"What the fuck did I just play?" was the first thing I said to my friend Simon over Discord after finishing the story mode of this game. I'm still not entirely sure how I'm going to process the experience, but I will try to here.

Challenger Number Five of the list is One Piece Mansion, unrelated to the popular shounen manga, and recommended by JamesBuc. Thank you for the recommendation, and also, what did you have me play?

I'm gonna get straight to the point, this game is fucking weird. It's an apartment manager game, where you have to properly position your tenants so that they don't stress each other out, so you can get money required for the various goals in the seven stage Story Mode.

Some goals require that you reach a certain monetary amount, others require you to get the apartment up to a certain height, all of it requiring money in some shape or form, money that you will lose if your tenants get too stressed, causing their rooms to fucking explode as well as your wallet.

Of course, that's not bringing up the literal terrorists that will take residence in your apartment and cause a hassle for everyone else. It is up to you to position your other tenants in a way where you stress out the enemies, while reducing stress to your allies.

That's only part of it though, because being terrorists, these guys get rather uppity and start walking around causing fires and just being a general nuisance. That's when you have to drop out of Manager mode and go full on Security. You have to run and blow that god damned whistle at the top of your lungs to tell these fucks that they're grounded and that they need to sit in the corner, or you have to put out the fires they set, most likely both.

Then on top of that, there are also boss fights. Yes, the apartment manager game has boss fights. They function the same as the other enemies, the only difference (of note that I realized) is that when a boss dies, no more enemies will spawn, allowing you to easily attain the mission objective.

This game's story is simplistic as it is weird. You play as Polpo, a (angel?) guy who runs a very popular apartment complex called the One Piece Mansion. You're very busy, so busy in fact that your little sister Putica is throwing a fit.

Suddenly aliens.

And they kidnap Putica and threaten you with missions because your apartment is so successful that it makes their apartment look bad. So they have you... do missions that make your apartment successful...

It doesn't make sense, but that's the nature of this game honestly. Your sister is even the final boss of the game, and ultimately faces no punishment as Polpo takes her to an amusement park at the end.

For the most part the game is rather balanced, though I did notice a rather large spike in difficulty in Mission 3, and the final mission had a gimmick where tenants would randomly transform into different things that would change how their stress mechanics work. I don't know why it happens, and it's only in Mission 7, but it was something that did feel a bit forced in terms of difficulty.

Over all this was a very, very strange game, but I think overall it was a solid time. It might not have exactly been my type of game, but I'm pretty sure there's an audience for this somewhere.

Also the music is pretty damn funky not gonna lie.

Edit: Forgot to mention, but I really love the artstyle this game has, not to mention Polpo's cute little dancing idle animation when in Security Mode.