What’s marketed as the celebration of the series as its approaching its final saga turns out to be the shallow encapsulation of the worst parts about the anime adaptation instead. They got Eiichiro Oda to write the story which I’m assuming means he wrote the basic outline of the plot and the new characters while the devs had to do the rest of the work which they failed in. The character models are just lifted from the Pirate Warriors games and fail to convey the expressive and dynamic art of Eiichiro Oda and instead look stiff and awkward. This was in development during Whole Cake Island so they couldn’t include any of the story material past that point so they resorted to circling back to previous arcs which for some reason was just 4. Granted, they’re the most acclaimed and fan-favorite arcs but this wouldn’t really be enough to provide the base content you have to sink through which is why they decided to pad them the fuck out with pointless backtracking, repetitive character banter, and uninteresting quests. There’s also no real difficulty that takes advantage of a mildly interesting yet ultimately shallow combat system that makes battle encounters too easy to just Unga Bunga your way through with spamming normal attacks. Except for the weird out of nowhere times they decided to ramp up difficulty to enemies having ridiculously bloated healthbars you have to chip your way down bit by bit. The only interesting thing about this is how it hints at larger connections to the lore of One Piece similarly to Film Red which Oda was also involved in so I guess that makes wiki surfing fun next time I do that.