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The Lowdown
Pros: More "mature" style in the graphics.
Cons: Barebones fighting system with only a few characters and next to
no replay value.
 Purchase
at Play-Asia
 Purchase
at Lik-Sang
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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.
All of the crucial information and menus are in English, except the
command list. Language problems shouldn't deter anyone from playing this
game.
US Bound?
It is more than likely that Fighting for One Piece will make its way
over to the US with the 4 Kids voice actors sometime next year.
Overall
It might look great in screenshots, but this game suffers from
slipshod quality in every area.
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