Shonen Jump’s One Piece (GBA)
After having huge successes with their localizations of the Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! anime dubs, 4Kids Entertainment turned their sight to another up and coming Japanese cartoon of the early 2000s: One Piece. While those first two anime shows were a good choice since they were already targeted towards younger audiences and easy to adapt for Saturday morning cartoons, the pirate anime One Piece was most assuredly not a kids show with its bloody violence, frequent depictions of firearms and smoking, and scantily clad women, but 4Kids still made an attempt to adapt it and the absurd level of censorship and odd adaptation choices are still good for a laugh now that the series is in more capable hands. However, during this brief period where they were trying to fit One Piece into a kid-friendly mold, their particular take on the adventures of the pirate Monkey D. Luffy were used for a video game exclusive to the United States, this game known both as One Piece or Shonen Jump’s One Piece in reference to the manga publication it was appearing in simultaneously.
Shonen Jump’s One Piece covers the early stages of the One Piece story where the rubber man Monkey D. Luffy sets off to begin his pirate journey, but besides the general locations and gradual expansion of his crew, you won’t be getting much of the actual story out of the plot events you play through. While beating familiar enemies and having new characters become allies with Luffy isn’t too hard to parse, the broad strokes used to encapsulate this can be quite confusing. For example, the character of Usopp is a notorious liar which is included in his introduction in the game, but when he joins the crew he cheers “I’m the captain!” without any context or anyone refuting his latest lie, making it seem odd if you don’t have the outside knowledge. The game mostly follows the East Blue Saga stories like facing the fishmen at Arlong Park and fighting aboard the restaurant ship the Baratie, the localization choices from the 4Kids anime to be found in elements like the cigar-chomping Smoker being present in the game with the name Chaser and no cigar in sight. It doesn’t impact the game much since the plot doesn’t spend much time with any of the characters though, so it’s more a time capsule of a particular interpretation of the material rather than something that would undermine an attempt at telling a story.
The story progression is primarily a means of traveling to different locations. Funnily enough, the main adventure is actually referred to as Stories mode with each of the six major stories covered being split further into three levels. You play as Luffy during this sidescrolling action game, but despite much of the experience being about punching Marines, pirates, and fishmen who stand in your way, your attacks are fairly limited with some not even unlocking until you’re deeper into the adventure. You have a basic punching combo that culminates quickly in a set of rapid fire jabs, this usually useful for hitting anything straight in front of you and only really a bad choice against boss characters who might not be vulnerable to the attack at that time or when you have foes behind you as well. Luffy’s stretchy body does give him some extra attack options like the ability to punch from far away, but others are incredibly situational or don’t even work that well. He can inflate his body to deflect bullets if you want to stop and wait to be shot instead of punching the gunmen, and with the minimal screen real estate a gunman who can shoot you is rarely far away enough to need this deflecting tactic. There’s a strange maneuver where Luffy can stretch a leg really high into the air only to do a small sumo stomp that will only hit a foe directly in front of him, and the similarly unusual short range headbutt also feels like a lot of wind-up for something that doesn’t justify its use enough.
You can start to build up power for special attacks by hitting enemies though, the special attacks that expend this meter at least worth the effort since they deal hefty damage and are great for wearing down the health meters of bosses. You can also use these to call in any crew members you managed to find during the levels in a Story though, and some of these can have special effects. The crew’s cook Sanji in particular can be particularly useful if you call him in to drop a healing item, and situationally you might find Usopp’s attack useful with his stunning slingshot attack, but the attacks characters like the swordsman Zolo and the crew’s navigator Nami can deliver seem difficult to actually hit with and are usually much worse than doing Luffy’s most basic power move despite costing the same.
Speaking of the battles, outside of their regular appearance during the main stages, they also have a dedicated portion at the end of each Story with what is called Ship Battle Royal. Standing aboard the crew’s ship, Luffy must fight off the enemies you faced during that story and beat them all within the time limit for extra lives. While this mode won’t punish you if you fail, the fact it also exists as a minigame on the main menu really helps show how bland the action is when it’s being focused on. Few foes really put up a good fight and their numbers are usually their best advantage when they can be on both sides of Luffy so you can’t just mindlessly punch the ones in front of you, but there’s little joy in these fights and unfortunately some bosses aren’t much of a step up from this either. Early on foes like Axe-Hand Morgan and Mohji the Beast Tamer aboard his lion are just about hit and run tactics, but once Buggy the Clown enters the picture with his ability to break his body apart and make the pieces fly around freely, things do start to improve. Fights involve finding your opportunity to strike and learning the pattern, but often the boss has a health bar so large that the fight starts to grow dull as you need to do the same basic maneuvers to safely whittle them down. There are some interesting battles conceptually like the hypnotist Django able to alter your controls or pixelate the screen with his powers and Chaser follows up his battle by chasing you through a level as you try to avoid his attacks, but even when it is decent or creative you’re still not going to get much out of the all too simplistic combat options you bring to the table.
Level navigation in Shonen Jump’s One Piece is perhaps a bigger problem than the battles since regular enemies are usually disposed of easily enough and bosses at least require learning how you need to fight to survive. Levels are often needlessly large for how little of the space has a purpose. The platforming sometimes ropes in ideas like stretching your limbs to grab items out of reach or launching Luffy about by grabbing poles, but the areas you’re exploring don’t do a good job of rewarding you for looking around or engaging with more difficult platforming challenges. There are optional collectibles to be found and coins you can collect to unlock a boss battle mode, but before you reach the third story, the treasure chests that contain these are locked shut and you need to find a hidden character in Syrup Village to get the key to make looking for these chests worth doing. Already this is forcing you replay the levels that weren’t that good the first time around, but if you aren’t interested in scouring around for every coin and item, the only real rewards are potentially finding a crewmate or picking up an item like an extra life or a health refill you probably needed less before you fought your way to the otherwise pointless dead end. There is a cute touch where the actions taken during a stage end up adding to a score presented as the bounty placed on Luffy’s head, but it is just a bit of color meant to incentivize spending more time battling the basic enemies.
Some areas also ask for unusual navigation like jumping above the top border of the screen or dropping below the bottom border whereas some levels make the bottom border kill you instantly, so getting around in Shonen Jump’s One Piece can be both confusing and deadly without there being much payoff for engaging with this level design approach that otherwise weakens levels that didn’t have much going for them. Very rarely you might run into special enemies like the sword-wielding unicyclist Cabaji or the octopus man Hachi who sends rocks raining down on you, but these opportunities for unique foes during the levels are wasted by the fact you can hit them once to make them retreat. The rare optional mini-boss at least gives you something interesting to find in two of the game’s levels and some foes like the fishmen in Arlong Park return for a 3 vs. 1 fight that makes use of them better than their brief appearances during the stage. Unfortunately, it feels like including some of these recognizable foes who appear and are gone in a flash wasn’t worth the effort to include since they have so little impact on the adventure.
THE VERDICT: While the plain and repetitive combat can sometimes find purchase in the more involved but still rather tedious boss battles, Shonen Jump’s One Piece doesn’t have much to offer even at its high points. For the most part you’ll be exploring stages that are more complicated then they need to be for the purposes of hiding mostly pointless collectibles and coins, and the fights with the regular enemies don’t do much to spice up the confusing level navigation. With barely any of the show’s actual story making it into the game properly, Shonen Jump’s One Piece is mostly just a series of disappointments. Nothing quite clicks despite the adventure being playable enough, the problems more that nothing is given enough depth or detail to make it worth engaging with.
And so, I give Shonen Jump’s One Piece for Game Boy Advance…
A BAD rating. With the character sprites as big as they are, Shonen Jump’s One Piece should have probably put more of its focus on interesting battles with rare opponents rather than cramming in a bunch of marines and pirates that won’t do much besides swing swords and fire guns in predictable fashions. Luffy’s abilities aren’t too limited but the impact of powers like the lifting his leg high or doing the headbutt aren’t worth the trouble compared to your basic attack combo, so retooling those to be more useful in a fight would do a lot to break up the repetition. Right now the game is a cycle of landing basic hits to build up that power meter for big strikes on the tougher characters, but having your stretchy powers factor into the boss battles could make them more dynamic fights. When the fight with the shark fishman Arlong has you needing to escape by climbing the tower with your stretchy arms it briefly injects that level of creativity that could make play more exciting, but most of the action is repetitive on top of level designs trying to cater too much towards optional exploration that isn’t worth the effort.
While remarkably light on the kinds of changes 4Kids Entertainment made to One Piece, Shonen Jump’s One Piece instead comes up short because of its unambitious and unimaginative design approach. For a series with colorful characters with off-the-wall powers everything seems to boil down to the same basic battle strategies here, and while having platforming in between battles wasn’t a poor idea, its confusing nature makes it an annoying portion of a game with very little else to offer. While its main problems are doing poor ideas repeatedly rather than making the kind of design errors that would make the game outright difficult or aggravating to play, this particular One Piece video game isn’t really worth much as a game to play and instead serves as a reminder of this franchise’s unusual first attempt to enter Western markets.