One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 - Ultimate Edition

My honest read on Pirate Warriors 4 is that it is the best possible argument for its own genre, and also a pretty clear illustration of that genre's ceiling. This is a musou, you drop one superpowered anime character into a battlefield swarming with hundreds of enemies, capture keeps, mow through crowds, and chain together escalating special moves until the screen fills with light and debris. If that sentence made you tired, move on. If it made you curious, keep reading. What separates PW4 from earlier entries in the series comes down to a few concrete improvements. The maps now have real elevation, and a dedicated jump button was added to take advantage of it. Air combat is a genuine system here, not an afterthought, Sky-type characters like post-timeskip Sanji can stay airborne and string juggle combos, while Power-type characters like Kaido crash into the ground to clear rooms. Speed and Technique types fill out the roster with their own rhythms. Each of the four playstyle categories actually changes how a character handles in practice, which gives the massive roster genuine variety rather than just reskin variety. Characters can also transform mid-battle, Luffy cycling up through Gears is exactly as satisfying as it sounds. Special move slots let you equip four abilities per mission, all with individual cooldowns, so you are rarely waiting around for something to happen. The Ultimate Edition bundles the base game with both Character Passes and an Additional Episodes Pack including three new story missions, one centered on Yamato, one on Koby, and one building toward the King of the Pirates conclusion. Gear 5 Luffy is in the roster here, along with Kaido in Human-Beast Form and Yamato. That roster depth is the main reason to pick this version over the base game, the DLC characters are not cosmetic extras, they play meaningfully differently from the base cast. The six story arcs covered in the Dramatic Log run from early arcs through an original Wano adaptation, though anyone who has read the manga past that point will notice the game had to improvise. The story mode functions more as a highlight reel than a faithful retelling, which is fine as long as you know going in that the cutscenes exist to give you a reason to be on a map, not to replace watching the anime. The weaknesses are real and worth knowing. Map design can work against you, objectives sometimes lack clear markers, and if you are not already familiar enough with the One Piece cast to recognize characters by sight, certain escort missions become genuinely frustrating. Mission variety is limited to defeat-the-boss, hold-the-point, and protect-the-ally structures that rotate with little variation across dozens of stages. The camera has a habit of losing itself during dense crowd situations. And if you have no attachment to One Piece whatsoever, the story filler between fights will not do much to create one. The 92% Very Positive Steam rating and the 75 Metacritic score tell the same story in different ways: this is a game that players who came for it largely loved, while critics flagged the structural repetition correctly. For One Piece fans, the Ultimate Edition is a straightforward recommendation. The added episodes and DLC character passes give the game a shelf life well beyond the base campaign, and the roster depth at this tier is hard to argue with. For musou-curious players who have never watched the anime, there is still a genuinely fun action game underneath the IP, particularly once the character progression opens up and special move chains start feeling like actual combat expression. Just go in knowing the structure repeats, and let the spectacle do the rest.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 - Ultimate Edition.