One Piece: Grand Adventure

Fighting games set in wide-open arenas filled with wacky weapons can be awesome, but this one, unfortunately, is not. Even the eclectic cast of the popular manga, with all their wild pirate-kung-fu moves, can’t fish One Piece: Grand Adventure out of the ocean of mediocrity.

It’s not as if the developers didn’t make a solid effort at fleshing out the single-player experience. You start out as the manga’s main character, the rubber-limbed pirate boy Monkey, but soon you pick up allies who can fight in his stead. Rather than just jump from fight to fight, you sail about the ocean, picking fights on each island you come to.

But once you’re in the battles, it’s all just a repetitive mess. As you jam on buttons, you quickly get locked into stiff dial-a-combo moves that, more often than not, leave you facing away from your opponents, wide open to attacks from behind. It can be easier to just use some of the items, like giant baseball bats and bombs, that litter the playfield.

You can zip straight through the story battles, or you can tackle minimissions on the world map for more experience points. Each fight has some kind of bonus condition that you can try to attain for extra experience points—finish a fight without jumping, for example, or beat an enemy within a shortened time frame.

eveling up will earn you new moves. Chaining the X and O buttons in various permutations can produce a wide variety of wacky moves—but since simple button mashing works well enough against the brain-dead enemies, it’s unlikely you’ll bother learning them. The multiplayer mode might offer some help if there were a four-player mode, but it’s only for two. If you’re a huge One Piece fan, then dive in; otherwise, find an alternative.

Yo-ho-ho: Decent graphics and music, lengthy single-player story

YAAAARrGh: Clunky, repetitive fighting, no four-player action

Score: 5|10

Ahoy!

Pirates aren’t just for cartoons and Halloween costumes and ye olden days. It is estimated that modern-day pirates hijack between $13 billion and $16 billion worth of loot each year. Yaaaarr!