➤ The touch of the buccaneer 🎮

For all otaku looking for good games based on anime and manga licenses, mobile has never been a particularly generous market in the West. Attack on Titan, Evangelion and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure are just some of the franchises that have landed on smartphones and tablets, but if we exclude a few exceptions, the vast majority of these games remain confined to Japanese territory and are not localized in an understandable language. One Piece: Treasure Cruise instead represents a lucky white fly, because in addition to being entirely translated into English, it honors the popular manga by Eiichiro Oda with a simple but fun RPG, designed exclusively for mobile platforms.

The adventures of Luffy and his companions have landed on iOS and Android with One Piece: Treasure Cruise

Crew! One touch!

Although it will mainly interest the most die-hard fans of Luffy's adventures and his crew, Treasure Cruise is easily accessible even to those who haven't even read the first page of Oda's manga. In fact, the story follows the first part of the work, with a short tutorial that tells of the birth of the Straw Hat, of the elastic powers obtained thanks to the Gom Gom fruit and of the promise made to Captain Shanks: to become the king of pirates. During this full-bodied introduction starring a seven-year-old Luffy, the few and simple rules underlying the fighting between pirates, the real heart of the game, are explained step by step. One Piece: Treasure Cruise is in fact a succession of clashes along the lines of Brave Frontier, in which you can launch an attack by simply touching the icon corresponding to your character. Starting from this very basic idea, the developers have made everything more interesting thanks to a series of variables.

In fact, you can chain combos by touching the icons of other characters with the right timing, you can perform a special technique after a certain number of turns, while a system of paper-stone-scissors weaknesses adds a pinch of strategy. At each turn, the type of attack linked to each of the characters changes, and so you have to use the most effective one against the opponent in front of you. In some cases, you have to choose whether to perform a devastating blow or use the turn to use healing items and power-ups, but it is essential to decide quickly if you do not want to waste a turn. However, the role-playing component of Treasure Cruise is not limited to just collecting experience points and simply leveling up. As in Terra Battle, characters can be unlocked and collected, added to the party or sacrificed for bonuses. In this way you can improve the pirates in your possession or evolve them into more powerful variants (and often characterized by a more "cool" artwork). Once practiced with all the menus and mechanics, players simply stop following the storyline and focus on building their team, growing their members and upgrading their galleon. However, many of these activities are linked to the inevitable stamina system typical of free-to-play games. This means that after a handful of fights you have to wait for a certain period of time or put your hand on your credit card, but it has very rarely happened to us to remain dry or have to wait for long periods. More annoying were the numerous and intrusive loads due to the need to stay connected online while playing, a compromise that is acceptable while on WiFi, but becomes almost exhausting if you play on the go. In closing we cannot fail to mention the excellent aesthetic work: from the interface to the sprites of the characters, passing through the backdrops, the intermission dialogues and the sound effects, the game of Bandai Namco is absolutely able to delight fans of One piece.

Comment

Tested version iPhone 1.0.2 Price Free Resources4Gaming.com

8.0

Readers (14)

7.8

Your vote

Wish there were more anime and manga based games like One Piece: Treasure Cruise. Bandai Namco's mobile game takes up the spirit of Oda's manga and tells the story of Straw Hat again through a simple but refined and enjoyable RPG, which uses original mechanics without taking refuge in the comfortable but now inflated genre of match-3 puzzles.