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With One Piece Odyssey, the best-selling manga of all time finally has another good video game to its credit, even if many gamers really can’t believe how easy it is.
One Piece Odyssey launched yesterday, January 12, and quickly became one of the highest-rated video games in the franchise. According Metacritic (opens in a new tab)currently ranks second with five other games, all of which scored 76 points – three points behind the 79-point gacha game One Piece Treasure Cruise.
The RPG similar to Dragon Quest 11 has also been quite well received by fans, which is not a big surprise. As we said in our Hands-on preview of One Piece Odyssey Last month’s adaptation walks a fine line between new and old, going all-in in fan service while spicing up traditional turn-based combat a bit through battle zones and bonus objectives. Our time with the game was limited, but it seems our initial optimism was justified.
He’s playing for now Steam (opens in a new tab) reviews are perhaps the most useful source of player feedback. One Piece Odyssey has 253 reviews with an 86% positive rating at the time of writing. Some of the more helpful reviews (assessed by other Steam users) praise Dragon Quest’s atmosphere, PC optimization, and authentic representation of the source material. “It’s every manga reader’s dream,” writes Fujicakes. “It’s like I really have friends,” says T, whom I hope he gets along well with.
Difficulty is a recurring issue in Steam reviews of the game discussions elsewhere (opens in a new tab). “It works really well, the combat system is fun, none of that matters because there’s absolutely no challenge,” says Speedy223 in one negative Steam review.
“The difficulty seems offensive,” agrees Steam user Miles. “After 3 hours, no strategy is required. You can choose basic attacks over and over again and never need to heal.”
As someone who has previously been let down by ridiculously easy JRPGs, I think this Kyoka FE review hits the nail on the head: “Normal attacks just [one-shot] everything, so there’s no point in delving into the (actually decent) combat system. Indeed, it is difficult to invest in strategy and min-maxing when the bare minimum works well.
Even the positive reviews mentioned that it’s a disappointingly easy game, and with no higher difficulty options to choose from, it’s apparently going to stay that way unless developer ILCA releases a patch that gives the game more playability. Hopefully we can find a balance for people who want a little more of a fan service challenge.
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