I was also delighted by just how traditional the gameplay is. It’s a genuinely inspired approach to the problem of anime-licensed tie-ins, and it also makes One Piece Odyssey perhaps the most accessible that One Piece has been for a very, very long time. Meanwhile, veterans of One Piece can enjoy playing spot the difference and seeing their favourite locations and plots play out in a different way. You’re able to enjoy the characters, their antics, and the settings, without feeling like you need to watch the anime to fill in the gaps that the game has overlooked in the name of efficiency. What this means is that players that are not as familiar with the specific stories of the One Piece gang aren’t as likely to be missing context. See? Metatextual deconstruction – a simple version of it, to be sure, but more than I was expecting coming in. They take full advantage of that to parody, subvert, and change bits of those original narrative arcs, and do so within the context of an all-new story. Thus, you’re reliving the past exploits of the team, but the developers have allowed themselves some creative freedom to throw some curveballs at you. However, because the circumstances of the team are now different, and memories are never perfect, their memories are no longer guaranteed to play out exactly as they originally experienced. There they meet an enigmatic character that, first, steals all their powers (so you’re dropped from level 40 back to level 1), and then helps them to gain their powers back by travelling back into their memories. It starts off with the crew, deep into their adventure, shipwrecking themselves on a mysterious island. One Piece Odyssey does things differently, though. Existing fans are already aware of how things will play out. In most cases, anime tie-ins drag players by the nose through a set plot, and it’s both restrictive and, for people who have actually seen the anime, naturally predictable. Most game developers aren’t fortunate enough to work with a property that matches as well as Arslan and Musou do. Koei Tecmo has long mastered the art of having battles play out true to a particular historical or fictional narrative while leaving players in control of the flow. Arslan: The Warriors Of Legend, for example, did a really neat job of putting in small cut scenes between the big battles to explain what was going on, and then playing out just like every other Musou game does. They’ll take an arc, season, or block of episodes and look to retell the story of those episodes in the most faithful way possible, while also making them interactive. Most anime tie-in games are slavishly beholden to their source material. The game is quite metatextual in structure. All I needed was something like One Piece Odyssey, which lets me enjoy the stuff about One Piece that I do like, without it feeling like I’m missing 90 per cent of the stuff I need to know to actually get along with it. I wanted to be involved in One Piece in some way. However, I like the art direction, the characters, and the personality of the property. I’ll never be able to get into the anime because there’s no way I have enough hours of my life left to actually watch it all. I’ve played enough One Piece games to know that One Piece is no exception to that rule.īut I like One Piece, so for years, I have continued to play them, hoping that a game like Odyssey would eventually come along. When they do that, the only people that can enjoy (or often even make sense of) the “retelling” are existing fans. So often anime tie-in games consolidate the main anime plotline to an extreme degree, just so the developers can squish some form of it into a game. One Piece Odyssey is a particularly impressive game for one reason in particular: You don’t need to be a fan of One Piece to enjoy it.
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