Another episode/mini-mode, and this one too based around the new DLC characters included in the DLC character pack that released as the same time as the additional episode, this time around Coby/Koby, one of the older One Piece characters that’s also notable for its incredible glow up and comeback later in the series, and a demonstration of Oda’s amazing long game, where in most shonen mangas it would have been simply one of the first characters Luffy meets in his adventure, the kind that’s basically forgotten after it fulfills its purpose, and never, ever appears again.
As with the first one, the episode introduces the second Soul Map to further increase the characters stat beyond the previous cap, improve existing skills and unlock some new ones, which include stuff like buffing attack while your combo counter is high, or more unique ones like converting/consuming the coins you collects into health directly.
Where Yamato’s Adventure was a time attack mode that forced you to fight hard and fast so to keep the mission/adventure going and hopefully actually finishing instead of getting a time out, Koby’s Combat Chronicle is more a survival mode, where you undertake various missions as you can, with some special ones with more unique or new objectives, all on the same life bar.
You can suspend the run every 5 levels, and once in a while you can choose to receive one out of three buffs, and some characters are locked until you finish the mode once, which will take some time as a single run will take like 4/5 hours.
It’s a bit odd because it’s not quite the standard Survival mode you’d find in Warriors games; aside from being half the size (50 levels instead of the usual 100) there is a sense of progression and a main objective of sorts that you’re building up to, after all the game doesn’t erase your progress throught the missions once you die, so you can resume easily, which is good but basically fights against the whole “survival/marathon” angle.
Even after you achieve the main goal, you can keep going but rewards and enemy levels will scale even faster, and yet you can start from the “post-game” mission even if you fail, plus it’s oddly difficult to start a new run because you’ll basically overwrite your progress with that character.
I would have liked it more if the mode let you choose or adapted the difficulty to the characters stat levels (FIY in PW 4 characters don’t level up in the usual way), though the difficulty does rise as the stages go on, forcing you to find a set of skills to redemy the lack of health items, which is nice as it otherwise the game still lacks the kind of post-game content where the difficulty forces you to find ways to get the most out of the skills and abilities you can learn or equip.
For example, PW 3’s Dream Log (pretty much the Adventure mode from SW 4 but not as good as in Hyrule Warriors) was already huge, but it had a “nightmare” side you can unlock meant for character that you have maxed out the levels and stats, gave purpose to some passive skills that otherwise felt simply unneeded as in they were too useful for the standard difficulty.
So yeah, this is a nice surprise, even though i’m not entirely sure what exactly they wanted to do with it, as it sound set up as a classic Survival mode but actively fights you doing many runs easily as different characters, despite also de facto being a profitable way to farm many souls due to the everincreasing level of difficulty and rewards that scale with it.
And as before i would have appreciated if they actually added new locales or missions, do a proper expansion content, i will keep lamenting it because it’s absurd this new content is basically perched upon the same old main content and maps, the exception is that the objectives also feature the DLC characters, so you might fight Yamato, Oden, but still…
AGAIN, i can’t lament myself too much because the episodes are fairly cheap, and they are just that, extra episodes, not full fledged modes, nor they were ever advertised as such, but since they don’t add that much, it just feels like this should have been some unlockable modes in the base game.
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