One Piece Odyssey – Review, the lost memory

Eichiro Oda has undoubtedly built a dense and intricate imaginary world, made up of original cultures and textures, to the point that sometimes one wonders: “What did we read before One Piece?”. The answer almost always comes close to Dragon Balland this binomial makes it clear how important the first of the two is, to the point that it has inherited a legacy that is not easy to obtain. One Piece Odyssey it’s the ultimate gaming experience possible in that imaginary world and we can’t wait to bring you to Waford Island.

The loss of memories

The pirate crew of Straw hat is en route to a mysterious island, when an unexpected Knock-Up Stream (a geiser of epic proportions) propels the Thousand Sunny (the ship of our heroes) in the air towards the clouds. Everything that goes up must also come down. While the Sunny is in free fall, the helmsman and carpenter franky extracts the turbo propulsors, and with a gust pushes the ship which glides towards the sighted island. The landing is not the best and the ship suffers several damages, to the point that Franky is forced to stay close to the boat, while the captain Luffy goes to search for members of his crew.

Find yourself Nami, Zoro, Sanji, Usopp, Robin, Chopper and Brook (the latter in a ghost version since his body is currently missing) the captain decides to explore the island of Wafordand in doing so they meet a strange girl named Limthat touching our heroes makes luminous cubes come out of their bodies, effectively taking away from the entire crew the memories of how to use their powers or abilities. The girl however does not prove aggressive and she leads them by To Goda man who considers himself Lim’s father and apologizes for his behavior inviting our heroes to recover their memories by carrying them left and right on Waford Island. Not going further than the plot we can tell you that it is one very original story and which will allow you to live an experience full of interesting mysteries and intrigues without ever falling into the banal, indeed often taking us back in time towards very intense personal memories.

Finding memories

In the game world we will be able to control any of the members of the crew, extricating ourselves through different situations such as dungeons and ruined streets. The choice of the character visible on the screen is not only linked to mere personal pleasure, in fact this will be the one who will allow us to interact with the surrounding environment, and here is that for example Sanji will be able to find materials for the kitchen, Zoro (which won’t let you see the map while he’s the team captain, as just like in the comic, he doesn’t have a developed sense of direction and tends to get lost often) he will cut through obstacles with his sword and impediments, while Luffy will as always be the protagonist of the adventure, capable of making us reach points of interest placed high up by stretching. During the adventure there will be several environmental puzzles that will increase in difficulty as you continue.

Still speaking of the game world, there will be objects, materials and keys to find to open the chests (eh, after all, without loot, what kind of pirates would they be?) Although, the rewards that are hidden in the latter are not exactly excellent, on the contrary, sometimes it would have been better not to open them. Enemies will be different and highly visible in the game world, to the point that you can often decide whether to avoid the confrontation or whether to fight them; attacking an enemy from behind you will have a bonus during the first round of attack: yes, One Piece Odyssey is a turn based game!

Started the fight you will have available four active characters and three on the bench. Don’t worry, at any time you can change character by sending him to rest and having another member take over. There are weaknesses and resistances in combat, “Rock, Paper, Scissors” style, which in this case are represented by Skills (Zoro, Robin), Beaters (Luffy, Chopper and Sanji) e Snipers (Nami, Usopp) each will be weak to the opposite element, ergo thugs will take extra damage from exploiters, snipers from thugs and so on. In the fight, our heroes will have several enemies in front of them, and although they are forced to stay in battle with those in front of them, nobody forbids using a long-range skill: for example a shot with the Usopp’s sling could hit a enemy (or more of them) who are annoying Luffymaking a tactical choice in terms of turn of action.

There are also status changes which can paralyze, put to sleep, freeze, electrify or make enemies and companions bleed, so always be aware of what is happening in the fight. Each attack can generate a push on enemies, effectively allowing us to throw our target into other opponents inflicting extra damage. This push doesn’t apply to skills, unless specified by the skill itself: each hero has a huge list of skills and techniques, to the point that it will take a long time before you recover the memory of each hit (by collecting the cubes scattered around) and this makes the exploration and growth of the pirate level always interesting, placing the player in an ever new condition. Each attack will actually generate action points that will be spent on skills that vary in cost, effect and damage inflicted.

Mastering Memories

Really nice the idea for which whenever you come across a cube larger than normal, our heroes actually travel through time, ending up in the maze of their memories and finding themselves on islands of the past, for example you can relive the memories of saga of Alabasterfinding friends like the Princess Bibi and deadly enemies like Crocodiles.

You might think it will be a piece of cake re-fighting already defeated foes, but as Lim tells us, memories deceiveand although you have improved, so are theybecause of this every challenge will be interesting and rewarding. The negative notes come not so much from the gameplay or from the graphics with dancer frame rate (when using Luffy’s pointing in an open field you can clearly see a vertical drop in FPSat least on PlayStation 5) but from the intrinsic structure of the game.

It would have been right to leave room for the imagination, and not relegate the characters to binary paths, making us explore Waford as we prefer and instead we are “forced” to follow all in all standard paths, with little freedom of action. Not only that: for each mission, minutes and minutes are lost in useless presentation scenes of the mission title, even the most trivial, in addition to the fact that time is lost when, for example, at the end of a movie you have to enter a cave and the game makes us perform that action, puts us in the role of the protagonist who physically takes three steps and again interrupts for a movie or loading the area.

The real tedium will come when you actually have to shuttle between one NPC and another to complete a missionand without any action or fast travel possible you will have to traipse here and there, effectively slowing down what was an excellent narrative and playful pace.