One Piece: Burning Blood (PC) Review

This follows the Paramount Wars story arc, which, luckily for the genre this falls into, is one of the more action-packed in the franchise. The cut-scenes are finely-crafted, the audio-visuals will make you feel as if you have just entered a TV episode, and, generally, everything is a joy to look at… as long as you are a One Piece fan, that is. This is one of those titles whose story simply can't be enjoyed by those who don't know what this is all about and, as such, most events and character behaviour will go over the head of those people.

Players are forced to begin with the story mode, which, besides acting as a long tutorial of sorts, is also the part where everything else gets unlocked, whether that's the traditional free solo play, or the online matches. While newcomers will find the story mode extremely helpful, this restriction will feel stupid to those who are experienced with fighting games, as they will want to just get their hands dirty with anything but the main campaign.

Luckily, unlocking most features doesn't take too long. Having said that, though, the story mode itself is not without issues, with the most annoying one being how, as mentioned before, this is more like a tutorial than an actual mode that you have to play through. This results in battles that might range from very challenging to almost impossible... but only as long as someone doesn't follow the on-screen hints, and actually manage to finish a round in a matter of minutes.

Gameplay-wise, this plays like most fighters do, but with an over-the-shoulder-ish perspective instead of the traditional 2D one, and with a relatively easy to grasp control scheme, which, rather than revolving around multi-button combinations as usual, keeps thing pretty simple, with each button tied to a specific attack, and with special moves requiring a nice and easy attack + shoulder button combo. There's also the typical gauge that fills up while punches fly, which can be used to unleash the full potential of a character for a brief amount of time.

Unfortunately, this is also a part with lots of problems. For starters, while there are tons of characters to choose between, there is an insane lack of balance, something that mostly becomes evident when playing against a human opponent. Speaking of which, this is one of those titles that's hard to actually find someone to play with, something that's not exactly surprising, as this was mostly made with One Piece fans in mind, instead of all fighting fans.

The second problem is that, although the battle mechanics are in no way broken, they aren't exactly fine-tuned, either, as moving or fighting with a character can, at certain times, feel somewhat slow, clunky, and unresponsive, especially with some of the larger characters. Long story short: One Piece: Burning Blood was made solely for the One Piece fan, and even him or her will feel a bit disappointed by the whole package.