Customer Reviews

Shonen Jump's One Piece Pirates' Carnival

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you enjoy mini-game multiplayer fun like the Mario Party series, then One Piece Pirates' Carnival will be right up your alley.

Where Mario Party has a main board with a "path" like Life or CandyLand, in Pirates' Carnival your main board is a grid, more like Othello. You're trying to turn squares to your color and capture as many as you can.

In order to win a given square, you have to play a mini-game. This is quite fun in a situation where other people are around to play with, or you can play against the computer to hone your skills. You can choose to play as a variety of male or female characters.

If you're playing against the computer, you can even set the difficulty level of each of the 3 other players. So you can start with them all on easy, and slowly work your way up with some easy and some harder.

The mini-games are pretty fun, and involve the One Piece crew. You can slide around in a ring trying to bash each other out, sort of a cross between Sumo rules and sliding samurai sensibilities. Other games involve dodging missiles, racing, and other traditional mini-game tasks.

The graphics are reasonably good here, with rippling water, cel shaded graphics and characters from the series. The sounds match up well with the series, which depending on how fond you are of the US version, could be a good or bad thing.

Because the game is fun multiplayer, and because you can ramp up the difficulty based on your own skills, the game can be played pretty much forever. There's always a new challenge in the game. Unlike the path-based games like Mario Party, the strategic challenges of the main board here are great for building up logic skills.

Now, there's the caveat that if you don't enjoy Mario Party style mini-games, you probably won't enjoy this either. It's not a long, epic story. It doesn't involve complex keystrokes to trounce an enemy. However, if you're up for light arcadey fun, and have friends you can hang out with for a few hours, definitely give Pirates' Carnival a try.

Early reviews from the major gaming sites seem to be trashing this game, and I think it's a bit unfair. One Piece: Pirates' Carnival is your basic Mario Party-style board game. Pick your character and participate in a bunch of button-mashing mini games. There is a decent strategic element, as the rules play kind of like "Othello" where you can steal your opponents squares and winnings. And the One Piece license is put to good use here: it's fun to see how they've reimagined scenes from the manga to fit the party game format, and its a kick seeing your favourite characters in deformed/chibi/cel-shaded style. And there's lots of voiceovers from the cast (which may or may not be a good thing if you don't like the 4Kids dub).

Where I felt the game came up short was that the mini-games aren't as diverse as in Mario party. There are some innovative ones, but mostly it's a 1 vs 3 scenario where one player controls a powerful boss character while the other 3 try to foil him. After awhile, these type of games start to feel the same. And like all American releases, some of the content has been removed from the Japanese version because the series isn't as far ahead here. But we've come to expect that by now.

If you like One Piece, I really do recommend this (or the Japanese version) as a purchase. It's amusing, and it's fun to come back to with friends every so often. Just be aware that it doesn't offer anything new from Mario Party, and you should be fine.

Again I will say that Game Cube has some really fun games that just can't be duplicated. My kids turned up their noses when they saw this one arrive but soon they were all fighting over the controller. Fun game.

The first One Piece party game ever was this one, and it's sad seeing gaming sites bashing on it. It's actually innovative and very fun. You can play a board game where you start your character, and play a minigame for the center panel. Whoever wins the game gets the panel. Then they pick the next panel to wager, and so on and so on. But, if you win a captain panel and get two panels across from eachother, then you get anything between the line they intersect. And if you get another captain panel, then you can get even more. What's great is that even if it seems like you're at a total defeat, win the right game at the right game and you could completely dominate the battlefield. There are lots of minigames, most fun. There are some where you walk up a mountain bowing to hiking bears and attacking rabbits, try to find a buff panda dude with a spyglass, play a game of darts, and even as quirky as trying to run up a ledge on what appears to be some sort of Chocobo knockoff. But they all will keep you entertained for sure. This is a must buy for all party gamers that love One Piece. You may think it's a little wierd, but it takes a true blue One Piece fan to fully understand the concept of Eiichiro Oda's crazy and wacky phenomenon that is One Piece. Have fun!