One Piece is a manga written and drawn by Eiichirō Oda, serialized in the Japanese magazine Weekly Shōnen Jump by Shūeisha.
The story follows the adventures of Monkey D. Rufy, a boy whose body took on the properties of rubber after inadvertently ingesting the devil fruit Gom Gom.
Gathering a crew around him, Luffy explores the Grand Line in search of the legendary One Piece treasure and pursuing the dream of becoming the new Pirate king.
One Piece has been made of many video games, different types of merchandising and even an anime that is currently still in progress. Among the various video games released, the last of these is One Piece Pirate Warriors 4, of which we were able to test the PC version.
If you want to know what news this title has brought or if it is a valid product, you just have to read the our review!
The way to become the pirate king
The story mode of One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 starts right from the end, from the last saga of the game, the Wa saga, which will be the tutorial of the main mechanics.
After a short mission we will go back in history, following a flashback, and we will start the game from one of the most famous sagas of One Piece, the Alabasta saga. This type of trick is present in many titles, with one of the most recent examples in My Hero One's Justice 2, of which we have reviewed the PC version.
So we're not going to start from the beginning like we did in previous titles in the series Pirate Warriors but after a brief video introduction of the first narrative arcs played through the game engine, we will actually start from Alabasta.
In the game we will cover only the most significant narrative arcs, skipping some of them, they will therefore be present beyond Alabasta, Water Seven / Enies Lobby, Sabaody / Marineford, Dressrosa, Whole Cake Island and Wa.
All the sagas will faithfully follow the canonical history of One Piece except the last which is currently underway in Japan, in fact the latter will present an alternate ending as happened in the past with One Piece Pirate Warriors 3 with the Dressrosa saga.
A novelty compared to previous titles is that the present sagas have been addressed and told in a different and more in-depth way.
If in the previous titles most of the sagas were told by one or two missions at most, in One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 instead we find up to six missions per narrative arc to tell the adventures of Luffy and his crew.
On boarding
One Piece Pirate Warriors 4, developed by Omega Force e Koei Tecmo, it's a Musou, with mechanics very similar to the classic Hack And Slash and Action.
This genre is characterized by a single character thrown into the fray having to fight, with a mix of spectacular and often unrealistic actions, against almost endless hordes of enemies and relatively fearsome bosses, with objectives such as defeating the boss or conquering various areas.
Going specifically, the gameplay of One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 is almost identical to the previous chapter, with some interesting differences and news. The camera continues to remain a title issue though, often becoming an obstacle during title fights.
The title features a cast of over 40 characters, a very important factor in this genre of games, as farming is the basis of experience and being able to use only a few characters can easily lead to boredom.
One of the novelties is certainly the presence of four classes or styles which will be assigned to each of the different characters of the title.
The Powerful style, for example, causes enemies hit by a slam attack to crash into the ground or a wall, and then hit all surrounding opponents.
The Veloce style reduces the consumption of resistance during a shot, the Technical style instead, it has a charged assault that draws all nearby enemies to it while the Volante style allows you to sprint after sprint to stay in the air and launch an offensive.
Finally, another novelty is the presence of much more difficult bosses, that is, they will have a kind of barrier represented by one or more shields.
If an enemy boss has a shield then it will suffer reduced damage until we can break these shields, with particular actions or sprints. Once destroyed the enemy will be vulnerable for some time and it will take a lot more damage than normal.
Character progression
One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 also features a highly rated progression system grinding, which will allow you to increase the statistics of the characters and teach them new skills both through a "skill tree“, Which will affect all characters, both through a series of power-ups for each of them.
Omega Force has also completely eliminated the possibility of being able to level up through experience. In this chapter, in fact, you can unlock the various upgrades and skills through a combination of money and coins .
Coins are obtained at the end of each mission and are classified from bronze to platinum. Some of these are permanent and can be reused at will, while others are on consumption.
Logbook
In One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 beyond the story mode (Narrative Diary) there are other modes such as Free Diary to face the same missions of history but in full freedom.
In Treasury diary, you can play missions divided into grades with invented scenarios. The peculiarity of this mode is that it is divided into three "chapters" that can only be unlocked by completing the previous ones. Of course, the difficulty will increase as you progress through the title.
The game also features a online or local multiplayer mode which allows you to take part in ongoing missions by other players, or host them in turn.
Problems with the PC version
During our PC test, One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 it has given us enough technical problems. Graphics settings when set low or high did not improve performance, causing stuttering, that is, the big drops in frames that occur during fights.
We want to clarify that the game was tested both on an i9 7900X with an RTX 2080 Ti and 64 GB of RAM, and on a Ryzen 5 1600x with an 580 GB RX 8 and 16 GB of Ram, so the problems encountered reside in the game itself and not in the pc used in the review phase.
The game allows us to remove the 30 fps cap to get up to 60 fps but this it does not solve the problems encountered at all.
We report a non-existent antialiasing and linked to the "texture" item from the game settings, and beyond that it lacks 21: 9 monitor support and an option to put the game in full screen.
In fact, we found ourselves having to play with a 16: 9 window, removing that sense of immersion that can be obtained from viewing the side desktop. We have only solved the antialiasing problem by forcing it through the video card management panel.
Finally, the cutscenes result "Dirty" and not clear because they were recorded via the game engine and not rendered in real time. Furthermore, the cutscenes in the first pc ran at 30 FPS while in the second at most at 12 FPS, something completely unusual, considering that the PC was above the recommended requirements.
We expected greater care from Omega Force and Koei Tecmo in the technical care for this new chapter of One Piece, but it did not happen.
In conclusion
Summing up One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 is definitely a valid title especially for fans of musou and the One Piece saga and definitely better than the previous ones, with the possibility of doing hundreds of hours.
But this can mostly be said for the console version while the PC version has failed miserably due to serious technical defects. We were very disappointed with it, as it was released with too many problems, some even very serious, making the game frustrating and not very funny to play.
We really hope that most of these issues will be resolved soon but as good as the title is at the moment we do not feel like advising the PC version.
