One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4

One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4

One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 is a game developed by Omega Force and the fourth installment in its series. So you accept that you know exactly what it will offer you and what its strengths and weaknesses are. What sets Pirate Warriors 4 apart from its predecessors is that it knows that you know this and focuses on its strengths to deliver one of the best Musou games Omega Force has produced in their history.

Like its predecessors, Pirate Warriors 4 covers the events of the One Piece manga in general, but while the previous parts told everything very briefly, Pirate Warriors 4 lists only the most important and dramatic chapters, albeit in more detail. These chapters include the Kingdom of Alabasta Sand, the Battle of Ennis Lobby, the Sabaody Incident and the Summit War in Marineford, the story of love, passion and dolls in the Kingdom of Dressrosa, and the infernal wedding that took place on Whole Cake Island. After that, the game concludes its events with an original story in which you imagine an alternative ending to the chapter of Wano Land currently told in the manga, since it has not yet ended. With this original story, there are many fun surprises for fans of the series and the appearance of most of its main characters, while at the same time giving the feeling that this chapter is a celebration of the anime’s anniversary. Twenty.

I found the detailed narrative more entertaining than the short narrative in the previous parts, and it led to a greater variety in the nature of the missions and the appearance of a greater number of important moments that could not be told in the previous parts. Unfortunately, despite omitting a large number of chapters, the narrative is still not perfect, which is understandable given the insane length of the One Piece story, which is impossible to fit into one game. The chapter that was most affected was the Kingdom of Dressrosa, as I was disappointed to notice that this version, led by Sugar, was missing many of its central characters. Still, the narration was good in most chapters, with nice cinematic excerpts for important action scenes.

Gameplay and Improvements

The gameplay is what you would expect from Omega Force games, as Pirate Warriors 4 allows you to choose between more than 40 different evolveable characters to wreak havoc in missions that pit you against thousands of enemies, and it’s quite normal that you defeat more than five thousand enemies in one mission. This style of play gives a feeling of power that is undoubtedly wonderful, and it fits perfectly with the world of One Piece and its super-powered characters, and this feeling of power is what Pirate Warriors 4 focuses on and is the focus of most presents its improvements over the previous parts.

The first addition is a separate jump button. In the previous installments of Pirate Warriors you couldn’t jump, and jumping is generally a rare currency in Omega Force games, and that always surprised me, and my surprise became even greater when I saw the effect here, like it in fact, the combat system has been greatly improved, giving most characters additional combo paths that I can no longer imagine. The second addition is the use of the official manga sizes for the size of the playable characters. This means that if you play as Whitebeard, Kaido, or others, you will find them as giants who view the enemies in the game as dwarves. This makes playing with them here a special flavor that enhances the feeling of power we talked about before. The third addition is transitions. In this game, almost every character has some sort of transformation, and some even have multiple transformations, and these transformations sometimes change the paths of the combo and dramatically multiply the characters’ powers. My favorite here is Straw Hat Luffy as he can transform into Gear 2nd in addition to Boundman and Snakeman and each of them has a different style and strength than the other, perfectly mimicking his fighting style from the manga.

Mission Design and Technical Issues

Unfortunately, despite the many additions to the combat system that have made it a truly excellent system in my opinion, the design of the game’s missions and objectives has never evolved and still doesn’t go beyond controlling a specific area or defeating a specific enemy addition, leading to a feeling of repetition and satiety despite the variety of playable characters. We find an exception to this in the final mission, where you get involved in a fight against a boss that is very different from all the bosses before it in the game, and I wish there were more fights like it in the rest of the game.

The other main mode outside of Story Mode is Treasure Protocol, a list of missions of varying difficulty in which you can earn medals for developing backward characters and unlocking their advanced transformations and moves. Some of these missions offer a high level of difficulty, which I enjoyed, especially the missions where you fight the four emperors of the sea, and these missions, with their exceptional difficulty, convince you that you are actually in a fight against them . Some of these levels allow co-op play for up to 4 players, while the story only allows 2 players. Speaking of cooperative play, in my experience it is the most entertaining way to play Pirate Warriors 4, as the game becomes more logical and entertaining when you start distributing tasks between yourself and your friends and then actually manage to simulate the randomness of war and conflict to be in the right place at the right time. Unfortunately, the network system in the game is very primitive, as it does not allow you to open private rooms or expel unwanted players from the room, and in addition, for each mission you have to open a new room, which is a waste of a lot of time that would not have been may be wasted.

Technical Level and Conclusion

The game’s technical level is also frustrating, with lots of pop-in and camera problems and moments where the character gets stuck between two rocks or under a tree. The game lacks so much technical polish that I feel like the previous installment was more polished than this one. Luckily this doesn’t extend to the music, as Omega Force delivers an energetic album with the usual guitar flavor of their games, and perhaps my favorite was the tune for Luffy and Sanji’s fight on Whole Cake Island, which conveyed the intensity of the scene better than even the music of the TV series, I think.