One Piece: Pirates' Carnival

First of all, ask yourself a question- do you really like One Piece? I mean, do you really, really love One Piece? If your answer is yes, you're bound to have fun with One Piece: Pirates' Carnival. But, if your answer is anything but that, get ready for a terrifying trip into the world of what happens when party games go terribly wrong.

It's A Party, But No One Wants To Attend

The premise behind Pirates' Carnival is pretty simple: take the wacky cast of One Piece and have them battle it out party-game style in a board game-like setting. You have a selection of key One Piece characters to choose from, including series favorite Luffy, and you'll face off against a whole host of different personalities in the title's wide number of mini-games.

From a party-game standpoint, Pirates' Carnival seems to have all the right pieces for a successful and fun time. You can play with up to four total players, with each player vying to take control of a majority of squares on a large game board. With each turn, a player will select a square, at which point a mini-game will start up, having you do weird and wacky things, such as climbing up a mountainside while avoiding avalanches or taking control of the bruiser Don Krieg as you try and prevent the other players from running through an obstacle course. When a player wins a mini-game, they'll take control over that corresponding square on the game board.

Control Issues

All seems fine and dandy; that is until you actually start playing the game. First off, the controls in the game range from barely controllable to downright broken. In the aforementioned mountain climbing mini-game, you can only control your character in three directions -- up, left, and right. It's frustrating, to say the least, that the controls seem to get the three mixed up at random, usually sending you in a direction other than where you want to go. This sort of problem appears over and over again in the other mini-games, making them extremely frustrating. For a game that relies heavily on giving you quick and digestible bits of action, it fails to deliver on that thanks to the unreliable controls.

Visually Pirates' Carnival fares much better than its controls, with some nice anime-styled characters and environments. Drawing heavily from the anime and manga, you should have no problem identifying your favorite pirate wannabes. Mini-games, however, fall prey to having to usually display four times the action on screen, especially during games that feature four-way split-screen action. Unless you're playing the game on a monstrous TV, the four-player split-screen games reduce your view to a woefully tiny slice of what's actually going on, making it difficult to even discern what's happening.

If you're a serious fan of One Piece, and likewise have friends that love it, you'll probably enjoy Pirates' Carnival. It's wacky and weird and has some funny moments. It's just too bad that the actual gameplay can't seem to keep up with that kind of creativity. While memorable for fans, those non-One Piece fans out there should steer clear of this atrocity.

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