I think Pirate Warriors is one of the better Musou spin-off series for several reasons, but most of them weren’t realized until the sequel. The main story only has a handful of levels with traditional Musou gameplay, with most of it spent in inoffensive but dull linear levels filled with QTEs. I’m going to assume this was done in an attempt to retell One Piece’s story in a more cinematic manner, but as Pirate Warriors 3 proved, you can retell most of the arcs in a fairly faithful but fun manner using the Musou formula. It feels like the game is almost ashamed at times to be a Musou and does whatever it can to distance itself from the structure, but what we get is even more bland because that’s just not what the dev team specializes in.

The Musou levels we did get, mostly contained in the character side stories, are much more enjoyable. Pirate Warriors has always contained some of the wildest and most diverse movesets in any Musou game ever, from Luffy’s wide AOE attacks using his rubber body, to Nami tactically setting up thunderclouds on the field to trigger a hellstorm, to Hancock being able to turn certain enemy officers to stone and deliver tag-team combos with her pet snake. It’s all some very creative implementations of these characters’ powers and no two warriors feel the same, which is a pretty rare claim to make in Musou. Unfortunately there’s not many stages and nothing to do except grind after clearing them, an unfortunate effect of so much of the production value being pushed on the lackluster main story. I’m really glad that the sequels focused more on actual Musou gameplay and expanded on what worked in this one.