In surely the worst example of RPG levelling up, you can actually spend your hard-earned skill points to speed up this process. You can add that in with the excruciatingly long Interact command, where you’ll hold down triangle for so long while trying to open a treasure chest that you can take a good long slurp of your cup of tea and check your phone for messages while doing so. There are a myriad of other odd little design choices that knock you out of the game’s rhythm, like how talking to any NPC the game fades to black before and afterwards for no apparent reason. There’s actually a laughable attempt at one point to be Spider-Man, which would be amusing if not for the fact that failing the section results in bouncing you back to a loading screen before you can retry. Besides that there’s just the side quests to dive into, but it all feels so empty when you compare it to the Assassin’s Creed games or something like Spider-Man. There’s treasure chests and crafting materials to find out in the world, but when they both appear on your map there’s no real skill to finding them beyond occasionally working out if they’re above or below you. It’s biggest sin as an open world adventure is that there simply isn’t enough to do. There’s often no music playing, no background hubbub, and the sounds of Luffy’s sandals are weirdly hushed as well, like the developers were too involved to allow anything so hateful as noise to reverberate around their wonderful buildings. You can be running around Steel City – the biggest settlement on the main island – and it’s quiet. One of the weirdest things is the lack of noise. It’s almost as though they got as far as building an amazing landscape and then forgot to fill it with enough to make things interesting.
It’s easily the best looking One Piece game yet, but it’s also worryingly lifeless.
One Piece: World Seeker sure looks fantastic. The balance it strikes is just right between having to get stuck into a few missions and levelling up and gaining new skills. There’s also Parameters, which allows you to speed yourself up or increase your health, and Battle which plays host to your special Gum Gum moves. You’ve then got the two combat stances, the quicker Observation Haki and the more aggressive Armament Haki, with points in each adding new moves or boosting ones you already have.