Duelling With Devil Fruits In One Piece: Burning Blood

Having run for nearly two decades in its manga and anime forms, One Puece has naturally spawned a large number of videogames. The series that will be most familiar to westerners are the Pirate Warriors games, which blend One Piece with the Dynasty Warriors brand of gameplay. One Piece: Burning Blood heads in a different direction, bringing a One Piece fighting game to home console for the first time.

So, instead of brawling with hundreds or thousands of enemies all at once, this sees smaller scale arena-based battles between tag teams of three, drawing from the wide range of characters in the series. It’s just one point that helps to keep this as a rather accessible game.

The biggest factor is, of course, the controls, which are completely standardised. Using three of the face buttons for attacks and blocks, the basics are easy to grasp, but so too are the special attacks, which bring the Devil Fruits and Haki abilities into play with a simple combination of the left shoulder button and the face button. It’s incredibly easy to unleash a flurry of powerful and impressive looking attacks.

Find yourself on the end of a vicious beating, though, and you might want to switch characters using the controller’s triggers. That might simply be to avoid having one of your characters knocked out – each has individual health bars – but time it just right and they will even intervene with a Unity Assist and deal a blow to the aggressor as they enter the arena, giving you the upper hand once more.

Additionally, you’ll be able to pick a trio of support characters that, while they won’t come out and fight for you, can use up a chunk of your Burst Gauge to give your fighter some hit points back, increase their agility, and so on.

However, you’ll likely want to try and wait until the Burst Gauge is full, before picking the character you wish to go into Burst mode with – often with an accompanying transformation – with a click of the right analogue stick. Luffy, using the series’ rubbery protagonist as an example, balloons in size over the course of an extravagant cutscene, while Drake turns into a huge T-Rex while still wearing his cape.

Others are less bombastic, and that’s true of then clicking the right analogue stick a second time to launch a suitably bombastic Ultimate attack. Hancock spins around like a Whirling Dervish, hitting her opponent with her Perfumed Femur attack – quite how one perfumes internal leg bones, I don’t know – Luffy slams into the enemy with two oversized fists, and so on.

With such a focus on special Devils Fruit attacks, it’s difficult to know if the game is particularly balanced. How does Crocodile’s ability to create green force fields stack up against The hulking mass of Whitebeard? How can the diminutive bear-like Chopper stand up to the towering Marine characters? How can anything stand up to a T-Rex?

And yet it’s just a lot of fun. Chances are that the AI in the purpose built demo was of a low difficulty, but quickly getting a hang of the simplistic controls and unleashing all manner of over the top attacks is eminently enjoyable.

For those that do want a challenge, there’s the retelling of the One Piece story in Paramount Mode. It will pick on some of the key battles from the series long history, with the Banaro Incident and the battle between Ace and Blackbeard an obvious flashpoint to start with.

Two of the Japanese developers – Bandai Namco Producer Koji Nakajima and Spike Chunsoft Game Director Hiroyuki Kaneko – who were across to introduce and demonstrate some of the game tried and failed to use Ace’s fire-based powers to beat Blackbeard’s black hole-like Yami Yami no Mi abilities.

And fans of the series will be just as happy to see the game’s excellent presentation – though maybe not the locked 30 frames per second. The cel shaded visuals are excellent, especially during cutscenes and the most spectacular attacks.

Bandai Namco are looking to reach an even wider audience than before, as well, with the Japanese voice acting localised with Polish and Russian subtitles joining the standard EFIGS languages, and a release on the Xbox One, alongside PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita and PC.

And hey, you can play as a character that turns into a T-Rex with a cape. What’s not to like about that?