There have been several One Piece series, but the new One Piece: Unlimited World Red has quite a few changes. Most are good, but some need change in my opinion.

I am a bit disappointed in the animation. Even in the cut-scenes, it feels like the animation is 10+ years old. I went back and loaded up the previous games just to make sure I didn’t remember things wrong, but they were definitely better in the previous games. Everything was a lot more detailed before. Even things like the mouths don’t match up to the words. Granted, it is in Japanese, but the mouths obviously don’t line up with the words. It’s like they figure that you will be distracted by Nami and Robin’s breasts enough that you won’t notice anything else. The NPCs are even worse than your main characters. I am pretty sure there were better NPCs in PSOne games. I know for sure they were better in PS2 games.

The music and voice acting is well done. Granted, all of the voicework is in Japanese with English subtitles, but I’ve mostly gotten used to that in a lot of the games I’ve played recently. The only time you might miss things is when you’re fighting, but they don’t say much that's important during fights in One Piece. They leave the important stuff to before and after battle.

When you start up One Piece: Unlimited World Red, you will get the option of playing either Main Story or Battle Coliseum. In Main Story, this time around One Piece is a true RPG where you can free roam and more or less choose what you want to do and when you want to do it, as opposed to the previous games where you played the episodes in order and you couldn’t wander around. Now, you are on an island in a town where you can save at the Inn and rest up as well, for a fee. To start off the story, everyone except Luffy and the new raccoon Pato are captured. Luffy is going to have to rescue them all.

While you’re working on rescuing everyone, you can expand your town as well using items that you have found in various areas. Once you build the Tavern, you can go there to get quests from the townspeople. Sometimes they’re easier than others and some are more rewarding than others. Quests are done immediately. When you accept, you will choose your team and be transported to the spot. This means you are only doing one quest at a time. They can have time limits too, so keep an eye on that, but as of now I haven’t found any that I am anywhere near the time limit. I highly recommend building up the town and checking out these new places when you build them. The restaurant was a lot handier than I thought. There, you can use the items that you have found to cook up meals. These meals will raise your stats, which can be quite handy. Your factory can upgrade your nets for fishing and bug catching. The other places will help you in various ways, so check them out.

The story ends up a lot more complex as you go and you’ll find out that everything isn’t what it seems. You’ll rescue everyone after just a few levels, but then things get more interesting. Just keep on going and as is normal for Luffy, he’ll stumble on the answers without knowing what he’s doing.

You will not always be fighting alone in One Piece: Unlimited World Red. In most areas, you can choose up to three people for your team. You will only control one of them at a time, like in the Tales games, while the rest of your team will be computer-controlled. You can switch which team member you are playing with at any time (even in battle), but you can’t change them out for other members until you return to town. It might be a bug, but your second and third team members don’t take any damage. Only the player that you control gets hurt. This means that you can switch through them when you’ve got one person damaged and continue the fight as a fresh player. If you’re really desperate and you’ve got time, you can just run away from the enemies and let your other teams members finish them off since they won’t take any damage from the enemies. You will be automatically prompted to choose your team when you leave town, so you don’t have to go anywhere to swap out members.

Items only last a short while, so if something is dropped by an enemy, you’ll have to pick it up before the fight is over or you will probably lose it. You heal to full and full SP when you level, so that can be really handy. You will also find that when you get to what you think is the end of an area, it’s really not. It’s just a place where the "words" are lost. You will have to go back towards the beginning until you find the enemies that you need to beat to get the right words. Words are also used to power up your character and you will collect those words as you go. Knowing how to properly use them will make your game a lot easier, even on harder difficulty levels.

The "Thriller Bank Card Rush" game is going to require you to know at least a bit about the anime or be good at guessing. You don’t have to play it though, so no worries if you’ve never seen it. It just gives you pirate points and money. There are quite a few other mini-games you can find to play after you unlock the second part of town. Some are easier than others. You will earn a gold, silver, or bronze on these games.

The controls are easy to get the hang of in One Piece: Unlimited World Red. They explain them at the beginning of the game. There are some things to note. A red flag shows you where you need to go on a map, which is really helpful to those of us with no sense of direction. You won’t wander around lost. You can walk off the edge of cliff, or rather fall off if you are fighting in just the right way and you’ll just be transported back to the top and lose a bit of health. (Triangle) will let you Gum Gum Rocket around town, to specific places at least. You can’t choose to use it everywhere. It only works in places where you see the (Triangle) on the screen. If you try and use it elsewhere, you’ll just spring forward some. To catch bugs, you have to use (L1) to lock on to it, equip your net, and press (O) to swing the net. After you catch it, you have to do yet more quicktime events to wear it out before you’ve really caught it. These are quite annoying. It’s like a rhythm game with no music for the rhythm part.

I have a real problem with games that require "quicktime" events, where you have to press a button just because they tell you to. Unfortunately, someone decided that it would be a good idea to "help" you out by telling you when you have to press (O) to dodge an enemy’s attack or (R1) for your companion to heal you. I really don’t like this change. I’d prefer to figure out when to dodge on my own rather than trying to watch for an (O) to appear. Of course, you do not have to watch for it. You can dodge, deflect, etc. on your own, so I found myself ignoring their prompts a lot of the time. Besides, usually if I waited on the prompts, I was a split second late, but if I just played like I would normally and blocked when I knew I needed to, I had no trouble. The games also tries to somewhat auto-aim for you. I found I would have to beat enemies before breaking trees or boxes because even if I was facing the object, I would still attack at the enemies.

While there are some low points to One Piece: Unlimited World Red, I still found that I kept wanting to go back to the game. The graphics are a drawback, as are the semi-quicktime events, but I still found I enjoyed playing and wanted to see what happened next in the story. The story was written just for the game so it will not be found in the anime. It does fit in perfectly with what I have now seen of the anime though. The characters act just like they do there, so you will not be disappointed if you are a fan of the series. I’m not sure I would recommend it if you’re looking for a next-gen look and feel, but if you’re looking for One Piece as a true RPG finally, check out One Piece: Unlimited World Red.