One Piece Odyssey Xbox Review 8/10 “A Wonderfully Fun JRPG Romp” 🉐🏯 @transvaalgf

One Piece Odyssey begins with the Straw Hat Gang’s ship ‘The Thousand Sunny’ getting shipwrecked on the mysterious island of Waford.

With the ship needing repairs, they set out exploring the island, and soon run into Lim, who is very fearful of them as she has had several bad experiences with other pirates, using her ability, she alleviates the gang of their powers.

Small cubes containing the powers rise out of their chests and are soon scattered around the island. Now depowered, they set out to retrieve the cubes, some cubes are larger - and to be restored they must enter the dream world of Memoria and relive the past to regain the power held in the cube, this takes them to past locations, reliving adventures, but with some differences.

Now I must admit that I have only the vaguest knowledge of One Piece, so I managed to grasp the basic narrative. However, I imagine people with intimate knowledge would obviously get more out of the story. That said, the game does a good job of explaining enough for people like me who don’t know much at all, it allowed me to follow along and still get a lot out of the plot. I found the characters instantly charming and could easily ‘get’ the bond they all shared, the gang has so much appeal, and I enjoyed all the silly antics they got up to.

The turn-based combat is an interesting one, players are divided into sections with enemies, so for instance, one player character could be with two enemies, another player character with one enemy and two player characters with no enemies – there is no rigid turn structure, you can choose any character at any time, but after every attack, an enemy will strike back.

Each character has a different attack style that is either strong, neutral, or weak to certain enemies, so before you attack you can swap your location and join another area or swap your character for a character that is not in your current party. This does mean that you do use every character in the game as you will need their attack style to best damage the enemies that they are strong against, but as the game goes on having to be constantly moving people in and out of combat does start to grind on you, as having to go through the menus for almost every encounter just wears on you.

Overall, I enjoyed the combat - but it definitely has its weaknesses

A problem that doesn’t bother me personally - but I’m sure other people may take some issue with - is the easiness of the game, even the bosses don’t feel like a challenge. Personally, I enjoyed how breezy the game was, it was nice to plough through and enjoy the adventure, but I could see why others may be hoping for more of a challenge.

Whilst exploring locations you will find many an activity to keep you busy. There are side quests to undertake - a lot fall into the ‘fetch quest’ bucket - you can also find ingredients to cook meals that make items to heal or revive fallen characters and there are also bounty missions, where you hunt local criminals down and apprehend them to gain rewards, for a JRPG on the shorter side (30-40 hours) it packs in a lot of things to do.

While exploring, you will also find hidden secrets that your whole crew can assist in obtaining, Luffy can use his arms to reach out and climb high objects, Zoro can cut certain doors with his swords, and Sanji can use his slingshot to knock down items, this is a cool feature but hits the same problem as combat in that you have to keep going into a menu to switch characters, and it's very frequent – at one point, within about five minutes I’d had to change into three different characters to deal with certain situations.

The one saving grace in all this menu-hopping is that the UI is so colourful and vibrant that it does lessen the tedium somewhat. If the UI was bland, I do think that it would have exacerbated the problem. 

Cutscenes and voice work are all Japanese, so a lot of reading will be needed, many of the original Japanese cast reprised their roles so it will remain an authentic experience for fans, though it would have been nice for a full English voice-over, mainly as the game will pop up many texts at once, and a few times I missed some dialogue as too many text boxes appeared - it can also be an issue that arises during the action sequences.

One Piece Odyssey has some flaws, but the sheer joy I had playing through the Straw Hat Pirates’ adventure completely outweighs them.