Review #172: One Piece - Grand Adventure

 I'd cross the Grand Line for this game. Just sayin'

 One Piece: Grand Adventure is a 1 on 1 arena-based fighter based on the hit franchise One Piece. While Japan had the "Rumble Arena" series, westerners had to settle with Grand Battle and Grand Adventure. Grand Battle was a decent game... but had stuff taken out, Grand Adventure sets out to correct that, and it manages to be a Western-Exclusive One Piece game that is almost on par with the last Rumble Arena game.

 The game has two main modes: Adventure and Battle, the latter that houses VS Player/Cpu, Tournament and Arena(A "choose your next opponent" ladder). The adventure mode actually has five different adventures, Luffy's story that loosely tells Luffy's story up to Skypeia's arc, and then there's four what ifs: Buggy's, Crocodile's, Chaser's(Smoker) and Usopp's. What's fun about Adventure mode is that you actually level up your characters as you fight battles, and get to spread their stat points! Each character also has unlockables(Luffy unlocks costumes for the Mugiwaras and Robin, Usopp unlocks costumes for the Mugiwaras, Smoker, Crocodile and Buggy unlock characters). Surprisingly, it's a very fun and lengthy mode, however, Smoker's Adventure is a bit of a chore. Y'see, for some reason they decided that in order to unlock Smoker's characters you need to level them up to 15, that's fine, but Kuina and Zeff come with terrible stat spreads that make even the easiest of fights in Chaser's mode hard, it just wasn't fun having to grind experience with these two characters.

 Controls are responsive and well set-up, but there's a bunch of functions that may take a while to properly get a grasp of. X and Square are your two basic attacks that can be combined to produce various three hit combos, pressing them together performs a strong attack that breaks guards. Circle is used to grab boxes, barrels, chests or items around the arenas, and triangle is the jump. So far, so good. R1 is a block, but holding R1 and pressing any of the face buttons allows for Special attacks! Then there's L1, which is used to enter Accel Heat Mode when pressed with the triangle button(There's three levels of Accel Heat, depending on how many energy gauges you spend, and they provide various bonuses like unblockable attacks and faster speed), but if you press square twice while holding L1 you can call a character to assist you(There's many types of Assist Characters, which you chose before each battle). L1+X plus another button performs Super attacks, but L1+Circle+Circle plus another button produces the Secret Attack that consumes three gauges, and if it hits, engages a rock-paper-scissors minigame, which I really, really could've done without. I also disliked how Super Attack and Secret Attack's inputs are different between characters, it doesn't add depth to the game or differentiate characters, it just makes it confusing!

 Regardless, 22 out of the 24 characters are completely unique between each other, they even have unique "hold" animations. Take Buggy, when he holds an item, he crosses his arms while his hands hover above his head holding the item, while Crocodile just holds his hand over his head nonchalantly, and Zeff just lays the item over his head. There's only two clones, Kuina and Zeff, who are Tashigi and Sanji clones respectively, and even then, they have some unique attributes to themselves. Stages are very colorful and varied, with different geographies and obstacles, some even contain hazards that must be avoided. On the flip side, it seems they tried to bite more than they could chew with some stages, the framerate can get pretty bad on some of the more intense environments. As far as usable weapons go, they are pretty dull, there's a bat, a laser sword, bombs, oil canisters, poisonous shrooms among others, but I didn't really care for them. There's also some unlockable mini-games, like a 1-on-1 race or one in which you have to break all the boxes in a time-limit, they're pretty forgettable, but I didn't mind them.

 The game is absolutely beautiful, a lot of care went into the game's graphics. While the game employs a slightly deformed look for the characters, they are pretty detailed, and the animations are pretty smooth(When the framerate isn't taking a dive that is!). Not to mention the amount of unique animations per character, like the previously mentioned "holding" animations. Particularly impressive is how cloth moves, just look at how Luffy's jacket waves. The music is alright, it fits the game and it suits the fighting, the same can't be said about the voice acting sadly. The game employs the terrible, terrible 4Kids dub, so expect to see some changes on some personalities. This also means that Smoker is now named Chaser and he is missing the cigars from his mouth, and Ace was renamed Trace, for some reason. I really didn't mind it to be honest, the game is great, and most of what made the characters who they are was left intact.

 One Piece Grand Adventure is almost a perfect example on how to make a licensed game. You could take away all the One Piece imagery and it would still be a great game. There's a couple of annoyances, like how the frame-rate can go to hell on some stages, or how Secret and Super moves inputs are different from characters for no reason at all, or the edits done to the characters due to the dub, however, Grand Adventure is so good that it's easy to look past that.
 8.0 out of 10.