One Piece: Kaizoku Musou review (part 1)
Aug. 28th, 2012 11:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rallamajoopSince running out of One Piece last month I’ve been filling the gaping void in my life by playing insane amounts of Kaizoku Musou, which we picked up on holiday in Japan earlier this year. I don’t play a lot of games these days – generally if we pick up a new title my sister does most of the playing and I’ll stick to wandering in to watch now and then – so it’s no mark in its favour that this game has kept me entertained so long. It is terrifically good fun, and given that it is apparently breaking sales records for both Musou titles and One Piece games, the Japanese fanbase would appear to agree with me on that count. Better yet, it’s coming out in English in a few months time, and I would heartily recommend it to any One Piece fan with access to a PS3.
The Basics
For those who may not be familiar with the franchise, Musou-style games work on the principle of pitting a thoroughly overpowered player character against a quite literal army of embarassingly weak opponents. Victory requires you to hack and slash your way through the hoards to take down a few mid-bosses and finally the enemy commander before the enemy troops manage do the same thing to you (your own character can be killed, but this is rarely what takes you out). There’ll usually be some strategic elements involved – you have your own supporting army of NPCs and often some sort of morale gauge which influences the effectiveness of your own troops, but by and large you’ll spend most of each stage repeating the same handful of repetitive moves against an endless hoard of identical opponents. The formula can be fun in a godmodding kind of way, but gets old fast.
Kaizoku Musou uses a variant on the formula that divides each battle stage into various areas connected lattice-style by narrow bridging corridors. Most areas start off as enemy territory, meaning enemy soldiers will continue appearing there until you defeat enough of them to capture it, at which point it’ll start generating soldiers for your side instead – unless the enemy captures it back, etc. While it’s obviously useful to capture territory, actually winning the stage tends to rely more on completing a series of missions that involve finding and taking down more powerful ‘bodyguard’ soldiers and a few recognisable mid-bosses (characters like Hatchan, Baroque Works officers or CP9), after which the main boss for that stage will finally appear and have to be defeated for a win. All pretty straight-forward.
The genius of marrying this sort of gameplay with One Piece comes from how you really couldn’t ask for a source canon packed with more excuses for Musou-style battles. The Straw Hats find themselves facing off against armies of marines or rival pirates on a fairly regular basis, after all. The story mode jumps around a fair bit, opening on the ‘Return to Shabondy’ arc, then it cuts back to take us through some of the earlier adventures starting with the battle against Buggy (and crew). From there we progress through Don Creig (and his crew) at the Barrate, Arlong Park (where Arlong has a slightly larger Fishman crew than I remember, but who’s counting?), Drum Country (you get the picture), Alabasta (Baroque Works), Enies Lobby (CP9), Shabondy Archipelago (Marines), then finally Impel Down (Marines and jailors) and Marineford (self-explanatory). Precisely why there should be an army of friendly pirates or other random locals assisting the Straw Hats is easier to justify in some places than others – you’ve got escaped prisoners in Impel Down, other pirates in Shabondy and Marineford and the Franky Family in Enies Lobby (or so one presumes, when they all look so much like generic pirates that I tend to spend a while attacking them by mistake), but I have a harder time explaining who was helping you at, say, Alabasta (…the royal guard?). On the balance of it all though, the presence of your own supporting army makes perfectly good canonical sense in enough stages for it to be fairly easy to handwave whatever’s left over.
You play as Luffy through most of the main story mode (‘Main Log’), which is a mix of battles, cut scenes and platforming sections which make use of Luffy’s Gomu Gomu abilities to swing around and reach areas that would be otherwise inaccessible. Since in practice this largely means running around until an icon pops up letting you know you’re at a ‘swing point’ then following the quick-time event prompts, exactly how much the adds to the gameplay is open for debate, but at least it does break things up a little.
Other characters unlock as you progress to become playable in their own limited story modes (‘Another Log’), basically consisting of all the locations they were present for canonically, though you can also opt to stick them in each other’s story modes and send Hancock rampaging through Arlong Park and the like. Since later characters like Brook and Ace only get a single location in their ‘official’ story mode, this is A Good Thing.
Gameplay revolves mostly around two attack buttons (square and triangle), which can be mashed in assorted sequences to prompt your character to execute various moves and combos. The X button makes you dash, the circle activates a super move of some kind or another (provided you’ve KO’d enough enemies to fill up your gauge) or can be held down to empty two or more gauges and activate an even more powerful super-move or temporary power-up (Gear Second, Chopper’s Monster Form, Sanji’s Diablo Jambe, etc). R1 and R2 give you a variety of character-specific blocks or other functions, such as activating Luffy’s Gomu Gomu no Fuusen to repel incoming canon balls or refill Franky’s cola supply. Finally, hitting L2 while one of your teammates is nearby will make them your ‘partner’, which lets you switch out with them for a few seconds at a time after hitting the right button combination. Since you’re pretty well invulnerable while the switch lasts, this can be very useful way of getting something through your enemy’s guard as well as being a novel little trick.
The Highlights
An awful lot of the joy of this game comes just from experimenting with all the different moves available for each character – most of which are easily recognisable from OP canon. Whereas what I’ve seen of the main Dynasty Warriors series gave you a massive cast of playable characters with maybe a couple of different moves apiece, Kaizoku Musou limits the cast to a ‘mere’ thirteen characters, and gives them all a dozen or more different moves to play with. Different button combos will have Luffy gattling-gunning down everything in front of him, muchi-ing out a leg in a wide circle or swinging his fist over his head like a propeller. There’s no jump button per se, but most characters have a move that launches enemies into the air which you can follow either by continuing the combo up there or slamming them straight back down again. While a lot of moves are inevitably far more novel than really useful, the game is mostly forgiving enough to let you mess around a bit and experiment with whatever looks cool. Then you move on to the next character and start the process all over again.
Everyone in the cast has their own uniquely different fighting style and their own handling quirks. Zoro’s two-sword slices have so much reach that it’s a bit like fighting with an incredibly agile combine harvester. Usopp is, as you’d expect, probably the weakest hitter, but he has the longest range and canrun away move around awfully fast. Several of Ace’s combo finishers will do extra damage if you pause a second to let him charge up before hitting the final button, while Nami’s will leave little storm clouds floating over her enemies’ heads which you can trigger from a safe distance to hit them with a lightning bolt. All that before you even start on characters like Robin, Franky or Brook.
Kaizoku Musou also happens to be damn gorgeous to look at. As compared to what I remember from the early Musou titles, where battles mostly took place at night in monotonous landscape, the stages from Kaizoku Musou are bright and colourful and filled with amusing little touches like the way enemy soldiers will respond to losing a territory by panicking and running for their lives with their arms waving over their heads. The cartoonishness of the aesthetic feels like a better fit for the genre than anything the original ever delivered.
The quality of the animation in both gameplay and cutscenes leaves basically nothing to be desired. Watching it in action is not unlike watching a fight scene from the anime where the animators somehow got ahold of the budget to animate every last little detail. It can be a little trippy watching what is clearly a real, live motion actor behind the animation of someone with Luffy’s rubber limbs, but on the whole the effect works for me far more often than it doesn’t.
As a final recommendation, it also turns out to make a surprisingly good party game. Never have I seen a room get so invested in watching someone play a video game as the gang of One Piece cosplayers we had over after a recent photoshoot. There’s a split-screen mode which allows two players to team up to take on a stage together, but we ended up spending most of the evening watching my sister play through the story mode while the rest of the room cheered like football fans watching a big game. Everyone had different ideas about which way she was supposed to be heading next. Everyone was willing to join in singing the Indiana Jones theme as Luffy ran down a corridor in the Alabasta tomb filled with booby traps. A good time was had by all.
The Lowlights
Hands down the single most annoying thing about this game is that if any one of your fellow Straw Hats gets taken down, you lose instantly. Since there’s no way to replenish your allies’ health gauge if it starts getting low and no way to make them stop attacking the boss and go sit somewhere safe either, this can be very hard to prevent. They can call for help when they get in trouble, but finding them often takes too long to do much good and frequently leads to a lot of running in circles and missing some other mission objective you were supposed to be completing instead. I suspect a lot of this would be a lot easier if my Japanese were good enough to understand what the game’s trying to tell me to do more than half the time, but as it is it’s a real source of frustration.
While you can replenish your own health by picking up various food items found in chests or dropped randomly by defeated enemies, availability does become a problem. Many times we’ve found ourselves running away from major boss battles with a depleted health gauge and hunting frantically through the rest of the stage to find a food item we hadn’t already picked up. As a strategy it works, but it’s clumsy and rather embarrassing one at best.
The game could also really use some way of replaying earlier stages at higher difficulty. You can replay any stage as many times as you like with any character, but since you go on levelling up regardless, as soon as you’re past about level 12 or so you find yourself replaying Enies Lobby and Shabondy over and over again because everything else has become too easy. When Impel Down and Marineford do finally unlock, they do so only as the first stage of Jinbe and Ace/Whitebeard/Hancock’s logs (Luffy’s log isn’t accessible to other characters for whatever reason), and consequently show up on minimum difficulty. There’s a challenge mode too, but since it looks like I’d have to replay Shabondy another dozen times or more before anyone’s at a high enough level to tackle, it’s not doing me much good.
Finally, I can only admit to my crushing disappointment that neither Skypeia or Thriller Bark are playable locations, even though Enel’s battle royal and the Thriller Bark’s zombie hoards could have been tailer-made for the Musou genre. Neither Law or Kid are present at Shabondy even as support characters, no matter that they’re central to one of the biggest pirate vs marine battles we saw there in canon, and while Crocodile, Bon Clay and Mr 2 all return from Alabasta in Impel Down, Ivankov is nowhere in sight. It’s probably a little petty of me to complain that there isn’t even more packed into a game which already has so much to offer, but I would be well and truly willing to pay extra for it. A few more alternate costume options for the cast would’ve been nice too.
In conclusion, I would like to offer a few other serious, important and thoroughly serious points of very serious criticism:
The Basics
For those who may not be familiar with the franchise, Musou-style games work on the principle of pitting a thoroughly overpowered player character against a quite literal army of embarassingly weak opponents. Victory requires you to hack and slash your way through the hoards to take down a few mid-bosses and finally the enemy commander before the enemy troops manage do the same thing to you (your own character can be killed, but this is rarely what takes you out). There’ll usually be some strategic elements involved – you have your own supporting army of NPCs and often some sort of morale gauge which influences the effectiveness of your own troops, but by and large you’ll spend most of each stage repeating the same handful of repetitive moves against an endless hoard of identical opponents. The formula can be fun in a godmodding kind of way, but gets old fast.
Kaizoku Musou uses a variant on the formula that divides each battle stage into various areas connected lattice-style by narrow bridging corridors. Most areas start off as enemy territory, meaning enemy soldiers will continue appearing there until you defeat enough of them to capture it, at which point it’ll start generating soldiers for your side instead – unless the enemy captures it back, etc. While it’s obviously useful to capture territory, actually winning the stage tends to rely more on completing a series of missions that involve finding and taking down more powerful ‘bodyguard’ soldiers and a few recognisable mid-bosses (characters like Hatchan, Baroque Works officers or CP9), after which the main boss for that stage will finally appear and have to be defeated for a win. All pretty straight-forward.
The genius of marrying this sort of gameplay with One Piece comes from how you really couldn’t ask for a source canon packed with more excuses for Musou-style battles. The Straw Hats find themselves facing off against armies of marines or rival pirates on a fairly regular basis, after all. The story mode jumps around a fair bit, opening on the ‘Return to Shabondy’ arc, then it cuts back to take us through some of the earlier adventures starting with the battle against Buggy (and crew). From there we progress through Don Creig (and his crew) at the Barrate, Arlong Park (where Arlong has a slightly larger Fishman crew than I remember, but who’s counting?), Drum Country (you get the picture), Alabasta (Baroque Works), Enies Lobby (CP9), Shabondy Archipelago (Marines), then finally Impel Down (Marines and jailors) and Marineford (self-explanatory). Precisely why there should be an army of friendly pirates or other random locals assisting the Straw Hats is easier to justify in some places than others – you’ve got escaped prisoners in Impel Down, other pirates in Shabondy and Marineford and the Franky Family in Enies Lobby (or so one presumes, when they all look so much like generic pirates that I tend to spend a while attacking them by mistake), but I have a harder time explaining who was helping you at, say, Alabasta (…the royal guard?). On the balance of it all though, the presence of your own supporting army makes perfectly good canonical sense in enough stages for it to be fairly easy to handwave whatever’s left over.
You play as Luffy through most of the main story mode (‘Main Log’), which is a mix of battles, cut scenes and platforming sections which make use of Luffy’s Gomu Gomu abilities to swing around and reach areas that would be otherwise inaccessible. Since in practice this largely means running around until an icon pops up letting you know you’re at a ‘swing point’ then following the quick-time event prompts, exactly how much the adds to the gameplay is open for debate, but at least it does break things up a little.
Other characters unlock as you progress to become playable in their own limited story modes (‘Another Log’), basically consisting of all the locations they were present for canonically, though you can also opt to stick them in each other’s story modes and send Hancock rampaging through Arlong Park and the like. Since later characters like Brook and Ace only get a single location in their ‘official’ story mode, this is A Good Thing.
Gameplay revolves mostly around two attack buttons (square and triangle), which can be mashed in assorted sequences to prompt your character to execute various moves and combos. The X button makes you dash, the circle activates a super move of some kind or another (provided you’ve KO’d enough enemies to fill up your gauge) or can be held down to empty two or more gauges and activate an even more powerful super-move or temporary power-up (Gear Second, Chopper’s Monster Form, Sanji’s Diablo Jambe, etc). R1 and R2 give you a variety of character-specific blocks or other functions, such as activating Luffy’s Gomu Gomu no Fuusen to repel incoming canon balls or refill Franky’s cola supply. Finally, hitting L2 while one of your teammates is nearby will make them your ‘partner’, which lets you switch out with them for a few seconds at a time after hitting the right button combination. Since you’re pretty well invulnerable while the switch lasts, this can be very useful way of getting something through your enemy’s guard as well as being a novel little trick.
The Highlights
An awful lot of the joy of this game comes just from experimenting with all the different moves available for each character – most of which are easily recognisable from OP canon. Whereas what I’ve seen of the main Dynasty Warriors series gave you a massive cast of playable characters with maybe a couple of different moves apiece, Kaizoku Musou limits the cast to a ‘mere’ thirteen characters, and gives them all a dozen or more different moves to play with. Different button combos will have Luffy gattling-gunning down everything in front of him, muchi-ing out a leg in a wide circle or swinging his fist over his head like a propeller. There’s no jump button per se, but most characters have a move that launches enemies into the air which you can follow either by continuing the combo up there or slamming them straight back down again. While a lot of moves are inevitably far more novel than really useful, the game is mostly forgiving enough to let you mess around a bit and experiment with whatever looks cool. Then you move on to the next character and start the process all over again.
Everyone in the cast has their own uniquely different fighting style and their own handling quirks. Zoro’s two-sword slices have so much reach that it’s a bit like fighting with an incredibly agile combine harvester. Usopp is, as you’d expect, probably the weakest hitter, but he has the longest range and can
Kaizoku Musou also happens to be damn gorgeous to look at. As compared to what I remember from the early Musou titles, where battles mostly took place at night in monotonous landscape, the stages from Kaizoku Musou are bright and colourful and filled with amusing little touches like the way enemy soldiers will respond to losing a territory by panicking and running for their lives with their arms waving over their heads. The cartoonishness of the aesthetic feels like a better fit for the genre than anything the original ever delivered.
The quality of the animation in both gameplay and cutscenes leaves basically nothing to be desired. Watching it in action is not unlike watching a fight scene from the anime where the animators somehow got ahold of the budget to animate every last little detail. It can be a little trippy watching what is clearly a real, live motion actor behind the animation of someone with Luffy’s rubber limbs, but on the whole the effect works for me far more often than it doesn’t.
As a final recommendation, it also turns out to make a surprisingly good party game. Never have I seen a room get so invested in watching someone play a video game as the gang of One Piece cosplayers we had over after a recent photoshoot. There’s a split-screen mode which allows two players to team up to take on a stage together, but we ended up spending most of the evening watching my sister play through the story mode while the rest of the room cheered like football fans watching a big game. Everyone had different ideas about which way she was supposed to be heading next. Everyone was willing to join in singing the Indiana Jones theme as Luffy ran down a corridor in the Alabasta tomb filled with booby traps. A good time was had by all.
The Lowlights
Hands down the single most annoying thing about this game is that if any one of your fellow Straw Hats gets taken down, you lose instantly. Since there’s no way to replenish your allies’ health gauge if it starts getting low and no way to make them stop attacking the boss and go sit somewhere safe either, this can be very hard to prevent. They can call for help when they get in trouble, but finding them often takes too long to do much good and frequently leads to a lot of running in circles and missing some other mission objective you were supposed to be completing instead. I suspect a lot of this would be a lot easier if my Japanese were good enough to understand what the game’s trying to tell me to do more than half the time, but as it is it’s a real source of frustration.
While you can replenish your own health by picking up various food items found in chests or dropped randomly by defeated enemies, availability does become a problem. Many times we’ve found ourselves running away from major boss battles with a depleted health gauge and hunting frantically through the rest of the stage to find a food item we hadn’t already picked up. As a strategy it works, but it’s clumsy and rather embarrassing one at best.
The game could also really use some way of replaying earlier stages at higher difficulty. You can replay any stage as many times as you like with any character, but since you go on levelling up regardless, as soon as you’re past about level 12 or so you find yourself replaying Enies Lobby and Shabondy over and over again because everything else has become too easy. When Impel Down and Marineford do finally unlock, they do so only as the first stage of Jinbe and Ace/Whitebeard/Hancock’s logs (Luffy’s log isn’t accessible to other characters for whatever reason), and consequently show up on minimum difficulty. There’s a challenge mode too, but since it looks like I’d have to replay Shabondy another dozen times or more before anyone’s at a high enough level to tackle, it’s not doing me much good.
Finally, I can only admit to my crushing disappointment that neither Skypeia or Thriller Bark are playable locations, even though Enel’s battle royal and the Thriller Bark’s zombie hoards could have been tailer-made for the Musou genre. Neither Law or Kid are present at Shabondy even as support characters, no matter that they’re central to one of the biggest pirate vs marine battles we saw there in canon, and while Crocodile, Bon Clay and Mr 2 all return from Alabasta in Impel Down, Ivankov is nowhere in sight. It’s probably a little petty of me to complain that there isn’t even more packed into a game which already has so much to offer, but I would be well and truly willing to pay extra for it. A few more alternate costume options for the cast would’ve been nice too.
In conclusion, I would like to offer a few other serious, important and thoroughly serious points of very serious criticism:
- When playing as Ace, picking up a health-restoring food item does not ever result in you suddenly keeling over unconscious for a few seconds.
- Bon Clay is mysteriously not immune to Hancock's Mero Mero Melo abilities.
- When playing as Zoro, the area map does not randomly start to rotate or rearrange itself.
- When playing in two-player mode as Zoro and Sanji, no amount of trying will convince the game to let us ditch the battle and fight each other instead. :(