One Piece: Unlimited Cruise 1 review

A pirate’s life for us? Not if it involves this much brainless scavenging. Continuing on from Ganbarion’s so-so Unlimited Adventure, Cruise bears little proof of two years’ development. Button mashing. Hiking around confusing maps. Scooping up an inordinate number of coconuts. Have we slipped through a wormhole back to 2007?

The main problem is the reliance on item scavenging to turn a simple task into an epic quest. Deep down there’s some dumb fun longing to get out: colourful characters unleashing the moves you’ve seen in the show. But where in the show do Monkey and company have to find ten coconuts, eight bits of moss and some driftwood to open a door?

We can’t even see this appealing to the ‘gotta collect it all’ crowd. Endless foraging only works if you’re rewarded. Here it opens up doors to new foraging grounds or lets you build tools to, you guessed it, allow new kinds of foraging. Combat occurs regularly enough, but there’s some vicious slowdown. It’s a shame, as the well-realised characters (the writing is bang on) could have been put to work in a much more ambitious twist on the Zelda formula. This, alas, is unlikely to happen soon, least of all in the imminent sequel, Cruise 2. Can’t wait.

Jun 26, 2009