Thanks to One Piece Odyssey, the best-selling manga of all time finally has another good video game to its name, even if many players truly cannot believe how easy it is.
One Piece Odyssey launched yesterday, January 12, and has quickly become one of the highest-rated video games in the franchise. According to Metacritic, it's currently tied for second place with five other games which all scored a 76 – three points behind the 79-rated gacha game One Piece Treasure Cruise.
The Dragon Quest 11-like RPG has also gone down pretty well with fans, which isn't a huge surprise. As we said in our One Piece Odyssey hands-on preview last month, the adaptation walks a fine line between new and old, going all-in on fan service while putting a bit of a spin on traditional turn-based combat through battle zones and bonus objectives. Our time with the game was limited, but it seems our early optimism was well-placed.
For now, the game's Steam reviews are maybe the most useful resource for canvassing player reception. One Piece Odyssey is sitting at 253 reviews with an 86% positive rating at the time of writing. Some of the more helpful reviews (as rated by other Steam users) praise the game's Dragon Quest feel, PC optimization, and authentic representation of the source material. "This is every manga reader's dream," writes fujicakes. "It's like I really have friends," says T, who I hope is doing OK.
Difficulty is a recurring bugbear in the game's Steam reviews as well as discussions elsewhere. "It runs really well, the combat system is fun, none of it matters since there is absolutely no challenge," says Speedy223 in one negative Steam review.
"The difficulty level feels insulting," agrees Steam user Miles. "No strategy required for anything at 3 hours in. You can select basic attacks over and over and never need to heal."
As someone who's been let down by absurdly easy JRPGs before, I think this review from Kyoka FE gets to the heart of things: "Normal attacks just [one-shot] everything so there's no point in diving into the (actually decent) combat system." Indeed, it's hard to get invested in strategizing and min-maxing when the bare minimum works just fine.
Even positive reviews have mentioned that this is a disappointingly easy game, and with no higher difficulty options to choose from, it's seemingly going to stay that way unless developer ILCA releases a patch that gives the game more bite. Hopefully we can reach a happy middle ground for folks who want a bit more challenge with their fan service.
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