One Piece: Burning Blood (Xbox One)

In the pirate adventure series One Piece, The Paramount War serves as a culmination of the build-up across hundreds of chapters of manga and anime episodes. Featuring a wide range of characters and a memorable paradigm shift for the series as a whole, it’s no wonder the video game One Piece: Burning Blood would want to focus in on this pivotal and beloved point in the series’s history even years after it had occurred. However, because the Paramount War is the payoff to so much of the established lore and the outcomes of previous events, focusing in on it in isolation can take away some of its gravitas, this 3D arena fighter adaptation of the series unable to escape some of the issues of building around an event where context felt so important.

 

One Piece: Burning Blood’s story mode takes the form of playing through the key moments of the Paramount War. Portgas D. Ace, brother of series main character Monkey D. Luffy and member of the renowned Whitebeard Pirates, is being executed by the World Government in a public spectacle, drawing in a range of notable figures from across the sea to either fight on the side of the Navy or support the liberation of Ace. Thanks to powerful Devil Fruits that grant those who eat them permanent supernatural abilities, the fighting goes well beyond simple pirate battles, earthquakes, magma, and all sorts of other unusual powers being flung about in the conflict. While there are many key players made playable in this fighting game, when you start the story mode, you’ll at first go through it as Luffy before unlocking different story paths for other principle characters on both sides of the conflict. While the story paths do let you sometimes play as other characters, especially in the extra chapters earned for winning fights while completing extra goals like not letting your health get too low, it doesn’t quite stave off the repetition of the same story being retold at least four times.

 

The cutscenes, when animated, do use an effective style for the most part, characters looking accurate to the anime but with shading that helps to make them look more serious and rugged. However, in some moments, especially during camera pans, the shading can fail to move with the shifting view, making it distracting. Sadly, the subtitles for the Japanese dialogue are not always up to snuff, leaving out words or swapping between different official terms when they seemingly forget something had a different name in the English adaptations. With the story-telling not even bothering to explain why Luffy and his allies are falling out of an upside-down ship in the sky in the very first cutscene of the game’s story, it’s clear this game not only expects you to already be a fan familiar with important details, but that you’ll not be too fussed about the parts it brushes over to show the highlight moments.

One Piece: Burning Blood ends up not being a game best approached for the quality of its story despite it adapting a superb arc of its source material as a result, but playing story mode is key to unlocking extra modes and unlocking characters. The fighting system in One Piece: Burning Blood looks a bit plain at first when the game lets you get away with simpler strategies, most characters inevitably going to rely on a simple attack combo consisting of pressing the same button over and over in most scenarios. This sounds troubling at first, a literal button masher of a fighting game, but Story Mode actually won’t coddle you for long. Eventually, enemies become so strong that they can take out a huge chunk of your life bar with one hit, requiring you to better learn the other actions possible in battle. Guarding will wall many standard attacks, but your fighter will have at least two guaranteed guard breaking attacks, a swifter one that’s easier to combo into and a larger one that often covers a greater range and plays into their special abilities. Unique attacks also lean into a character’s powers and can sometimes give you a new way to attack from afar, joined also by more extreme moves activated by holding down LB before you strike. Characters who ate specific Devil Fruits can also pull off special tricks like teleports or turn their body into something like pure fire or sand so attacks pass right through them, and then there’s the team system where you can call in characters to take over the fight but can also do more active swaps where they fly in with an attack or break you out of a combo. Add in Awakenings that can transform a character, Ultimate moves, and ideas like Flash Guards and Flash Counters that let you upset the rhythm of an attack combo and set up your own, and you start to realize there is a meaningful layer of depth and that one that becomes crucial for overcoming the strength differentials in story mode. It doesn’t make the sometimes heavily skewed fights exactly the best at times, especially when you’re stuck with a less flexible character for them, but at least putting up difficult barriers to success actually makes you engage with such mechanics and come to understand what the fighting system in One Piece: Burning Blood is meant to be like before you head to multiplayer and potentially face someone who would beat you down for not knowing the important tricks.

 

Beyond the story mode and multiplayer fights, the main thing meant to keep you coming back to One Piece: Burning Blood are the Wanted Posters. A wide range of single player challenge battles exist where you’ll be thrown into battle with set teams of characters, although these are mostly just straightforward battles. The special Rayleigh’s Training set of posters will require you to beat the opponents while completing special conditions like using specific attack types and the Wanted Posters do break the game away from certain rules, fights usually meant to be 3 on 3 tag battles at most but Wanted Posters can have you facing teams of 9 at their hardest. However, both Wanted Posters and Story Mode also lean into an unusual choice for determining your own strength. Fighting with characters in battle will earn them experience, leveling them up and increasing their inherent might. This means there will be fights that are easier to handle if you come back to them later after growing your characters through weaker Wanted Posters for example, making some tough fights perhaps a bit more surmountable, but it also encourages you to lock in your characters of choice early. While all your unlocked characters get a pittance of experience any time you fight, the ones you use grow much more quickly. You’ll still find challenging battles for your favored crew as you go up the ranks of the posters, but once you start getting to the high value posters, if you want to swap in someone new, they’ll be at an unfortunate inherent disadvantage.

Luckily, despite some clear structural issues in the way single player content is handled, the cast of over 40 characters in One Piece: Burning Blood provides a great range of battle types and unique powers. While the story focuses in on the Paramount War which was missing some key players as well as some other beloved faces of past and future One Piece stories, One Piece: Burning Blood does throw in the entire Straw Hat Crew as well as memorable characters like Enel, Perona, Bartolomeo, and Fujitora so the roster doesn’t feel so limited to a single point in time. It is likely that Jozu, the giant pirate who can turn his skin to diamond, is here only because of his brief importance in the war, but he also adds a huge burly character to the roster the same way the giant wrestler Jesus Burgess does by being borrowed from later down the line. Already interesting powers like Luffy’s stretchiness, Akainu’s magma, Buggy the Clown’s ability to break apart and control his floating body parts, and Jinbei’s water karate get to be joined by the musician skeleton Brook, the shapeshifting reindeer Chopper, and the weather wielding Nami by broadening the cast away from just story relevant faces, and their powers do manifest in a range of interesting playstyles. A character like Whitebeard can bully foes from afar even with basic attacks thanks to his long spear, but then characters like Marco the phoenix can cover great distances in a hurry to keep up pressure. Being able to swap in characters helps some slower and situational characters still feel useful as you won’t be locked into bad match-ups, although Sanji’s refusal to attack female characters besides with meter-draining flirtation makes him hard to justify using at all despite it feeling appropriate to the character. Team composition ends up being a rather fun balancing act though because of how characters are weighed.

 

While you can have up to three members on your team in standard battles, different combatants have different values. No one is incredibly overpowered or expensive, but there are some clearly tougher characters that end up hitting against the limits of the total crew value you’re allowed to have. What the crew value system impacts the most though are support characters, a wide range of One Piece characters who won’t be joining in the fight instead featuring as assists that will grant you little boosts or special options during a fight. Press a button on the directional pad when an assist is available and you can do things like increase the energy build up for super moves, heal the characters you have in reserve, or even do more directly harmful things like disable enemy special abilities or launch a poison blast. There are a great deal of almost useless supporters unfortunately, even if you just weigh them up against similarly cheap ones they feel like clutter you’ll never take a risk on. There are still a good deal that can suit different play styles or supplement crews with different point totals, and unlocking the wide range of support characters at least gives you a goal to shoot for. Beyond characters unlocked through specific actions like story mode battles or clearing certain sets of Wanted Posters, most characters, playable or support, must be bought with the money earned through battles. This does unfortunately mean that characters you wait to unlock are even further behind in the level game, but having something to work towards gives the plentiful Wanted Posters some extra value and makes you more closely consider what each support character can do when you’re unlocking them gradually rather than getting a menu so full you’d easily overlook them.

THE VERDICT: One Piece: Burning Blood has a strong fighting system despite the inevitable prevalence of your basic attack combo, the various ways to get around guards, call in allies, and utilize an incredible range of unique special powers across the cast giving the game an enjoyable layer of depth. The single player side doesn’t necessarily make the best use of it with a repetitive and somewhat poor recounting of the Paramount War and the level up system feels needlessly added when the Wanted Posters could have focused on player skill most of all, but needing to actually understand the fighting system to overcome difficulty walls does add a few satisfying trials to overcome and the multiplayer will make better use of the gameplay’s strength and huge roster.

 

And so, I give One Piece: Burning Blood for Xbox One…

An OKAY rating. One Piece: Burning Blood’s efforts to reproduce the Paramount War can be impressive at times and misguided at others, some incredibly memorable moments reproduced in loving and stylish detail but then the game barely explains why the battle arena has a giant laying across the ground you can hit into during the battles. Integrating battle arenas and characters from different arcs of One Piece for the more standard fighting matches and Wanted Posters isn’t so egregious, essentially just ways to diversify the experience, but the story retreading beats and battles so often while being pretty important to unlocking characters and still coming up short will inevitably sour your opinion on One Piece: Burning Blood some. The difficulty walls could have been better integrated as just special boosts to the opposition rather than tying it to a level up system, the game perhaps wanting you to be able to overcome them if they’re too hard just by training, but asking for such a commitment to overcome crucial knowledge of gameplay mechanics feels like it misses the point of what training should be in a fighting game. The Wanted Posters would have been a nice addition of single player longevity and still mostly are despite the level system, there being enough battles to take some time and explore the roster a bit before you’re left mostly with tougher battles where you don’t want to bring in weaklings. The most important thing of all for this 3D fighting game though is that the battle system does work quite well. It is a touch unimpressive how often the standard attack combo feels important to use, but there are mind games and areas of strategy to be found in trying to get around guards, in exploring a character’s unique powers, and in constructing a team and set of supports that suits your play style while also countering whatever other players will bring to the table.

 

One Piece: Burning Blood has a decent set of mechanics and tried to give the game long term replayability in having plenty to do alone and a large roster to explore in the multiplayer, but it committed to some ideas too strongly despite them being what held the game back. With how cutscene heavy the Paramount War can be it’s perhaps not surprising there wasn’t extra effort put into providing bits of other arcs, but splitting the story into four perspectives that don’t offer too much new beyond shifting the playable character ends up rather rough. One of the best arcs of One Piece is represented well in parts here so it’s not completely tarnished, but with such a solid fighting system and plenty of more recent material leaking into the game already to flesh out its offerings, perhaps One Piece: Burning Blood would have benefited by not focusing so much on retelling a story and instead on constructing some more unique, challenging, and flexible situations for its fighting system to thrive in.