Review #822: One Piece - Pirate Warriors 4

 A Pirate I was meant to be, trim the sails and roam the seas!

 While I only got into Pirate Warriors with 3, I could instantly tell that it was good stuff. One Piece and its creative character design and powers made for fantastic movesets in a Musou game, and the lack of a proper jump wasn't as bad as I feared when I first heard about it when the first game came out. One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 is here, and boy, they have changed things up, there's a jump button for one, as well as other mechanics that make it fairly experimental as far as Musou goes.

 As per usual with the Musou games, there are three modes: Dramatic Mode, which is the game's story mode, Free Mode, which lets you play Dramatic Mode with any character and without cutscenes and Treasure Log, which is a collection of about 99 mini-missions under silly circumstances while random mini-scenarios occur, such as having to fight any of two combatants or having to rescue a villager from a random character. The story mode is a mixed bag. It features 3 pre-timeskip scenarios: Alabasta, Ennies Lobby and a mix-mash of the Sabaody Archipelago arc and the Marineford arc, as well as 3 post-time skip scenarios: A mix of the first post-time skip chapter when the Straw Hat Pirates reunited with the Dressrosa arc, the new Whole Cake arc and a new, made up version of the Wano arc. As any connoisseur would know, One Piece is fairly long and a LOT of stuff happens between these arcs, so the game tries to condense as much as possible the in-betweens through cut-scenes. New comers will probably have a hard time keeping up, core characters such as Chopper and Brook get some pretty shallow introductions and barely any scenes afterward. On the other hand, the cutscenes are really good and do a great job of adapting some key scenes from the series. There are a lot of them too, so while every scenario is divided into 6 12 minute stages, there are so many scenes to watch that it'll bump up your play time, which isn't a bad thing when it's so entertaining to watch, at least to someone that knows One Piece.

 Basic gameplay remains the same: You vs thousands of brain-dead enemies and stronger generals. Y is a basic attack string that can be peppered with X button presses to produce more powerful attacks. The first change is an emphasis on air combos, B is now a jump button that can be pressed mid-combo to launch enemies up into the sky, and A is the power charge, a dash that deals low damage and can be used to cancel your attacks...or jumps. So you can push an enemy into the air and tie combos along, by power-dashing, your limit being a Stamina gauge, which refills over time. The other change was to the Super/Musou attacks, as they have no dedicated button... or slot. Each character starts off with four special moves, at least one of them being a Musou attack, which are used by holding down the R button and pressing any face button. Each character has MORE than four of these abilities, but you can only equip four at a time, and gain more by leveling them up. Not every character has the same surpluss of abilities, Luffy being the one with the most, from form changes(Gear 2nd, Boundman, etc) to Super moves. These R-button abilities refill as you deal and receive damage. It's an interesting idea, and works quite decently. You could equip four Musou/Super attacks if you want, at the cost of taking longer to refill, or you could use some quicker but weaker super moves, heck, you don't really need to equip a Burst(Such as a form change) at all!

 The leveling up system is completely different, you no longer gain traditional experience points, but rather spend earned money and coins, the latter mostly from defeated enemies, on growth Maps, to obtain stat gains, extended attack strings, new moves and even passive skills you can equip. There's one shared growth map and two exclusive maps per character. The three-tiered enemy life gauges I hated from PW3 is gone, but bosses now have armor gauges that you must deplete in order to deal more considerable damage, but these gauges regenerate every time you destroy them. The game claims that the new giant enemies can only be harmed when they are attacked, but I could deal damage just fine even when they weren't doing anything, which is a good thing, since otherwise they'd be a bit of a bore. To be honest, I'm not fond of this new armor gauge, but I prefer it over the three-tier life gauge. A new aesthetic change is that you can damage the environment around you, sometimes you can even destroy entire buildings. It's not a game changer, but it's a nice detail.

 There are 13 new characters, made up from Kaido, Big Mom, some of the Pirate Super Novas and all of Sanji's siblings, his father isn't playable, for whatever reason, though. Sounds pretty neat right? Well, in something I haven't seen since the classic PS2 era, they actually removed characters. Garp actually got turned into an NPC, which is completely ridiculous since he used to have an entire moveset. Enel, my favorite villain, got removed because who knows why, Moria and Perona are gone too. And the Strawhats? Only Luffy, Zoro, Sanji and Usopp get their pre-timeskip forms, which, once again, is ridiculous since the other pre-timeskip characters they had movesets in Pirate Warriors 3 and they even have their models/skins in this game. And while it's true that this game is using a new graphic engine, old characters animate pretty much exactly like they did in the previous game, so what gives? Yes, characters have expanded movesets thanks to the R-palette, but keep in mind that, sometimes, these moves used to be X-combo enders in the previous game. There's no excuse other than laziness, and don't worry, they'll nickel and dime you with 9 DLC characters anyways.

 Speaking of no excuse, the targeting system still sucks. It's been a long while since Musou games haven't had a decent targeting system, but in this game it was particularly egregious. The lock-on camera loves to get stuck around, and sometimes, even get stuck in angles you can't see the enemy you are targeting. Their solution was to make it so that if you press the Power Dash button while standing still it'll automatically take you to the targeted enemy. But it's not a decent a solution. If they are gonna cut corners so bad they'll better fix the most basic of mechanics. And the loading times are pretty darn long too.

 As many corners as they cut, the sad reality is that this is still one of the most fun series of Musou games. Honestly, the crazy powers and the ways these characters move are a perfect fit for the genre. The new changes they made to the mechanics feel like a step in the right direction, and the aerial combat was way more fun than it deserved to be. I love the Musou game, but they are very shallow affairs and they never change too much, even with the new additions this game still follows the same blueprint very closely, so removing characters doesn't sit very well with me. The new aerial combat also really brought to light how much they need to work on the targeting system. When it's all said and done, Pirate Warriors 4 is still a choice game when you feel like playing Musou, when you just want to turn off your brain and feel like a one-man army. But it can be better.
 8.5 out of 10