Pirate Warriors 4… New DLC characters?

honestly can’t believe i’m talking about Pirate Warriors 4 again, but suddendly, out of nowhere, a week ago, there was a tweet announcing that One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 would receive more DLC characters in the near future, and info would be revealed during One Piece Day 2023, meaning the 22th of july, as in a couple days after the announcement was made.

I tuned it, and among other many announcements and stuff – including a new trailer with new footage for the Netflix live action One Piece series, which seems less awful than expected as we see more of it, but i’m reserving judgement for when the series drop at the end of August – and yep, it’s definitely what was reasonable to expect.

Yep, after 3 years of when the game launched (and all the DLC characters, which were released in 3 waves, the last one in December 2020), 3 years of what i guess now can be called “inactivity”, there’s new paid stuff coming for Pirate Warriors. As in a new Character Pass has been announced, with 9 new playable characters for PW 4 , divived in 3 packs that are gonna be released over time, each including 3 characters that are tied by a theme.

The first one is gonna be the “Onigashima Battle” pack, releasing this September, and it has been revealed the first character of this pack is gonna be “Gear 5 Luffy”, which makes sense as this new form is gonna debut in the tv series on the 6th of August episode.

If i’d hazard a guess, the other two characters of the pack could be Kaido in its humanoid dragon form (fair since Gear 5 Luffy is gonna be counted as a separate characters, which is cheap) and Yamato, since the theme of Onigashima.

We also got a peek at the other 2 packs, with the second one obviously featuring Uta from One Piece Film Red (nice), and the third one… i guess Gol D. Roger?

This is unprecedented for these games, heck, even with the mainline series release like Samurai Warriors 5 you get a Season Pass with content that released in 2 or more waves after launch to give the games something to look forward in the near future (or oddities like PS5 Strikers and FE Three Hopes not even having season pass or substantial DLC to begin with), you’d think we would be hearing at least some vague confirmation that Pirate Warriors 5 will be a thing (even more since PW 4 eventually sold 2 million copies worlwide, not bad for a musou game), obvious that won’t come out anytime soon as these games are made to never progress further from the current arc of the anime series, always waiting so more material from the source media can pile up.

Actually no, i mean, Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 still got new DLC this year, they’ve announced another Season Pass of content for Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, so yeah, i guess this is far from the first time it happened with ol’ Bandai Namco…. but here lies the problem.

This is also a Tecmo Koei and Omega Force game, and they never do that, or otherwise they announced it clearly like how DW 9 was gonna have multiple Season Passes and support over time, but still, it’s beyond rare.

Even so, they announced a Character Pass, NOT a Season Pass, and going by the previous Character Pass, it will give you exactly what it says on the tin, as in 9 new playable characters (plus a pre-order bonus costume for Trafalgar Law) for Pirate Warriors 4, but not new content in either Story or the Treasure Log sets of challenge missions.

I’d be a pleasant surprise to be proven wrong and find more actual content to play through by updating the game in order to play the DLC characters…… but it’s safe to assume they expected you to use these new characters in the same stages or challenge maps you’ve probably already aced (not assuming you 100 % completed the game like me).

One thing that one might have wanted to hear is that the new DLC characters would come alongside a software update that adds new content, because otherwise you would have the same problem most people (me included) had, as in you get these fun DLC characters to play as… in a game that most people would have already completed and fully “eviscerated” by then.

Can’t wait for it to be as overpriced as the first Character Pass was, so i guess i will do 3 more reviews of PW 4 DLC packs, that i did not foresee.