One Piece: Pirates’ Carnival
Invite some pirates over for your next game night.
Tags: One Piece: Pirates’ Carnival Categories: Game Cube Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Mike "Two Tone" McConnell on Oct 23rd, 2006
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| One Piece: Pirates’ Carnival (title page) | 1 - 4 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Party | No | ||
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Party Games were essentially birthed from the loins of Mario Party. While it has produced many a spawn, most were just pale imitators missing some important factor. While One Piece: Pirates’ Carnival does emulate certain factors, it does build an entirely new creature on top of the skeleton. There are some important innovations to what has become, honestly a stale formula.
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Graphically this is what you would expect from an anime license; cell-shaded graphics, and chibi style sprites of the characters. The graphics aren’t much to write home about, but they do the job fine. My only complaint is that from time to time, the sprites end up looking like color forms stuck on the backgrounds. This is a problem with many of the anime games. I think it is an attempt to be stylistic, but 2-D sprites in 3-D perspective just looks ridiculous.
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Gameplay is easy enough as the player takes one of the 7 “Straw Hat” pirates. Don’t worry if you are unfamiliar with the manga/anime, as none of the player choices really effects game play. The central game mode is based around a Reversi/Othello type board game. Each player (any combination of 4 human or computer players) has a color, and a home tile. From the beginning each player battle for the control of the most squares. Each square is a character card, and each of the characters is one of three types. There are friend/event cards that have various instant effects, and transfer over to the player immediately. There is one of these that mentioning specifically, and that is the “Davey Back Fights.” Here you can select an opponent tile for the “steal” and force them to face off against the other three.
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Each character has a different game to defend their territory, so you have to play for awhile before you can see them all. Then there are the mini-game cards, which are free for all games. Winning these are important because even if you selected a tile if you lose the mini-game it can go to your opponent.
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Lastly there are Captain Cards. These are games where the player selecting the cards take the role of one of the One Piece ancillary characters. The rest of the players face the captain in a mini-game. As usual the winner keeps the space, but these are heavily skewed for the “captain”. Considering that each of the captains have two spaces on the board this is valuable. There is an additional type of game at the halfway point in any game. The players are to split into two teams, and battle for an extra bonus.
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I’d have to say the worst thing about this game is the instructions. It is a lot of fun, but you have to suffer a bit to work out how everything is supposed to play out. The instruction manual is pretty much useless – even having an extra character listed as playable that is no where to be found. There is an unexplained password feature that cannot be found anywhere. I even spent a few hours searching around the Internet, and alas no one knows. When you slap in the disc and turn on your GameCube, you are greeted with only one board to play on. There is no explanation on how to get more, and I played this game with friends for an entire weekend, and not one new board. I happened to go back to get a quick refresher, and playing in one player mode, I found two more boards to be unlocked. While this may be a “secret”, there is not one place that mentions any unlockable features, and I don’t understand why I couldn’t have unlocked this while spending hours playing with a few friends. The in game text to give instructions for the mini-games is just as absurdly vague. As I said before you’re going to just have to walk the plank to figure this game out.
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In fact this whole game suffers from poor localization. Compounded on previous complaints about the anime’s translation, it seems that the game was poorly translated. One Piece has already been through a wringer of content and cultural wringers to deliver a kid friendly version, add in a seemingly mad dash to throw together the English version of this game, and viola you have useless text. Considering this is the second One Piece game in less than a month, Bandai/Namco could have been more patient.
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Regardless of the translation difficulties, this is a fun game. While it won’t steal away weeks like the newest RPG, it will help to serve an a night’s entertainment of beer and pizza with a few friends. So if Trivial Pursuit, and Parcheesi have gotten stale, pick this up for your next game night.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ Twist on the party genre with a board game that actually requres some strategy. + Good use of the liscense, without alienating the uninitiated. |
7.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- Bad instructions from the manual to the on screen minigames, all the text is vauge. - No practice mode for the mini-games. |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| If you need a break from Mario Party, this is a good place to start. | |
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Tags: One Piece: Pirates’ Carnival
Posted by Mike "Two Tone" McConnell on Oct 23rd, 2006 and is filed under Game Cube Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
