One Piece: Pirates' Carnival
Pirates?! Carnival?! Holy crap, where do we sign up?
Published: April 29, 2006
Here at TotalPlayStation, we pride ourselves on being able to deliver content that's (mostly) late, but (usually) more in-depth and informative than a lot of sites that just scramble to get it up first. Since we'll never win that race, we'd rather work smarter than harder. (Okay, we're just fighting hangovers most of the time.)
That said, there's very, very little about Pirates' Carnival that we can really dig into; the game just isn't terribly deep. That's not to say that there's not a fair amount of stuff to dabble in, it's just light on time involvement. The near-final version that we've been playing off and on between pre-E3 events and meetings is surprisingly fun for what it is, but it's a very duck-in, duck-out affair.
Then again, maybe that's the idea; merging the instant attraction (at least among those that follow it) of one of Cartoon Network's first anime properties with the Mario Party milieu and all wrapped around a basic Othello- or Reversi-like board game premise means you can go from start to finish in about half an hour, digesting bits and pieces of the characters from the show, complete with the voice cast from the American version.
Since the title is an obvious giveaway, we can probably get the whole explanation of what exactly Shonen Jump's One Piece concerns itself with. The bulk of the game is spent picking a character from the show and then jumping onto increasingly larger boards outfitted with different shapes. There is support for up to four players, but whatever humans aren't around can be subbed in by a fairly adept CPU.
No matter how many people you are playing with, everyone starts out with a simple mini-game that lets the winner capture the center square and lets them go first. They pick a square, flip it over, and take a peek at the card underneath. If it's an Event Card, that character locks in the square free of charge and the turn moves to the next player in line. If it's a Character card, you're given the chance to pick a mini-game (if applicable) and then everyone participates, with the winner taking the square.
The final type, a Captain Card gifts the lucky finder with a mini-game that's extremely heavily weighted towards the person that uncovered the card. A short little cutscene between the character you've chosen at the beginning of the game and the captain plays out, and then the game begins, with the other three players just trying to survive. The captains are insanely powerful -- and usually much faster -- than the other players, and so long as they manage to win, the character that uncovered the card captures that square and gets a random second square that's claimed by the captain card.
If there are any squares on the diagonal, horizontal or vertical between the captain and this new square, a bolt of lighting links to the two captain cards and claims any squares held by opposing players in between. This obviously has the power to quickly turn the tide of the game, especially when there are lots of adjacent squares that can be converted. At about the halfway point of the match, another free-for-all mini-game gives losing players a chance to team-up and pull down some extra cash to get them back in the game.
The mini-games themselves have so far been almost universally fun. Most involve just one or two buttons at max, and are quite frantic. We've run around underwater in search of treasure in a barrel armed only with a punching glove to attack and collect treasure (attacking another player makes them drop some treasure), had a punching match on stilts where we could fling our body at the other players to make them fall over, dashed around the deck of a ship while attacking everyone with swords and button-mashed our way up a mountainside on a hyperactive goat -- and there's plenty more games we still haven't played yet.
The game does offer the chance to play any mini-games you're played in the main game as one-offs for practice if that's your thing, but half the fun was just getting people in the office around to play games for the first time, letting the person who actually figured things out the fastest (which only takes a couple of seconds) be the victor.
What's impressive about the game is that the source material isn't especially necessary to enjoy things; these are mini-games with a simple pick-up-and-play mechanic, and when combined with some nice hi-res art, loading screens that break things off into manga-style panels, and a health variety of different things to do that aren't all twitch-based, we actually found ourselves getting a little hooked -- some more than others.
The game hits late next month, so there's still a little waiting to be had (and, mercifully for us, arrives well after E3), but it's definitely addictive enough to keep us coming back when we should be working, and if that's not a strong enough endorsement from a bunch of procrastinators, we don't know what is.
That said, there's very, very little about Pirates' Carnival that we can really dig into; the game just isn't terribly deep. That's not to say that there's not a fair amount of stuff to dabble in, it's just light on time involvement. The near-final version that we've been playing off and on between pre-E3 events and meetings is surprisingly fun for what it is, but it's a very duck-in, duck-out affair.
Then again, maybe that's the idea; merging the instant attraction (at least among those that follow it) of one of Cartoon Network's first anime properties with the Mario Party milieu and all wrapped around a basic Othello- or Reversi-like board game premise means you can go from start to finish in about half an hour, digesting bits and pieces of the characters from the show, complete with the voice cast from the American version.
Since the title is an obvious giveaway, we can probably get the whole explanation of what exactly Shonen Jump's One Piece concerns itself with. The bulk of the game is spent picking a character from the show and then jumping onto increasingly larger boards outfitted with different shapes. There is support for up to four players, but whatever humans aren't around can be subbed in by a fairly adept CPU.
No matter how many people you are playing with, everyone starts out with a simple mini-game that lets the winner capture the center square and lets them go first. They pick a square, flip it over, and take a peek at the card underneath. If it's an Event Card, that character locks in the square free of charge and the turn moves to the next player in line. If it's a Character card, you're given the chance to pick a mini-game (if applicable) and then everyone participates, with the winner taking the square.
The final type, a Captain Card gifts the lucky finder with a mini-game that's extremely heavily weighted towards the person that uncovered the card. A short little cutscene between the character you've chosen at the beginning of the game and the captain plays out, and then the game begins, with the other three players just trying to survive. The captains are insanely powerful -- and usually much faster -- than the other players, and so long as they manage to win, the character that uncovered the card captures that square and gets a random second square that's claimed by the captain card.
If there are any squares on the diagonal, horizontal or vertical between the captain and this new square, a bolt of lighting links to the two captain cards and claims any squares held by opposing players in between. This obviously has the power to quickly turn the tide of the game, especially when there are lots of adjacent squares that can be converted. At about the halfway point of the match, another free-for-all mini-game gives losing players a chance to team-up and pull down some extra cash to get them back in the game.
The mini-games themselves have so far been almost universally fun. Most involve just one or two buttons at max, and are quite frantic. We've run around underwater in search of treasure in a barrel armed only with a punching glove to attack and collect treasure (attacking another player makes them drop some treasure), had a punching match on stilts where we could fling our body at the other players to make them fall over, dashed around the deck of a ship while attacking everyone with swords and button-mashed our way up a mountainside on a hyperactive goat -- and there's plenty more games we still haven't played yet.
The game does offer the chance to play any mini-games you're played in the main game as one-offs for practice if that's your thing, but half the fun was just getting people in the office around to play games for the first time, letting the person who actually figured things out the fastest (which only takes a couple of seconds) be the victor.
What's impressive about the game is that the source material isn't especially necessary to enjoy things; these are mini-games with a simple pick-up-and-play mechanic, and when combined with some nice hi-res art, loading screens that break things off into manga-style panels, and a health variety of different things to do that aren't all twitch-based, we actually found ourselves getting a little hooked -- some more than others.
The game hits late next month, so there's still a little waiting to be had (and, mercifully for us, arrives well after E3), but it's definitely addictive enough to keep us coming back when we should be working, and if that's not a strong enough endorsement from a bunch of procrastinators, we don't know what is.
