One Piece: Unlimited World Red - Deluxe Edition

My first hour with this game was a pleasant surprise, and my fifth was where the cracks started to show. One Piece: Unlimited World Red Deluxe Edition lands on PC as the most complete version of a title that started life on the Nintendo 3DS back in 2013, and the bones are solid enough to make that heritage feel like an asset rather than a liability. You play as Luffy and a rotating team of three Straw Hat Pirates, working through a hub town called Transtown, launching into self-contained levels, beating up marines and rival pirates, collecting crafting materials, then returning to upgrade your base. It is a loop. A comfortable, low-stakes loop. The combat is where the game earns its most consistent criticism, and it is fair. Each character has a light attack, a heavy attack, a dodge-and-counter window, and a set of special moves tied to their Devil Fruit or fighting style, Luffy's rubbery Gear attacks, Zoro's multi-sword slashes, Nami's weather-based crowd control, and so on. Characters also have unique stage actions: Chopper can dig for materials, Nami can steal Beli off downed enemies, Robin and Chopper can pursue knocked-down foes for extra damage. That variety in character kits is genuinely fun. The problem is that the enemy AI is forgiving enough to let almost any approach work, and the encounters in the main story rarely demand that you use any of it smartly. Boss fights are the exception, the difficulty ramps up noticeably there, and a few of the Arc Villain encounters are legitimately satisfying. The Deluxe Edition's real selling point is volume. The package includes all the previously released DLC, costumes, side quests, and extra missions, and a fully fleshed-out Battle Coliseum mode that runs parallel to the main campaign. That mode has Boss Rush, Scramble (fighting waves of 50 to 150 enemies), and Battle Royale sub-modes, plus a Dressrosa-based story thread with a roster that goes well beyond the main nine Straw Hats. You can play as Ace, Whitebeard, Trafalgar Law, Shanks, Admiral Aokiji, and others, each with meaningfully distinct move sets. For fans who want to mess around with the wider One Piece cast, that alone is worth the runtime. There is also an RPG layer: characters level up individually, and you equip them with stat-modifying "Words" to tune their performance. It rarely feels necessary in story mode, but it adds meaningful depth in Coliseum's harder brackets. The story is an original, non-canonical adventure written specifically for the game, with the main antagonist Patrick "Red Count" Redfield and his tanuki companion Pato designed by Eiichiro Oda himself. That is a real point of distinction. The narrative is breezy shonen fun, kidnapped crewmates, escalating boss fights, familiar faces from past arcs showing up as cloned enemies, but it assumes you already know who Zoro and Robin are, and it never bothers to catch newcomers up. If you have seen fewer than a hundred episodes of the anime, a lot of the emotional beats will land flat. The campaign itself is also short, completable in a handful of focused sessions, which makes the Coliseum and side quests do heavier lifting on replay value than they probably should. For PC players specifically, this is a serviceable port, the visual improvements from the original 3DS version are real, and the game runs cleanly at 60fps in standard gameplay. It is not a technically demanding release, and it shows its age in animation fidelity and level design variety. What it does exceptionally well is capture the visual identity of the One Piece world: stages spanning deserts, underwater areas, icy seas, and sky arenas, all rendered with the kind of color saturation that makes the anime feel alive. If you are a One Piece fan who wants a relaxed, lore-adjacent way to spend time with the crew, this delivers that without much resistance.

Alex · Scout Team

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