Can't always shift Into fourth gear.
When it comes to current games based on One Piece, there isn't much room on the Thousand Sunny pirate ship for neophytes. One Piece: Burning Blood reshapes one of the series' most important arcs into a 3D fighting game that'll confuse anyone outside of its fanbase. But as someone heavily invested in the pirate lifestyle of the long-running manga and anime series, I’m impressed with how just dense the crew is on this voyage, even as I wished for better combat and a broader story in Luffy's newest brawler.
Burning Blood's combat will be immediately familiar to anyone who played the underwhelming crossover J-Stars Victory Vs.+. Burning Blood is all about colorful, noisy, one-on-one 3D battles where you swap between fighters in teams of up to three different characters, and the combat is full of flashy action ripped straight from the source. That style makes the early rounds of battle a visual treat, particularly when Haki users enter the fray to pull off some badass dodges and combos. Unfortunately, Burning Blood needs that flash to compel you to learn its somewhat wonky and chaotic approach to combat.
Even though the roster is an admirable 44 characters deep, their actual variety is so limited that battles feel overly simple. I took out most early AI-controlled fighters by button-mashing my way through Burning Blood's nine large, sparsely decorated arenas. Later challenges up the difficulty some and there's certainly technique to dodging massive attacks from heavies like Hawk Eyes and Sengoku, but overwhelming an opponent with a flood of richly detailed attacks is still a winning strategy. As disappointing as it was to find that ceiling to Burning Blood's gameplay, I still had fun with those adjusted expectations.
Battles On The Too Open Waves
The stages are a bit too big for this kind of action, too – you spend nearly as much time chasing your opponent as you do firing off attacks. Space is needed for some of the bigger moves to work, but the available distance can briefly get confusing when an enemy runs too far away. Plus, the slightly off-center camera takes some getting used to, and even once I adjusted to it, the over-the-shoulder camera placement never felt preferable to more traditional camera views from classics like Tekken or Virtua Fighter.
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Attacks get wackier and wackier the deeper you go into the roster.
Attacks get wackier and wackier the deeper you go into the roster, like Emporio Ivankov's wonderfully ridiculous Face Spectrum that fills up the screen with his Rocky Horror Picture Show-like features. And these vibrant displays still look good even after seeing them dozens of times. Burning Blood prioritizes style over substance -- arguably the correct choice when making such a fan service-focused game, but it comes at the cost of mechanical depth. I was much more interested in seeing Luffy's many Gum-Gum attacks being done correctly than if a screen-filling attack really hit me.
Burning Blood may lack carefully measured hitboxes, but that chaos is the draw of One Piece. None of the hits I took felt unfair to the point of frustration, even if with unbalanced gameplay. One Piece is at its most enjoyable when folks (whether online or in person) toss away any tactical restraint and treat fights like a reckless party game they are.
Tell It To The Marines
When it comes to the solo campaign, Burning Blood somehow finds a way to simultaneously over- and underdeliver. The single-player adventure is ripped straight from one of One Piece's most epic adventures: The Paramount War, aka the Marineford Arc. The fully Japanese-voiced cutscenes gorgeously recreate moments from the series, with a source-material-accurate spin on traditional cel-shading that captures the heavily inked style of the manga. In the concise four-hour-long campaign, you experience multiple viewpoints of the triumph and tragedy of Luffy's attempt to save his brother Ace, all while a war between pirates and marines happens all around you.
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Burning Blood expects high familiarity with One Piece from anyone who picks up the controller.
But that also means the somewhat short campaign will make zero sense to non-fans, explaining virtually nothing from the previous 500-plus episodes of the anime that lead up to this story. Burning Blood expects high familiarity with One Piece from anyone who picks up the controller. Conversely, while One Piece fans will enjoy playing through such an important chapter in Luffy's life, the limited scope mostly ignores the more than five years of plot that have taken place since, simply stopping when the Paramount War concludes. This approach to the campaign ends up being a lose-lose situation: too dense for the uninitiated, and too limited for diehards.
Good thing the limited scope of the campaign doesn't extend to Burning Blood's fighters. The massive roster and even bigger collection of support characters offers a taste of the later years of One Piece, particularly with post-timeskip Luffy and his relatively new Fourth Gear form. That transformation changes up his combat considerably. Another great moment of mythology influencing gameplay is seeing all the creative ways Sanji avoids fighting the women on the roster.
You'll get little bits of the characters' background here and there as the fights go on, sometimes with a quick quip before a fight with folks like Nami and Zoro referring to some past history. You'll even get surprising trivia thrown in to spice up an assist from the likes of Ivankov stopping an attack from Sakazuki. Moments big and small like those are when Burning Blood is at its best - using One Piece mythology to justify a cool addition to the gameplay even if there isn't space for them in the brief campaign. Still, I wish the developers had a more expansive view of the series rather than briefly touching on some of the more interesting, recent mythology.
The Verdict
One Piece: Burning Blood understands what makes the pirate life so compelling in the source material, and is fairly successful in channelling that roguish spirit into its chaotic fights. That flashy, firm commitment to action will feel welcoming to One Piece's biggest fans, but confusing to everyone else. It’s great to have something made just for fans, though even Luffy's biggest supporters will be let down by the brief, limited campaign. At its best, this wild and crazy fighter makes for a fun distraction for folks who've been dying for more One Piece games to get localized.
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