4 is a game developed by Omega Force, and it is the fourth part in its series, so it is a game that you accept and you know exactly what it will offer you, and what its strengths and disadvantages. What sets Pirate Warriors 4 apart from its predecessors is that it knows you know it, and is focusing on its strengths to deliver one of the best Musou games the Omega Force has produced in their history.
Like its predecessors, Pirate Warriors 4 generally covers the events of One Piece manga, but while the previous sections chose to tell everything very briefly, 4 lists only the most pivotal and dramatic chapters, but in a higher degree of detail. These chapters include the Kingdom of Abasta Sands, the Battle of Aeneas Lobby, the Sabaody Incident and the War of the Summit at Marineford, the story of love, passion and dolls in the Kingdom of Dressrosa, and the infernal wedding that took place on The Whole Cake Island. After that, the game ends its events with an original story in which you imagine an alternate ending to the chapter of Wano's land that is currently being narrated in the manga, as it has not ended yet, and with this original story a lot of funny surprises for fans of the series and the emergence of most of its central characters, while giving the feeling that this chapter is a celebration of the memory of the anime Twenty.
I found the detailed narration more entertaining than the summary in the previous parts, and it led to a higher variety of the nature of the tasks, and the emergence of a greater number of important moments that the previous parts could not recount. Unfortunately, despite the sacrifice of a large number of chapters, the narration is still not perfect, and this is understandable given the crazy length of the One Piece story that is impossible to cram into one game. The most affected chapter has been the Kingdom of Dressrosa, where I am frustrated when it absorbs the absence of so many central characters from it in this version, chief among them Sugar. Despite this, the narration was good in most of the seasons, with beautiful cinematic clips of the important motion clips.
The gameplay is what you'd expect from Omega Force games, as Pirate Warriors 4 lets you choose between more than 40 different scalable characters, wreaking havoc on them in missions that pit you against thousands of enemies, and it is quite natural to defeat more than five thousand enemies in one mission. This style of play gives a feeling of strength that is undoubtedly wonderful, and fits the world of One Piece and its superpowers characters perfectly, and this feeling of strength is what Pirate Warriors 4 focuses on and places it at the center of most of its improvements over the previous parts.
The first addition is a separate button to jump. The past parts of the Pirate Warriors did not allow you to jump, and jumping is a rare coin in Omega Force games in general, and this is something that I have always amazed at, and I was even more surprised when I saw its effect here as it really improved the combat system greatly, and it gave most of the characters additional combo paths that I could no longer imagine without them. A second plus is the use of official manga sizes for playable character sizes. Meaning that if you played Whitebeard or Kaido or others, you will find them a giant who sees the enemies in the game as dwarves. This made playing with them here a special flavor that adds to the feeling of strength that we talked about earlier. The third plus is the transitions. In this game, almost every character has some kind of transformation, and some even have several transformations, and these transformations sometimes change the paths of the combo and multiply the strengths of the characters enormously. My favorite here is the Luffy Straw Hat, where he can transform into Gear 2nd in addition to Boundman and Snakeman, and each has his own different style and strengths, which perfectly mimics his fighting style from the manga.
Unfortunately, despite the many additions to the combat system that I think made it really excellent, the design of the missions and goals of the game has never evolved and is still no more than controlling the designated area or defeating the specific enemy, which causes a feeling of repetition and saturation despite the diversity of playable characters. We find this exception in the last mission, which puts you in a fight against a leader who is very different from any leader before him in the game, and you wished there were more fights like him in the rest of the game.
The other main game outside of the story mode is Treasure Log, which is a list of missions of varying difficulty where you can get medals to develop lagging characters and unlock their advanced transformations and moves. Some of these missions present a high level of difficulty that suits me, especially with the missions in which you fight the four sea emperors, and these missions convince you of their exceptional difficulty level that you are really in a battle against them. Some of these stages allow co-op play of up to 4 players, while the story allows only 2 players. And speaking of cooperative play, I found it in my experience the most enjoyable way to play Pirate Warriors 4, as the game becomes more logical and fun when it begins to distribute tasks between you and your friends, and its time really succeeds by simulating random war and conflict to be at the right time in the right place. Unfortunately, the network system in the game is very primitive, as it does not allow you to open private rooms, nor to expel unwanted players from the room, and on top of that you have to open a new room for each mission, which wasted a lot of time that should not have been wasted.
The game's technical level is also frustrating, with loads of pop-in and camera issues, and moments when the character gets stuck between two rocks or under a tree. The game lacks a layer of technical refinement to the point that I feel like the past part was a bit more polished than it is. Luckily, that didn't extend to the music as Omega Force introduces an enthusiastic album with the usual guitar flavor in their games, and perhaps my favorite was Luffy and Sanji's fight tune of Cake Island, which sold the power of the scene better than the music of the TV series even thought.
Positives
- Excellent combat system, wide variety of playable characters, fun co-operative gameplay, good owl
Negatives
- Frustrated narration of some seasons, redundancy and limited assignments, modest technical level, rudimentary network system