One Piece Unlimited Adventure for the Wii Review




I remember in my Zack and Wiki review saying I love pirates. I also mentioned another good pirate game in the form of the famous anime, One Piece. Along with pirates, I also love the anime One Piece. All the characters, powers, villains, and just the whole world of One Piece is just insane. Of course, with any popular show, they have a game made for it even if the game itself is just horrible. In my opinion, however, I think this certain One Piece game is better then the rest of the One Piece games released to the world. This game is called One Piece Unlimited Adventures. Let’s get some shovels, and dig into this pirate treasure shall we?

The whole plot of the game is basically following the events of the Japanese dub version of One Piece, so if you don’t follow the Japanese version with fan-made English subtitles, then I would recommend not reading this review until you get all caught up and such. It follows the Straw Hat pirates who are led by Monkey D. Luffy as they sail on their new ship the Thousand Sunny, which was made by their new crewmate, the steam punkesque Franky. While fishing for food one day, Luffy hooks something in the water, and accidentally pulls up an ocean-blue orb, because he and two other crewmates have eaten all the food in an eating contest. Sadly, no one is interested in the jewel Luffy found until Luffy launches himself into the air to see if there is an island to land and restock. After launching himself in the air however, the jewel finally reacts, and a strange island appears out of the ocean and causes the whole ship to go nutty and everyone tossed off and separated on the island. It is up to Luffy to find his friends and find out what the heck is going on.

The game play is in the form of a huge action adventure game, where you control each of the 8 Straw Hat Pirates to find out the mystery of the jewel and the island. Each pirate has his own special moves and special abilities, like Luffy’s body is made of rubber from a cursed fruit he ate, Zoro uses a 3-sword fighting style, Sanji has powerful leg attacks, and etc. You will only know what they do if you watch the show. If you haven’t seen the show however, I say look up the separate characters and find out what they are, so you aren’t caught blindsided with a character. There is also some rpg elements, like finding multiple items to open up a new area, making new weapons, leveling up, learning new moves, and other stuff like fishing and bug catching. The fishing and bug catching however sound like it’s supposed to be in the Harvest Moon franchise…but whatever.

Graphically, it’s very impressive. I like the whole look and design of the One Piece universe. The whole cel shade art style works very well, and the animation on the characters looks nice. The boss fights are also cool since you fight most of the One Piece villains from the past and even some that haven’t been shown in the American-dubbed version of the show. The music is also colorful and fun to listen to. The voice acting is also very good. My guess is that they got the team from the Funmation version of One Piece, which was a great idea since the 4KIDS version just sucked.

Let’s talk about the bad parts of this pirate story. The story itself is interesting, but ultimately forgettable. When I was typing this, I had to remember what happened in the story, since I forgot about 85% of it. The enemy variety is very annoying and repetitive. In the whole universe of the show, there are multiple varieties of enemies and they should have used more bad-guy variety. The only variety comes from the bosses and the main heroes. Now, a lot of people complain that the backtracking is a little much, but I think they need to shut it! How many games have you seen where you need to backtrack? You backtrack in Castlevania. You backtrack in the dungeons in Legend of Zelda. What I’m trying to say is that backtracking can be an issue, but I think it isn’t that bad in the game. I would say though that they could have used a teleporter so you don’t have to use all the energy in the running bar. Other than that, I don’t really think the backtracking is that bad.

Overall, it isn’t the best thing on the Wii, but I think it is a fun game. If you are a fan of the show or like good anime games, then I say, pick this one up. If you aren’t a fan of the show however, I would say that renting it might give you a good entertaining weekend. Let’s just hope that the new One Piece games coming for the Wii are going to be better, but just as awesome as this one.

This game gets a 7.7 out of 10

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