one piece unlimited cruise

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One Piece: Unlimited Cruise SP Review

Luff at first sight.

The One Piece universe offers a clutch of potent ingredients for the prospective video game tie-in. For one, the lively Shonen Jump manga chooses the Saturday-morning-cartoon side of swashbuckling pirates for its theme - a celebration of primary-colour braggadocio and easy treasure hunting on desert islands that fits the medium like a glove.

Then there's the brash combat, all Super Smash Bros-style starry effects and speed-blurred limbs, perfect for thoughtless button-mash ecstasy. And, of course, the members of the Straw Hat Pirates pack intrigue and humour within their tight-knit, motley social group, a cat's cradle of affections and rivalries from which many an easily-written cut-scene may tumble. Namco Bandai understands the richness of the license, and One Piece Unlimited Cruise SP is no less than the 32nd game in a series that only debuted in 2000.

In truth, it's a repackaging of two previous Nintendo Wii titles - One Piece Unlimited Cruise 1: The Treasure Beneath The Waves and One Piece Unlimited Cruise 2: Awakening of a Hero - with some bits removed and some added. At least, that's what the Japanese players were offered. The European version is a different matter entirely. Reportedly, the need for five different language subs (all voice acting remains in Japanese) took up enough cartridge space to force Namco Bandai to simply drop the entire second Episode from the package, a fact the publisher has kept cheekily quiet ahead of release.

In other words, the European release of One Piece: Unlimited Cruise SP offers just half the content of the Japanese version: a port of a four-year-old Wii game (with the versus mode stripped out), and a bonus one-on-one fight mode dubbed The Marineford Episodes. It's a raw deal, especially considering the poor quality of the game that did make it onto the cartridge.

Unlimited Cruise is something of a misnomer. The game is primarily set in a single location, a pretty but sparse sun-doused island that consists of a series of interlinking tropical-themed areas. The game opens with the Straw Hat gang scattered around the island (which magically appears in the opening cut-scene when lead pirate Monkey D. Luffy fishes a magical orb from the ocean depths) and your first task is to regroup at your ship. Once the band's back together, you can switch between any member, exploring the island and fighting enemies with the (initially, at least) one-note combat.

You are free to change characters at any point by hopping into the menu screen, and during boss battles you're able to bring out another member of the team when your current pirate is defeated, essentially giving you nine lives. Each character has their own combat style, although to begin with you only have a single attack. By defeating enemies you slowly unlock new moves and combos for the selected character, giving play an MMO-grind feel as you chisel away at the predestined potential of your avatar.

The character progression system may be lightly compelling over the long haul, but the downside is that play is at its most repetitive in the early stages of the game when each character has a limited interactive vocabulary. As the levelling up is all hidden from view (there are no read-outs of XP gains) you simply have to bash away at enemies until you develop - an obfuscated system that makes keeping track of your character development fuzzy and frustrating.

Even in the latter stages of the game, when you've expanded your skills and augmented the basic punch-punch-punch combos with more impressive special moves, combat remains monotonous and unthinking. It's a war of attrition, with no blocks or counters, the latest branch on the family tree of the most dead-eyed, button-mashing beat-'em-ups from the 16-bit era.

Exploration is no better. The island is a gated environment, with access to new areas requiring special items to be retrieved. These can be found in hidden treasure chests or collected as random drops from enemies. There are no hints as to where to find the 'keys' for these environmental locks, and treasure hunting soon becomes a chore. This would, at worst, be boring if it were not for the introduction of GP, an arbitrary currency that is often needed in addition to the required items to unlock a gate.

GP is gained not through fighting but by converting items in your inventory to points. For example, you might earn one GP by 'converting' five health-restoring herbs. A gate may require a special treasure item as well as 3 GP before it will be unlocked, a system that essentially has you farming for drops in order to pay your way into the next area, even after you already found the piece of treasure needed to unlock the gate. It's a terrible, punishing system that's designed to artificially extend the playtime of the game while asking that you convert your hard-earned loot to otherwise meaningless points.

These systemic issues are compounded by poor layout design. For example, you can only save the game by returning to your ship (which becomes a longer and longer trek across the island as you progress through the game). Likewise, your small inventory soon fills up, requiring you to return to the ship to offload items into storage. You'll also need to spread your attention across the team in terms of levelling, since if a character you have invested all of your energies into during battle falls in the latter stages of the game, you're left to rely on your weak, undeveloped cast members to pick up the slack - a system that never quite allows you to feel true ownership over your avatar.

The action is occasionally broken by a series of enjoyable cut-scenes, and these show off why One Piece has become so popular. They are voiced by the Japanese cast, but the sub is strong with some poetic lines that elevate the script above many of its contemporaries. But these scenes are few and far between, and the lines that link the drama are never more than routine and tedious.

As a package, One Piece Unlimited Cruise SP lacks care and attention (there's even a spelling mistake on the game box's spine), but the problems are more deep-rooted than those introduced by the localisation team. A tiresome waste of a strong license, only the most blinkered fan will derive pleasure from this slog of an experience filled with wrong-headed design decisions intended to pad out a game that cannot sustain expansion.

Video Game / One Piece: Unlimited Cruise

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Like its predecessor, the game is a fairly standard action-adventure game. You must take the Straw Hats through several islands filled with enemies to defeat, items to collect, and bosses to defeat. Said bosses and enemies are clones of the crew's old friends and foes, created from the Straw Hats' memories. You can level up the crew's moves and make them learn more by repeatedly using them in battle, and you can use the stuff you collect to have Usopp craft all kinds of bells and whistles, Chopper create healing and damaging items, and Sanji cook up various meals that enhance the crew's life and SP bars. There's also a Versus mode, where you can fight team battles against another player or the CPU; you can even play as the other characters and standard enemies in that mode.

Unlike its predecessor and successor, this entry is divided into two games: One Piece: Unlimited Cruise 1: The Treasure Beneath the Waves , and One Piece: Unlimited Cruise 2: The Awakening of a Hero . Both of them are rich enough to work as stand-alone games, but they work best as a pair, as not only do you then get the whole story, but you can also bring over your characters from Episode 1 to use them in Episode 2. The game was released in Europe and Japan, but Japan also got a compilation of both episodes for the 3DS, called One Piece: Unlimited Cruise SP , which also includes Marineford Mode, which is a recreation of the manga's Marineford Arc, adds most of the important characters from that arc as playable characters, and retweaks Whitebeard's moveset to match the manga. In Europe, the games were separated again, with SP only including Episode 1 and Marineford mode, leading to Episode 2 getting released seperately as One Piece: Unlimited Cruise SP2 .

Bait-and-Switch Boss : In Episode 2, Bellamy initially pops out of the first seed on the fourth island. But just as you expect a fight against him, Doflamingo comes out and chucks him away.
Butt-Monkey : Usopp, as usual, gets the short end of the stick in several cutscenes.
Continuity Cavalcade : There's a whole lot of miscellaneous references to the manga, ranging from attacks to quotes, pieces of dialogue, the bosses' introductions, etc.
Defeat Means Playable : You can play as the bosses and Mooks you've defeated in Versus mode.
Doflamingo isn't fought alone, but with one of the other Straw Hats, who he controls with his powers. Not only does that make him more difficult, but it also means that unless you have items to revive them, they're pretty much doomed; you obviously can't select them when Doflamingo controls them, and he KOs them instantly when he releases them.
Some of the clones the Straw Hats have to fight are of their friends, like Monster Chopper, Nightmare Luffy and Ace in Episode 1, and Vivi and Paulie in Episode 2.
Doflamingo can force the Straw Hats to fight at his side with his powers.
The Final Boss is a transformed Gabri.
Final Dungeon Preview : Both games have you explore a bit of the final Island before getting kicked off and having to explore the 4 new ones.
Flunky Boss : Enel is summoned with a couple of his space minions, while Smoker is accompanied by several Marine soldiers. Vivi is also accompanied by several Alabasta warriors, and Spandam fights alongside Cipher Pol agents.
Hub Level : The Thousand Sunny, which is extremely faithfully recreated.
Insurmountable Waist-High Fence : At the start of the game, Franky put special locks that even he can't break on all of Sunny's doors but Gabri then eats all the keys . Thanks to that, Sunny can't be fully explored. As the player finishes more isles, Franky recreates more keys and unlocks more of the Sunny.
New Game Plus : After you beat an episode, you can replay it on a higher difficulty while keeping most of the stuff you unlocked and obtained in the first playthrough. It's in fact the only way to fully level up the Straw Hats' techniques.
Nostalgia Level : Part 2's Memory Isle, which is a recreation of the Seaside Zone area from Unlimited Adventure.
Old Save Bonus : You can bring over your characters and progress from Episode 1 to Episode 2.
One Game for the Price of Two : Double subverted. Both episodes have enough content to last you quite a while gameplay-wise, but you must still get both entries if you want to know the whole story. The Japanese version of Unlimited Cruise SP doesn't have that problem, though.
Part 1: Buggy the Clown, Nightmare Luffy, Monster Chopper, and the Evil Guardian from Unlimited Adventure .
Part 2: Vivi, Paulie and Normal Lucci, Whitebeard, and Garp.
Pokémon Speak : Gabri can initially only say his name; in fact, the Straw Hats named him that precisely because he kept repeating it.
Episode 1 has a fight against the cowardly Spandam and a bunch of Marine flunkies, followed immediately by a fight against Aokiji.
Episode 2 has one of these for its final fight. After defeating Yami's first form (a large golemlike creature), he transforms into a much nastier creature composed of tree roots and darkness.
Shown Their Work : The Thousand Sunny is extremely faithful to the blueprints Oda drew for it in the manga, right down to minor details.
Franchise/One Piece
One Piece: Pirate Warriors
Platform/Nintendo 3DS
Creator/Bandai Namco Entertainment
One Piece: Unlimited World Red
Licensed Game
Japanese Video Games

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One Piece: Unlimited Cruise 1 review

These pirates can shove off.

GamesRadar+ Verdict

Colourful characters unleashing cool moves

Writing nails it

May appeal to compulsive collectors

Brainless scavenging

Brainless button mashing

Some vicious slowdown

Why you can trust GamesRadar+ Our experts review games, movies and tech over countless hours, so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about our reviews policy.

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

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One Piece Unlimited Cruise: Episode 1 - Nami ni Yureru Hihou [Japan Import]

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