Fighting for One Piece

By Spencer . September 26, 2005 . 9:28pm

Fighting for One Piece ditches veteran developer Ganbarion who made the Grand Battle Rush titles in favor of in house development. In fact Fighting for One Piece seemingly ignores the humor of the series and attempts to make a hardcore 2D fighter designed for older gamers. The first thing you’ll notice is a change in the character design. This time around you have large 3D models instead of tiny cel-shaded midgets. All of the stars have such a serious look in their eyes. Normally goofy Luffy looks ready to break some legs and cheerful Nami looks angrily at the player. If you haven’t figured it out from the box art the cast is ready for some serious fighting.

Think Tekken meets Street Fighter 3’s custom combos for an idea of how the One Piece system works out. Besides pressing punch or kick you can add in a direction for a new attack. There are some street fighter type quarter circle swipes of the analog stick to learn, which makes the system slightly deeper than the Grand Battle Rush titles. Like every other fighting game you’ll build up your super meter with each successive attack. If you look carefully at the meter you actually have five tiny bars built into it. After one or more bars are filled you can grab your opponent by pressing square and do an uninterrupted combo. When you do this attack the action will briefly pause and you’ll get a chance to input moves for the combo. Since you only have two seconds per move you need to be fast and precise. After that the camera switches angles and you watch as your character deals each attack.

Although many more players will probably wait until the bar is fully charged and use the shadow technique by pressing triangle. When you use this super ability you’ll gain a bunch of shadows that mimic each hit you make for a couple of seconds. This gives players an perfect opportunity to deal a high hitting combo, with bonus damage from each shadow hit. While it is nice to have combo boosting mechanics you don’t have any real super moves for the characters.

The actual cast of characters in the game is lacking as well. You have all of the classic characters like Zolo, Luffy, Sanji, Usopp, Nami, Robin and Chopper for initial play. You can unlock other playable characters like Crocodile and Aokiji by going through the fighting mode. With each successful battle you’ll earn gold that allows you to purchase other characters. However, the main mode doesn’t have a story to follow or anything of the sort. The game just expects you to fight so you can unlock more characters. There is a faster way to do the unlocks if you try out gambling mode. You can win a lot of gold this way and this is probably the only sensible way to go if you plan to unlock everything. The single player fighting mode takes an extremely long time to even unlock a single character. Unlocking characters is really the sole focus of the title and even that is a boring task.

What all of the One Piece fans are really excited about is the hardcore character design. Yeah, the design is a refreshing change over the anime and manga. Although the actual animated characters are more horribly rigid. Luffy is flexible right? Then why does he move like a guard from Buckingham Palace? There’s just something wrong about a fighting game that has to freeze frame every move instead of linking one move to the next. At least the design of the levels and the characters is well done.

Fighting for One Piece tries too hard to appeal to an older demographic. While superficially it looks appealing, the gameplay won’t even captivate a kindergartener for very long. No story to go through, just endless battles against the same CPU opponents in the hope of unlocking more characters. Why bother fighting for One Piece when there are better One Piece games with more characters and that are flat out more entertaining.