seconds on the loading screen, others I’ll have time to go make some toast and a cup of coffee. There’s really no rhyme or reason to it, but I have found that longer load times are more common than short ones. I almost bounced off the game purely because of this, and I worry that had I not been reviewing it, I might not have returned. 

One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 is the perfect mix of a silly long-running franchise and a semi-serious wartime battlefield simulator. With a strong foundation stemming from One Piece’s rich history, built upon familiar musou gameplay, there’s little to fault with the concept. The execution is a little bit hit and miss, with some strange choices about which story beats to cut or leave, and the Switch version is a little bit rough, but it’s still very much an enjoyable experience.

Review code provided by Bandai Namco