As announced, we’ll be reviewing a handful of One Piece videogames this August, basically the entire Grand Battle sub-series… at least the games that got localized or released westward as well, so logically enough we’re starting out with One Piece Grand Battle, the first one, released for the PS1 in 2001 and brought to Europe in 2003.
It’s so early that it’s ALMOST the first game ever based on One Piece (that would be an action RPG-card thingie for the WonderSwan, never release outside of Japan, like the console itself), but it is the first game ever developed by Ganbarion, which will be handling a majority of the One Piece videogames for more than a decade (and also come back to developed One Piece World Seeker), alongside other anime related/based project for Namco Bandai, like the beloved Jump Super Stars for DS, Dragon Ball Fusions for the 3DS… and also Pandora’s Tower for the Wii.
Being this early in the One Piece anime it means it mostly depicts the “East Blue Saga” ensemble of arcs and basically the prelude of the Alabasta one, though here it stops even before Whisky Peak (due to some characters appearances), hence before Little Garden, so it’s kinda of tease, not gonna lie, but what can you do, it was pretty early in…
At least it has the classic “WE ARE” opening from the anime (kinda), might as well since the original japanese titles puts the “From TV Animation” well before the actual name of the game.
I didn’t play this one until i finally was able to find a copy for a reasonable prices years ago, i did actually play the PS2 game also called “One Piece Grand Battle” well before, so i was expecting a Power Stone clone, just less refined since it’s obvious a far earlier iteration on the idea…
What i got was basically 2D Power Stone… well 2.5D Power Stone with whiffs of Smash Bros since the fighting itself it’s done on a 2D plane but the arenas are rendered in 3D and sometimes “wrap” around” the 2D plane, like in Arlong Park causing the pool to be a ring out pit due to the camera angle. It’s a bit weird.
Look, i know it was gonna be rough 3D… and indeed the polygonal models for the characters are rough, nothing too bad for the era, but nothing good either.
Can’t say the same for most of the NPC in the crowds being kinda ugly pixel messes of sprites with barely any animation to them, like 2 frames of animation each, those are kinda cute in a retro way… but admittely look kinda cheap even for the time.
The cinematics for the finishers/super are kinda ambitious and do attempt quite decently to recreate the characters well known moves, but overall it’s a mediocre looking PS1 game that suffers from both an obvious rush to push it out on the market ASAP and being made in that transitory 2D-to-3D phase for fighting games where if it wasn’t 3D in some way it would have been seen as “antiquate”.
Presentation is a mixed bag, with decent music, some nice attention to details in menu graphics and in the arenas themselves, but also doodles of the rappresented location put in the background for the brief pre and after battle line exchanges (cutscenes feels like a big word since they’re out of context dialogues that are either random or inspired by scenes in the series) between the characters sprites, which are quite decent, and even the EU/PAL release retains (one would assume for cost cutting reasons) the original japanese voice acting that has all the anime VAs returning…. but the secret ones are not voiced, even if they already appeared and had VAs in the anime.
I’m gonna guess to cut costs since this was the real first big One Piece videogame release to see if there’s a market, a foundation release as i call them, we can always make a sequel with more content if this sticks being the attitude (which continues to this day for anime fighters).
First impressions aren’t great either for gameplay, though it’s not actually bad, it’s just a very average, mediocre fighter.
It’s definitely better than it seems initially, one that might have needed some actual practice mode since some of the systems are not that intuitive and the game lacks any kind of move list, sure, there’s a “Guide/assist” option that can be turned off and on, and you’d think it would show tutorials at various points…. what it actually does i still do not know even after almost completing the game, sure as shit it doesn’t have tutorials or help boxes or tips show up (even even other reviews i’ve read for the game didn’t have a clue what it ACTUALLY did….)
Wish i had the manual on hands because while most of the moves are done in the Smash Bros fashion, the super moves require you to press L1 and then 2 or 3 of the face buttons…. and as i said there’s no move list to access from the pause menu, or anywhere, and i’m just guessing the manual would list those because usually they did for fighting games back in the PS1 era.
So off to GameFAQs you go… or beating the “story mode” once will unlock the “Treasures” menu, which is basically a gallery that lets you see the fighters stats, play their voicelines and see the button inputs for their supers. IF you did beat the story mode with said characters, that is.
If you didn’t you’ll just be able to play their voicelines.
This is stupid, and even the system for the super moves itself it’s a bit unorthodox.
Basically the health bar is divided in 3/4 big segments (depending if the character has 2 or 3 supers), once you go under the first you can use LV 1 supers, and so on, so i get it, it’s done to have some balance to it and avoid people spamming them from the get go without any limit, bit odd but fine.
The downsides are that if you’re doing very well you won’t even be able to launch a LV.1 super, and there’s no limit to how many supers you can use, so spam away.
Once you get the hang of it (and read the movelist so to know what buttons to press to activate the Supers)… it’s not bad, to be honest, and at least the computer opponents IA isn’t braindead (a bit too good at using and catching thrown items by you, too), though let’s be clear, it’s mostly a game of baiting characters into eating supers, due to slightly sluggish pace of combat and movement, to the point it makes sense having a block that parries all altitudes , the characters move a tad too slow to react in any proper manner and basically will have to commit once starting even a basic 3 hit combo done by mashing the attack button.
Aside from supers there are some basic mechanics that you wouldn’t think exist (since the game doesn’t have a tutorial or explains shit and it’s pretty simplicistic), like fall recovery and a wake up attack, but don’t expect much else to dig into or perfect with practice.
Heck, even after getting more time with it and managing to find how to break the IA and what cheap tricks do work, sometimes it’s hard to tell even if you can attack character as sometimes you’d think you just ate a super but i guess not, the window of activation/effect/trigger it’s often so specific it’s hard to tell, sometimes they trigger even if they shouldn’t due to characters being at a different elevation, it’s iffy and in some occasions i’ve just resorted to not even bother to use supers on the enemy and just exploit the stage gimmicks and items (some of which have effects that aren’t self-explanatory, or are but the game doesn’t tell you those anyway, or the effects are so brief they ar borderline pointless) and the lack of any air game defense, for example.
Look, i know these anime fighters aren’t made to be balanced (you are not gonna see One Piece Grand Battle matches at EVO, for example) and are more an excuse to have the series fan use their faves from the series in versus matches, but honestly i didn’t bother cojoling some of my pals into this, because it’s a bit too simplicistic nowaydays, and i’d rather play either Smash Bros or boot up Power Stone… or even Grand Battle Rush on PS2. Or One Piece Burning Blood.
And there’s not much to learn in terms of mechanics, just how to exploit the Supers system, since while some supers are projectiles, some counters, some summons, most trigger on contact…. hence some characters that have more base attack range are advantaged (like Nami and her staff) or Usop’s projectiles, which you’ll learn soon to spam since – as explained before – there’s no limit in how many times you can do supers.
At least there’s more attacks to the characters even with this setup, more than you’d be led to think, with characters attacks (even if using the same basic input method) having specific properties, for example Nami basic super also produces a rice ball health recovery item (stealing health from the foe, basically), and ring outs are in the water, which means it does extra damage to characters with Devil Fruit abilities (and fittingly none to Arlong), so they did think of something and didn’t phone completely in.
Guess why bother having a practice mode when most of the mechanics and moves you can learn by fudging about, there’s really not much to learn or practice in a dedicated mode, i guess, you won’t need to spend hours to “learn” a character…
Still, it should have had a Practice or Tutorial mode since the fuckin option for helps and hints doesn’t tutorialize shit, and because Killer Instinct on the SNES had it.
Speaking of characters, the roster is surprisingly not bad at all, heck, for the first One Piece fighting game ever, it’s good…. though again, you gotta put this into prospective, remember exactly how much of the series it covers, so don’t expect to use Crocodile, but still, 15 characters isn’t bad at all for a 2001 released One Piece videogame.
And they did have playable the long-time running small in-joke of Pandaman, so i can’t really be too mad… even if the developers were clearly scrambling to include anyone they could think of into the game to pad out the roster, but still, it has most of the big ones you could want or expect from the point the anime series was on at the time (and some you’d assume would be cut out, like Vivi), and some are included as summon/support attacks, like Buggy having Ritchie (the lion) or Kuro the Nyan Brothers.
Still, there’s not much content or reasons to bother going through the game, unless you’re a big One Piece fan and wanna unlock all the secret characters, since there’s not much to “learn” in terms of mechanics or characters, or many modes to enjoy it.
Heck, there’s not even a proper story mode, the 1P player only mode (Event Mode) it is just an arcade ladder with 6 fights that are partially randomized, with some chatter pre and after match, 5 continues, and a stillframe of the character taken from the TV series as We Are plays over the game credits roll.
Maybe another FMV cutscene taken from the anime (like the barrel oath before entering Reverse Mountain or Smoker hearing about the Strawhats at Loguetown) to let you know you’ve made some progress and now can unlock further characters than you’d think.
Guess it’s also stupid to call this “Story Mode” when the game doesn’t present the story of One Piece in any fashion, there’s no narration or context, so hope you already know what this is about.
There is also the titular Grand Battle mode, a versus mode that lets you also play against the CPU, have the CPU fight itself… and that’s it. At least in Grand Battle mode you can use the villain characters from the get go even if you didn’t unlocked them yet for use in Event Mode, so that’s nice if you just want to fight your friends locally and don’t have to beat the “story mode” many times over
There’s an autosave function and… that’s it.
There is no training mode, no survival, not even a challenge mode of sorts.
there is no story or info about anything, there’s just the FMV opening that is basically the classic We Are anime opening from the TV series… or so i thought, had to check on youtube because my copy had issues if i let the cutscene play more than 5 seconds it would freeze the entire thing.
And while the opening song is ol’ classic We Are!, the opening animation is not the same, it seems like a mix of some footage from the anime and some original, i don’t have time to cross-references so much material to be 100 % sure about this, but i think it’s fair to say some original work went into the intro cinematic here.
Overall, the first One Piece Grand Battle isn’t bad and it can be still be some fun, even if it’s an odd duck, feeling a 2.5 D Power Stone-Smash Bros hybrid that has 3D arenas but 2D gameplay (with some odd workarounds), decent but not great PS1 polygonal models and yet some subpar pixelated NPCs as crowds and such, with a good roster for the time (considering the TV anime at the time wasn’t even in the Whiskey Peak sub-arc yet), even if it’s a bit too simplistic to warrant spending much time with it, especially since it’s a bit famished and bony in terms of contents, with few arenas and many modes you could reasonably expect from a fighter released in 2001… just aren’t there.
Not too surprising since it was the first game of this kind made by the developer Ganbarion, and the first One Piece fighter ever, so most likely also rushed to “test the market waters” when the TV series was picking up steam, to see if they had another Dragon Ball on their hands.
It’s not bad, as despite the very simple gameplay the characters feel varied enough and there is some satisfaction to be had even with some unorthodox mechanics (like how it handles supers in an attempt to balance things out a bit) and the game being fine to control even if there’s a sluggish feel to the whole thing, not too much to ruin the experience but enough to feel it could/should feel faster.
Again, it’s not awful, it’s just a mediocre anime fighter, and i will cut it some slack since it was indeed the first One Piece fighter ever made, though it’s nowadays quite pricey, so if you plan to own it… i would advise doing so only to One Piece superfans.
I still want to eventually cover the following sequels, maybe we’ll do a One Piece videogames “import special” one of these summers…
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