OPINION: One Piece Odyssey Is the Beginning of What a Great One Piece Game Could Be
One Piece Odyssey is a pretty good game. Most of its positive attributes come from sheer enthusiasm for the material. The voice acting is expressive and consistent. The writing is often funny and laden with references to the anime/manga. The battle animations, seeking to recreate the explosive and/or cartoonish powers of the beloved Straw Hat Crew, are fun to watch — even if the nature of JRPGs have you performing them over and over again.
That said, it isn’t a perfect game. And while playing it (and enjoying it for the most part) I began to wonder why truly great One Piece games are in such short supply. It does not have the equivalent of, say, a DRAGON BALL FighterZ, something that feels like it specifically captures the unique experience of a series without re-chronicling it for us, making the game less of an adaptation and more of an extension.
Image via Steam
Having reached its 25th year of publication in 2022, the story of One Piece is both simple and labyrinthine. The overall goal of its protagonist has not changed since the first episode (find the One Piece and become Pirate King) but its plot has become infinitely more layered and complicated thanks to copious world-changing story arcs and heaps of history.
Reliving these story arcs has become a staple of many One Piece games. Most recently, the main story of the arena fighter One Piece: Burning Blood sees you traversing the Paramount War arc, One Piece: Romance Dawn strictly retold the first half of the story and One Piece: Unlimited World Red has you exploring through multiple islands from the series’ past while facing those islands’ primary antagonists as final bosses. One Piece Odyssey has this, too, adding in twists that freshen up things so that you don’t feel like you’re just going through the motions as you save Alabasta or overthrow Enies Lobby again.
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But this adherence to fan-favorite narratives leaves One Piece video games with little room to breathe on their own, all without the stakes that made the original arcs so potent. However, by abandoning them entirely for a whole new experience (like One Piece: World Seeker did a few years ago) you arrive with something fun but relatively empty. Characters (mainly villains) show up but their importance is neutered, existing only to be angry at Luffy for a few minutes before they throw down with familiarity.
One Piece fans know that incredible feeling when the manga is chugging along on all gears so each week’s wait for the next chapter becomes agonizing. They know the feeling of when they just have to binge one more episode because who needs sleep when the narrative is getting this good? So, if you’re tasked with replaying the arcs, how do you recapture their impact? How do you bottle that in video game form? That blend of excitement and unpredictability is nigh impossible to collect unless you’re experiencing it all for the first time, but if this is your first time and now you have to live it out in a condensed playable fashion, it’s doomed to take a silver medal.
Image via Steam
One Piece Odyssey’s unfamiliar new location and the meat of the story that takes place there teases us with possibilities. Unlike One Piece: World Seeker — which gave a new location and neat gameplay but was hampered by a few uninspired environments and the aforementioned parade of halfhearted cameos — One Piece Odyssey has a fantastic aesthetic that’s often been compared to Dragon Quest. I love arcs like Skypiea and Zou, ones that introduce not just a whole new location but a new biome to learn the ins and outs of, and One Piece Odyssey sometimes manages to scratch that same itch for me. It feels lushly ripe for the series, the kind of place where it can thrive if it can find a story worth holding its audience’s attention.
Is it worth retelling One Piece’s famous arcs or shifting the chess pieces a bit so that we’re not inundated with the recognizable? In the case of One Piece Odyssey, it’s a mixed bag, just as it’s been in the franchise’s gaming past. But I’d say that its handling in this game is a step in the right direction for a series that’s become so monumentally iconic. At their best, these returns to the past do feel vibrant. Seeing the Going Merry in Alabasta again and watching Usopp react to his beloved ship was a nice moment, one that managed to emotionally link this game from the series that birthed it.
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But it hints at a wider game where strolls down memory lane don’t play a part and instead, a One Piece video game can exist with only the Straw Hats there to provide any whiffs of nostalgia. For instance, even though the game has a battle UI that could use a little bit of clearing up, being given objectives during fights where you gain bonuses through accomplishing a certain thing with a certain Straw Hat is a great way to make a game feel like One Piece without a heavy helping of “Remember when?” For experienced fans, it’s a fast reference, and for new fans it’s a great way to get to know our pirate heroes on the fly.
Even with a series that leans so heavily on its world-building blocks like One Piece, continuing to extricate it from its past importance while also making the current game feel important is a balancing act that I hope they attempt. One Piece Odyssey is a wonderful way to spend your time, but perhaps it is only the beginning.
Daniel Dockery is a Senior Staff Writer for Crunchyroll. Follow him on Twitter! His book, Monster Kids: How Pokemon Taught A Generation To Catch Them All, is available wherever books are sold.
