ONE PIECE: PIRATE WARRIORS 4 Legendary Edition

The best thing about Pirate Warriors 4 is what happens once you get an enemy off the ground. Omega Force rebuilt the Musou formula around aerial juggling and destructible arenas, so a fight stops being a lawnmower run through identical mobs and becomes you punting a hundred marines into the sky, chasing them up there, and bringing the whole crowd back down through a building. The giant-type characters push it further in the right direction. Swapping into a form that eats half the screen and flattening a fort in one swing is a genuinely great trick, and it is the thing this game does better than almost any other licensed brawler I have played. Structurally it is a Warriors game and it never pretends otherwise. The main campaign, the Dramatic Log, runs the series' greatest hits: Alabasta, Enies Lobby, Marineford, Whole Cake Island, Wano. Each mission drops you onto a map full of objectives pinging in from every direction. Hold this fort, reach an ally before a timer runs out, stop a captain from breaking the line. Free Log lets you replay those maps with whoever you want, and the side-mission log stacks on extra conditions and modifiers. Characters split into Power, Speed, Sky and Technique types, and the split actually matters in practice. A Sky character trivializes maps where you are constantly repositioning across the field, while a Power character is what you bring when a boss has a stagger bar you want gone in a hurry. The Legendary Edition bundles the base game with the character passes, which is the version worth owning if you are coming to this now rather than at launch. The roster is enormous, well past forty fighters, and the added characters are not filler padding. Katakuri plays nothing like anyone in the base cast, and the Wano-era additions carry some of the flashiest movesets in the whole package. Progression runs on a coin board: you slot growth coins into a grid to buff attack, health and passive perks, unlocking nodes with currency you earn by playing. It is not deep, and nobody will call it a build system, but it gives you a reason to keep taking one specific fighter back out instead of rotating aimlessly. Where it disappoints is presentation and structure. The story assumes you already know One Piece cold. Cutscenes are compressed into something closer to a recap reel than a narrative, and if you have not read or watched the arcs, Marineford in particular lands as a lot of names shouting at each other over an explosion. Mission design also flattens out fast. Once you have learned the objective vocabulary, most maps are the same map wearing different scenery, and the spikes in difficulty come from escort failures and timer losses rather than from anything the combat itself is asking of you. Online co-op works and a four-player run is a good time, but finding a lobby outside peak hours can be slow, and the camera during giant-character fights loses track of where you actually are more often than it should. So who is this for. Anyone who wants a combat sandbox they can switch on for forty minutes at a time and switch off without guilt, and anyone who has ever wanted to play as their favorite Straw Hat and watch the defeated-enemy counter roll past a thousand. Fans of the manga get the most out of it, because the fanservice is doing real work here, but the fighting is strong enough on its own terms that a Musou-curious newcomer will get plenty out of it as long as they accept the loop for what it is. If you bounced off older Warriors games because the combat felt flat and grounded, this is the one that fixed that specific complaint. If you bounced off them because the objective churn bored you, nothing here is going to change your mind.

Alex · Scout Team

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