Great job guys. I am looking forward to all the interviews. Here's my review of Cruise that will likely end up too long thus be sad that I typed it.
I have played all of Unlimited Cruise 1 and 2 and it mostly entertained me enough and I really liked some ascepts but a One Piece videogame could be so much more.
I never played Adventure but since I'm pretty sure Cruise is exactly the same but with minor improvements, I'm not sure if there's any point in my playing it. Well the only reason why I would is to hear all the english voices out of curiosity, mostly Franky's. And reliving some One Piece moments in CGI cutscenes is cool.
So with Cruise, the islands are very badly designed; they're mostly a boring mess (especially the canyon place). One Piece is one of the best series for amazingly designed locations so the games' levels are kind of an insult. Though I don't really know how they could design the levels better. Since the storyline has some being creating people from the crew's memories, I dont see why it couldnt also take locations from their memories and sort of mash some of them together or something. I dunno…
The non-boss enemies are mostly the same boring fodder you keep plowing through and I hate the non-One Piece ones like weird clay monsters and clay soldiers. They could have at least had several different character models for the same enemy. I was sick of every zombie looking the same.
Bosses are pretty good and yes some were freaking hard. I leveled up my stamina so much I just spammed them with special attacks though. I'm not the kind of guy who likes to be patient and dodge. I just go on the offense.
The way to raise your stats is so stupid and I am surprised the developers didnt learn their lesson from the first game. If there is ever a 3rd game in the same vein please get rid of and change the really bad aspects.
If you want your stats at the max it requires an ungodly amount of fishing and running around for ingredients and since I have no life I maxed them out in 1. In 2 I am pretty sure the developers realised how much people could spam bosses so they made stamina get used up way faster with no way to increase it more (or increase it much I cant remember) thus DESTROYING all my hard work EFFING FISHING!! But I think I still managed to spam bosses quite a bit in 2. Still they were hard and it was so SATISFYING defeating some of them. Best part of the whole game is that satisfaction.
I still haven't finished boss rush mode in 2 yet because I want max HP for everyone but its gonna take too much fishing. Since its so ridiculous what you have to do to max out, they should'nt have even given you the possibility to do it and should've thought up a better system.
Collecting ingredients to build and cook stuff was good at first and in theory but when I was trying to make one of everything, and needed the right materials for Franky and enough stuff to feed gabri so they could open up new areas, it took way too long going to the same boring places in a big collectathon.
But with all that being mostly bad, here's the good:
Exploring the Thousand Sunny with it looking exactly the way it should according to Oda's designs. But I think there's some design flaws that are either Oda's fault of the videogame developers'. It's also sucky that they forced you to buy the second game in order to unlock the rest of the ship. The 2nd game was just a huge money ploy. My primary motivation for buying and playing this game was to explore the virtual ship. Yes I paid like $40-50 AUD (actually I really cant remember) per game for a virtual pirate ship.
One of the best things about One Piece are the crew's interaction with each other and boy did this game convey that perfectly. Every time you go back to the ship you will find different people in different places and situations, plenty of which are hilarious. I spent too long going on and off the ship to find every scenario and even though of course they repeated a lot there's still a HUGE amount of them. One of my favorites was Brook sitting at the dining table banging his cutlery on it yelling for Sanji to make dinner.
Getting to control the characters and use their cool movesets. In part 1 I was disappointed by the lack of attacks but in 2 I was happy to find that you get a whole new set of moves and can choose the ones you want. Its a bit limited by the controller and its a bit sucky you have to press 2 to switch between the 2 movesets, though. Special attacks are mostly a disappointment though because a lot of them ended up essentially being the same.
There might be some stuff I've forgotten (god forbid) but that's it. If this game wasnt One Piece or I wasnt a One Piece fan, I'd give it a 7. Add on all the One Pieceyness and its a 9. But thats for someone who just does the bare minimum plus maybe the secret bosses. For the completionist who does all that fishing and collecting the game is brought down to a 6 by the end of it.
My ideal One Piece game would be a 20/10. Its all about the potential and all the flaws they didnt fix from Adventure.
