@FolhaS said in "One Piece Odyssey" trademark registered by Shueisha and Bandai Namco:
@Ivotas said in "One Piece Odyssey" trademark registered by Shueisha and Bandai Namco:
Nope, the games are not good. The EA sports franchises for example are stagnant messes that literally copy paste the previous iteration of a game into next year and just slap a new date on it. Fifa and Madden have even included bugs from previous versions of the game because nobody bothered to actually fix them. People didn't buy those because they are good. They buy them because EA has the monopoly on the licence (at least with Fifa this will end after this year thankfully).
Outside of sports games we also have shit like Anthem that was an absolutely broken clusterfuck of a game and has now been abandoned. There's articles that explain how terrible the development of this game was because of the publishers coorperate mindset. It's a good read but also very frustrating and sad. Publishers DO give a fuck about the customer because the customer will buy it anyways. There's plenty of other examples of how publisher demands are messing with games. And in all those cases the games are not good. That they sell doesn't take away from that fact.
And the Musou games are definitely a genre that outside of it's own eco system is not held in high regards in the western gaming community. That I don't like it has nothing to do with it.
And just claiming Spider-Man 2 was a game changer means nothing without providing any examples where that game's influence has been felt for for games that came before. In comparison fans and developers themselves use the term Arkham Style combat when talking about newer games that implement a similar type of combat system.
I can see the point you are making with Spider-Man 2 and Arkham Asylum making you feel like the respective superhero. But that's not what the term 'game changer' means. It's a term that existed in sports before video games were a thing. In sports you refer to something as a game changer that from that point changes how the game is being played. Not just one match/game. New rules are often considered game changers. In football for example the implementation of yellow and red cards, the offside rule or more recently the implementation of video proof were game changers because they changed the game from there on. And that's what a game changer is in the video game space too. Spider-Man 2 was a good game. But it was not a game changer.
But truth be told, brother, I feel like this post got too long and we just started arguing about games in general and not this OP rpg, so I'm happy to shake hands, agree to disagree, and call it a day.
But if you wanna discuss any of these points a bit more, I can still put'em up and have another round. 
Truth be told, I actually would like to continue with this if you don't mind and if everyone else here is ok with it and doesn't feel like we're completely derailing the discussion. The reason is because I actually like listening to what you have to say. You always make sound arguments, approach discussions constructively and make me look at things from a different perspective. I always find constructive discussions more interesting than just people agreeing with each other as I end up getting something new out of it. And since we're not really having a flamewar here and it actually is connected to OP games I feel we can go another round. 
Wasn't arguing about whether the games are stagnant or not, I believe they are, you can't go really far with yearly releases, imo, but they're good, good enough at least.
I would agrue the good enough part. It's more a "we have to deal with it because there's no other option if we want to get our fix" kind of thing. I'll get more into detail about this below.
Can't speak for madden cause I don't much about it but a decade ago Fifa was playing second fiddle to PES.
PES started getting licenses because it was more popular than Fifa despite not having official teams. Then Fifa actually started making the better football similator and people started buying Fifa.
The moment some company makes a better football game, even without official licenses, Fifa looses it ground again.
Actually people were always being Fifa. Back when PES was a thing and even before when it was called International Superstar Soccer people still bought Fifa because of they had the name rights. Fifa wouldn't have survived that long if there wasn't a huge amount of fans that valued licenses over gameplay.
Also a little tidbit of information if you didn't know. EA has lost the license because Fifa itself demanded too much money for it (and not because they said no to the predatory monetization practices). So this years Fifa is the last game EA will we allowed to call the game this way.
I don't know why you brought out Anthem. Anthem came out to a luke warm reception, was a new IP so no one was buying it because of the name, and it was a flop. It sold well during the first week or so, then people played it said the game was just ok and no-one bought it anymore.
But despite that people didn't really say the game was bad it just wasn't great, or new.
Again something where you are mistaken. Anthem was one of the most anticipated games that year. Simply for the fact that it was a new Bioware game which is a beloved studio in the gaming world and has created some legendary games. Even the fact that they released 'Mass Effect: My Face is Tired' prior to Anthem didn't temper the expectations because people told themselves that it's a different Bioware studio that worked on that one, but Anthem would be done by the real Bioware. It sold well during the first week because of those expectations. And then the sales numbers went down because it was apparent what kind of a clusterfuck that game was.
Truth be told most big companies don't make "bad" games, sure there are bugs and some problems, but their biggest sin tends to be that the games are boring. Not bad games, just mid-tier games with way to much production and publicity.
The thing is that they do make bad games. What I can agree with you on is that publishers don't tell developers "develop a bad game" but instead the order to put gameplay and fun on the backburner and focus more on milking the audience ultimately ends up at the same destination: a game that's purposefully designed to be lesser fun to play than it could be. And I can give you examples for it below:
Star Wars Battlefront 2: Had super predatory lootboxes and the game progression was made purposefully tedious to entice players to dish out money to earn rewards quicker.
Assassins Creed Valhalla: A bloated game with a too long, tedious and repetative grind to get good/desired rewards. What's worse here, the devs were forced to make the game less grindier that it was at launch after all reviews have been released and the reception was positive. In other words they had the instructions to make the game less fun to play so that players would be enticed to dish out more money to progress.
Marvels Avengers: Another game that released in an suboptimal state, because it had to be released quickly to please investors and milk players. This one like Anthem came out with the "release unfinished game now, fix it later" mindset.
If you want to say that none of these games are really bad in terms of functioning gameplay mechanics then I agree that they are not "bad". But if a game is made with the intention to be less fun to play, and that you actually have to pay additional money to get to the end quicker, than that IS a bad gameplay experience. I mean you as a customer pay money to get a game with the intend to play it in your freetime. But then you are enticed to pay additional money to skip playing what you paid 60 dollars for already? I'm sorry, but by my standards a game that makes you want to skip playing rather than playing is not a good game. And if it's in the game by publisher demands, then it's just as good as them telling the developers to create a bad game.
Also another thing I want to add because it will be important later down below, when we return to One Piece, is some arguments how shills defend stuff like this by saying that "games are difficult and expensive to make and the publishers" need to get their money back. This argument has already be proven wrong with actual numbers. But the reason why I bring this up in this discussion and in this thread is because of Battlefront 2 and Avengers. Star Wars is arguably the biggest popculture IP on the planet and Avengers at the time of the games release was the hottest IP to have. If you as a publisher cannot make a game that is good AND successfull with those brands without going the route of predatory monetization, than you shouldn't be in this business in the first place.
But by now I feel like I have to concede you a fair point, after thinking about some of these examples. Management interference does affect the final quality of the game (forcing micro-transactions which lead to grind economies, for example) but that's only a discussion when the game is actually "playable", when the games are actually bad they're borderline unplayable. A 6 or 7 out of 10 is not a bad game, it's actually above average.
As I said in my previous paragraphs, there's different ways how to consider a game to be bad. Just because a game is playable it does not mean that it is actually good in terms of you having fan to play it.
As for the Musou, you keep bringing up the fact that the genre has less fans in the west to indicate quality and that's just a fallacy. Having more fans doesn't say anything about the quality of the content. Look at any crappy sequel, in both games and even movies, the longer the franchise keeps going the more fans it has but the first entries, when it was a niche thing, are still considered the best.
And now we come to why I brought up that Star Wars and Avengers argument above. One Piece is the biggest manga ever in terms of sales. It's an actual phenomenon. Add to this that in the past years the gaming industry has become financially more successful than the movie industry. That's two juggernauts coming together. And yet Kaizoku Kuso games are a wet fart in terms of sales. If you are not able to create a game that appeals to more people out of this IP then you are doing something wrong.
If a game is good than word of mouth will spread and other people will get try it out. This years Elden Ring shows how popular and successful a game can get because of good game design. While FromSoft games always were beloved, they were not as popular as EL because of the punishing difficulty, which does not appeal to every gamer. But the reception was so overwhelmingly good that people just had to try it out and mostly found out that the what people were saying was on spot. I don't expect a One Piece game to be good as those really big gaming milestones. But the fact that with 4 iterations the Kuso games still are just a blip on the radar should tell you all you need to know about the appeal of the gameplay loop.
I don't care how popular the games are in the west and I respect your opinion of not caring for them, but you gotta understand you can't say you don't like Musou games and then expect to give a fair review. If you don't like the genre most likely even the best entries will bore you out of your mind.
You do realize that this argument is a door that swings both ways. If my review is not fair because I don't like Kuso games then your review is not fair because you DO like them. But since I feel this is the wrong way to look at this I will try to go a bit more into detail, why I think that those games really are not that good. And yes, there will still be personal opinion attached to it because in the end, if that appeals to someone then that there's nothing wrong with that.
I don't know how to say this quick but compared to many other games types I play, the Kaizoku Kuso games don't feel like I'm actually doing something. I mean when I'm literally swimming/drowing in a sea of hundreds of enemies and every single attack I do hits at least several dozens of enemies, then it kinda feels like punching the air or in this case water that you are swimming/drowning in. There's no particular skill required to actually hit your opponent, no matter what you do. Just like you would always be hitting water when you try punching water while you are submerged in it. I'm not arguing that this can appeal to some players because as we established, there is a crowd for this too. Still you it would be hard to deny that in a medium where no matter which genre you play, the gameplay loop requires a little bit precise controls from the player to achieve something that what you can do in the One Piece: Water Punchers series does.
That's not to say that this series cannot work if you tweak somethings here and there. I can even show you two examples of where some things that could be considered improvements happened but not to a satisfactory degree. I'm talking about the implementation of a jump button and the giant characters both seen in One Piece: Water Punchers 4.
Personally a thing that I liked doing in Water Punchers 4 was to go on a rampage with Kaido and just destroy as many buildings as possible. It just felt like I was playing a Kaiju game and it was awesome. The thing is while this was possible in the game, you weren't really enticed by the game to do this because there weren't really objectives tied to it nor did you have a level where destroying buildings is the goal. I just did it as a sort of own fun as you can do when freeroaming in an open world game. The thing is though that this is not an open world game and most likely not something the developers intended to become a thing of it's own. I'm not saying that this Kaiju thing is a super awesome gameplay mechanic but it is a new gameplay mechanic added to the game which helps to mix things up and make you feel you're doing more than punching water.
Same with the ability to jump. I was happy to have a feature like this but it only made miniscule changes to the gameplay loop. Yes, jumping against the new introduced giant characters was a welcome new addition to attack them but you could take those opponents don't even if you didn't jump. It was not necessary. If the game would have introduced more plattforming sections or encounters that are more vertical the player would be forced to use jump. Not by choice but by neccessity.
I'm not saying that these two things are mindblowing additions. But they are mechanics that add something to the core gameplay established gameplay formula, which just is flat and boring. No matter how many new ways you find to clear waves of mooks. If the end result is the same then the only thing you do in those games is punching water. Mixing things up to keep things fresh is never a bad thing to do, if you know how to handle those things right.
Regarding the game-changer term, I guess we really are using two different meanings.
Batman's fight system is a game changer and an innovation, sure, (and it's a good system, it's actually based on rythmn games).
But the only reason Spider-Man 2 is not considered a game-changer by your standards is because what it did best and what it innovated on was not reproduceble to 99.5% percent of games. The webbing system and how it allows you to travel was custom made for that character and it set the mark. I'm repeating myself but until Insomniac's game every single Spidey game was compared to SP2 and declared Not As Good. It literally changed the perception of a douzen games that came after it.
The thing is though if nobody was able to reproduce it to this day, then it didn't change "the game" as by your argument it seems to be a one time only thing. Thus nothing has changed.
Also, I'm almost certain that it was the first super-hero game that allowed you roam freely in a city and gave you the option to pick a story mission, side quest, or just interact with random crimes happening, something Batman started imitating from Arkham City onwards.
That might aswell be true, but that's just implementing an already existing concept (free roaming) into a super-hero setting. That's not a game changer either. It just implemented something someone else came up with first. So whoever created free roam like this would be the game changer. That might fall on GTA3. I don't know if they were the first but definitely the one that popularized it, from where on out the gaming world was changed for ever. Just like PUBG didn't invent the battle royal genre but something about it clicked with the gaming community that made it this big thing, were Fortnite now is this cultural phenomenon. Neither of those two games are the inventors. But they definitely are both game changers.
But to take this all back to One Piece it isn't even important if Arkham Asylum or Spider-Man 2 was the first. The original point I was trying to make is that just because you are working on a licenced IP it doesn't mean that you have to do a lazy and uninspired job. Both superhero games are not so beloved because of their IP but because they are two things: Good games overall and good power fantasies for fans of the IP to feel like they are actually their favorite heroes. There's no reason that One Piece games (or any anime game) shouldn't aim for something similar.
