Reviews

It's been a while since I played a turn-based JRPG. I like the more action-oriented direction the likes of Final Fantasy has been taking, but I find the frenetic pace overwhelming when so much is going on on-screen. Hence my delight with this gem.

It seems like it shouldn't work; gritty crime-based plot centering around corruption, murder, false imprisonment, and betrayal, interspersed with Japanese RPG weirdness in the combat and mini-games. The games leans in hard to both aesthetics, and though it sounds like it shouldn't work, this blood-and-bubblegum approach gels magnificently. Case in point: encountering crime boss who wants me dead, and attacking him with a rain of lobsters.

Yokohama, the setting for the story, is so vibrantly alive. The people, and the environment feel so alive, from the pristine and cluttered shelves in a well-lit pharmacy, to the debris scattered in the dim sewers and back alleys. Passers-by cower and run when the fighting starts, and traffic flows organically as you traverse the streets. It's a delight just going from A to B.

There is so much to do beside following the main story. Again, it could have felt like a rag-bag of mini-games, but instead they seemed more like entertaining palette-cleaners. I sang karaoke, played UFO catcher in the arcades (along with other vintage SEGA games like Virtua Fighter), hit the golf courses and batting cages, casinos and shogi parlors, and rode mini-carts. I even ran a local business, attend stockholder meetings, and attended the local college. Nothing essential to the plot, but it did unlock goodies which would help in combat.

I have only a few minor quibbles. One of the story beats is contrived to Shakespearean levels, which elicited a "Oh come on, what are the odds" reaction. And the game never really explained what all the status ailments actually meant, so I had to look them up online, which is a major oversight considering how important they can be during longer battles.

So in summary: engaging characters, compelling story, great sound and graphics, immersive setting, and game play which is simple joyful fun.

It feels like there were two teams involved in the making of this game. The first team contains the writers, the voice talent, abd the artists. They want me to have a good time. The other team hates me. They designed the control scheme and programmed the gameplay.

Team One does a great job. In fact, if you strip out the gameplay and treat it as an interactive story, it's a lot of fun and has humour and heart.

Team Two does their best to ruin what Team One has done. I had to adjust the settings to super Easy to even make the game halfway playable (and I never play on Easy mode). There was often too much chaos and shouting during combat, the iconography was unclear, and the controls unresponsive.

Ah yes, the controls. Pick up an item and interact with it, the press O to put it down. Funny, the O button doesn't work. What if I press it longer? Nope. Mash it quickly -- that works. This isn't even in combat, and they can't get "Press O to cancel" to work? I tried two controllers, same problem, and the O button works in other games. Other times the game went into Picture mode at random. Or I tried to Paase the game but (you guessed it) the button didn't work.

Combat is worse. You have to press triangle to heal a companion, but it's a toss of the coin as to whether that will work. The same button can be used to get team members to perform context-specific actions, like Gamora cutting a suspended crate so that it crashes down on foes. Only I had to run around getting the camera in just the right spot for the icon to even show up, by which time the enemy had moved on.

Then there are the glitches. I had to Restart from Last Checkpoint a few times because puzzle elements were in the wrong state, or combat state continued after enemies were defeated. It even glitched just wakling down the road after beating the Big Bad.

Maybe it was developed on the PS5 and these were porting issues to the PS4? Whatever, it ruined what could have been a fun gameplay experience, and had me salvaging a cinematic one instead.

Most of the movie seems to be little bits of fan service stitched together, rather than a satisfying story. Here's character X. They're saying that thing that makes them sound cool (Zoro), or doing that attack that makes them look badass (Luffy), or trying to do both and failing because that what makes them an endearing loser (Buggy).

At this point in the canon everyone is so OP that that the villain has no choice but to be equally overpowered; although One Piece can do smart villain plots, they work better as a slow burn over a long story arc. This is more of a showcase for as many characters as possible getting their 15 seconds of screen time before the unsurprising climax.

The sweet spot for characters with such a power creep is similar to an RPG; at the low levels they can't do much, and the high levels they are so strong they can just spam their strongest attacks. It's that middle ground where the most fun is to be had.

Unfortunately that heyday for the One Piece crew was around the Alabaster era. The ongoing stories are still entertaining when there is room for is a solid story, character development, and plot twists. But in a movie which is trying to shoehorn in as much as it can, those fall by the wayside in favor of a simple battle royale plot. It's still fun, but it could be better.

It treated the audience as savvy enough to not have to over-explain problems related to their heroes endgame strategy; as a shorthand they just referred to a few movies enshrined in popular culture

The climactic action scenes ticked all the boxes for a good fight: The Shine, the Cut-off, the Hope, the Double-down, and the Finish. There were literal cheers from the audience I was in during The Hope

Callbacks to previous movies: Proof that Tony Stark has a heart, Kill Mode Activated, the Elevator scene (and its surprising resolution)

Iconic shots uplifted from the comics (the "farmer's" scarecrow)

Completed character arcs stay completed

If you're out of the limelight for 5 years kids won't know who you are and won't want a selfie with you

*SPOILERS* This seems like a modernization of the Frankenstein myth (creator destroyed by his creation), but with more T&A. It really panders to the male gaze, which seems almost like a concession to a promising exploration of AI in a psychologically thriller.

Unfortunately the promise isn't fulfilled. At one point I thought I saw a clever twist, but the movie preempted me by revealing that was not the case. Then I saw what could be another, even cleverer twist, but that didn't pan out either. The ending was actually a bit of a letdown. It dragged enough that I thought there must be a big reversal coming, but no. It's a shame, because it was on the verge of being rather good.