[Mini-Review] One-Piece: Pirates' Carnival
Mini-games = mini-gameplay.
Published: September 20, 2006
[The Good]
On paper, Pirates' Carnival is one of those games that just screams "bust me out at parties," the sort of game that you can pick up and jump into with little thought to an over-arching storyline or needless expository sequences to explain that the object is just to beat the crap out of something. And in a way, that's what a lot of the Cartoon Network-licensed games of late have done. Naruto: Ultimate Ninja gave only the barest essence of a storyline and mainly concerned itself with many an ass whuppin'.
Even the recently released One Piece: Grand Adventure concerned itself with a bunch of brawlers' truisms. And make no mistake, PC shares that twitch gameplay, allowing you to just play the mini-games found in the Board Game Mode if you so choose, but the meat of things -- and where the game has any real legs -- is in playing that board game. An anime-flavored board game with all the main Straw Hat Crew characters from the TV show and a modest amount of dialogue between them.
It's less Monopoly and more Othello (or, if you like Go), though; a series of progressively more complex and larger boards are filled with squares that hide a particular card. At the start of things, everyone joins in a free-for-all random mini-game that determines who gets the center square and who goes first. Up to four players can participate, but if you don't have a MultiTap or that many friends around, the computer can sub in (with varying levels of difficulty, but more on that in a second).
Buried under the squares on the board are one a few different types of cards, all of which give you money, and, if you win the mini-game that results from finding most cards, money and the square, which is the key to winning. Event Cards give you the square straight away, though they also meet with a random, often balance-shifting event like rearranging the squares or giving an opponent some of yours. Captain Cards let you launch into a mini-game with the odds stacked heavily against the person that overturned the Captain; it's not impossible to win, but it is very, very tough for some of the games. Character Cards are simple up-for-grabs mini-games with the winner getting some cash and that card.
Because anyone can potentially win the card and capture the square for themselves, careful control of the board is key. If you can surround an opponent's card with two of your own on either side or the diagonals, you'll capture that one too. There are always two Captain Cards on the board, and capturing one via a mini-game nets you the other, though the location is random.
It's here that things can get interesting if they're found late in the game, because when the second Captain card is uncovered, and if it happens to draw a straight line to another of your cards, you'll capture opponents' cards in between. At times as many as four cards can combine to completely flip the balance of control in the game, and it's here that things get a little unbalanced.
[The Bad]
The core of the game, despite the whole board game construct, is in mini-games, and it's here that PC chugs. Hardly any of the games are explained well enough for a newcomer to understand them right off the bat, which means if you're just starting out, you'll have to lose just to learn how to play most of the time. It not only gives players that have seen the mini-games before a massive advantage, but when encountering a new game for yourself, it's basically trial-and-error the first couple times before you really learn the ins and outs.
So it's a little like chess, with some games that are nigh-on impossible to figure out the first time, that I can sort of handle, but the game does tend to go a little too hog wild on the randomization events. You can spend tons of time working over the board, only to have quite literally everything change on the last game. In a way, I suppose it's strategic, but it pushed my buttons way too fast, and way too often.
Capping off this frustration is the way the game awards bonuses at the end. Generally speaking, if you've got the most squares, you'll win outright, but bonuses are given to the person who captures the most squares, who flips them, who grabs the most Captain Cards, who wins the most mini-games and who loses the most mini-games (which, fittingly is the biggest bonus of all). In theory, this would allow last-chance shafted players to come back in the end, or break close ties. In practice, it's a little less of a leveler; biding time and capturing the other characters' squares at the last second is the cheap -- and almost universal -- way to win (it's also, appropriately, the one the AI goes for most).
And there's just the issue of the mini-games themselves. Beyond being a little tough to grasp initially, some of them just aren't terribly fun. There are a couple of good ones, and that's mainly because they are indeed pick up and play easy, but they, along with all the other games including the stinkers and yawn-worthy ones, just don't add up to a lot of replay value, which is odd considering how many boards there are in the game.
[The Verdict]
Visually the game is really quite solid, with some first-person stuff, some four-way split screen and lots and lots of characters running around at once. The framerate is solid and the characters animated smoothly. In fact, the whole thing captures the look of the show (or what we've seen of it) and manga (likewise) rather nicely -- better than most licensed games in fact.
But paying tribute to the source material is only one part of things. The board game concept is novel, and perhaps with a few less randomization events, it could have been more engaging, but with AI that's absolutely relentless on the upper settings, mini-games that fail to deliver the basic premise on the first play-through, and a general sense that things were rather slapped together, Pirates' Carnival lacks the kind of fun you'd expect when you put those two words together.
On paper, Pirates' Carnival is one of those games that just screams "bust me out at parties," the sort of game that you can pick up and jump into with little thought to an over-arching storyline or needless expository sequences to explain that the object is just to beat the crap out of something. And in a way, that's what a lot of the Cartoon Network-licensed games of late have done. Naruto: Ultimate Ninja gave only the barest essence of a storyline and mainly concerned itself with many an ass whuppin'.
Even the recently released One Piece: Grand Adventure concerned itself with a bunch of brawlers' truisms. And make no mistake, PC shares that twitch gameplay, allowing you to just play the mini-games found in the Board Game Mode if you so choose, but the meat of things -- and where the game has any real legs -- is in playing that board game. An anime-flavored board game with all the main Straw Hat Crew characters from the TV show and a modest amount of dialogue between them.
It's less Monopoly and more Othello (or, if you like Go), though; a series of progressively more complex and larger boards are filled with squares that hide a particular card. At the start of things, everyone joins in a free-for-all random mini-game that determines who gets the center square and who goes first. Up to four players can participate, but if you don't have a MultiTap or that many friends around, the computer can sub in (with varying levels of difficulty, but more on that in a second).
Buried under the squares on the board are one a few different types of cards, all of which give you money, and, if you win the mini-game that results from finding most cards, money and the square, which is the key to winning. Event Cards give you the square straight away, though they also meet with a random, often balance-shifting event like rearranging the squares or giving an opponent some of yours. Captain Cards let you launch into a mini-game with the odds stacked heavily against the person that overturned the Captain; it's not impossible to win, but it is very, very tough for some of the games. Character Cards are simple up-for-grabs mini-games with the winner getting some cash and that card.
Because anyone can potentially win the card and capture the square for themselves, careful control of the board is key. If you can surround an opponent's card with two of your own on either side or the diagonals, you'll capture that one too. There are always two Captain Cards on the board, and capturing one via a mini-game nets you the other, though the location is random.
It's here that things can get interesting if they're found late in the game, because when the second Captain card is uncovered, and if it happens to draw a straight line to another of your cards, you'll capture opponents' cards in between. At times as many as four cards can combine to completely flip the balance of control in the game, and it's here that things get a little unbalanced.
[The Bad]
The core of the game, despite the whole board game construct, is in mini-games, and it's here that PC chugs. Hardly any of the games are explained well enough for a newcomer to understand them right off the bat, which means if you're just starting out, you'll have to lose just to learn how to play most of the time. It not only gives players that have seen the mini-games before a massive advantage, but when encountering a new game for yourself, it's basically trial-and-error the first couple times before you really learn the ins and outs.
So it's a little like chess, with some games that are nigh-on impossible to figure out the first time, that I can sort of handle, but the game does tend to go a little too hog wild on the randomization events. You can spend tons of time working over the board, only to have quite literally everything change on the last game. In a way, I suppose it's strategic, but it pushed my buttons way too fast, and way too often.
Capping off this frustration is the way the game awards bonuses at the end. Generally speaking, if you've got the most squares, you'll win outright, but bonuses are given to the person who captures the most squares, who flips them, who grabs the most Captain Cards, who wins the most mini-games and who loses the most mini-games (which, fittingly is the biggest bonus of all). In theory, this would allow last-chance shafted players to come back in the end, or break close ties. In practice, it's a little less of a leveler; biding time and capturing the other characters' squares at the last second is the cheap -- and almost universal -- way to win (it's also, appropriately, the one the AI goes for most).
And there's just the issue of the mini-games themselves. Beyond being a little tough to grasp initially, some of them just aren't terribly fun. There are a couple of good ones, and that's mainly because they are indeed pick up and play easy, but they, along with all the other games including the stinkers and yawn-worthy ones, just don't add up to a lot of replay value, which is odd considering how many boards there are in the game.
[The Verdict]
Visually the game is really quite solid, with some first-person stuff, some four-way split screen and lots and lots of characters running around at once. The framerate is solid and the characters animated smoothly. In fact, the whole thing captures the look of the show (or what we've seen of it) and manga (likewise) rather nicely -- better than most licensed games in fact.
But paying tribute to the source material is only one part of things. The board game concept is novel, and perhaps with a few less randomization events, it could have been more engaging, but with AI that's absolutely relentless on the upper settings, mini-games that fail to deliver the basic premise on the first play-through, and a general sense that things were rather slapped together, Pirates' Carnival lacks the kind of fun you'd expect when you put those two words together.
