In the story of One Piece Odyssey, Luffy and the Straw Hat pirates find themselves in a huge storm at sea and shipwreck on the mysterious island known as Waford. One Piece Odyssey is a brand-new turn-based RPG featuring new characters and monster designs produced by Eiichiro Oda, the author of One Piece.
At our recent preview event One Piece Odyssey producer Katsuaki Tsuzuki framed the main theme of the game as a “Story of bonds, spun by memories”. It was also important to the developer team to create an “RPG that allows players to explore and adventure in the world of One Piece”.
Today, we’re excited to share ways that players will be able to strengthen bonds in the game and harness each characters’ unique skills as they immerse themselves in the One Piece world Tsuzuki and the rest of the team have created.
(Be warned, pirates, minor story spoilers ahead!)
Battle system
To start, we’ll cover the battle systems in the game and how the unbreakable bonds forged in battle are essential to beat your enemies.
Tsuzuki: “In action games, it is necessary to focus and understand how to control a single character in each battle, to get that sense of satisfaction. However, One Piece as an IP has plenty of fascinating characters already in the “Straw Hat Crew”, so for our players to enjoy the unique charms of each and every one of them, we adopted a turn-based command battle as the battle system of our choice.”
Generally, RPG turn-based games have players set up all characters and locked in before executing the turn. However, One Piece Odyssey takes a different approach.
Tsuzuki: “We adapted a rock-paper-scissors element as its basic tactics, while also randomly positioning the characters into multiple areas. This is so that players can switch between various registered characters—and challenge them to make full use of each character’s unique abilities and skills to defeat the enemies at hand. This system provides a variety of situations they will face each time, which brings a fresh perspective on the combats they’ll endure along the way.”
In most combat encounters, the Straw Hats will scramble into different combat areas with the enemies, and up to four crew members will engage the enemy while the rest remain in reserve. Straw hats can be called in from reserve and may reposition freely as long as they have an action remaining. At times, the positioning of enemies may be challenging for your line up if more support-oriented crew members are rushed and surrounded by elite marines. Since you’ll have the ability to switch between characters on your roster, you’ll be empowered to consider combat positioning, effectiveness type, Bond Arts, and potential secondary objectives in any combat encounter.
Effectiveness type
The Straw Hat crew and enemy NPCs are categorized into effectiveness types: Power, Speed, and Technique. Where Power is more effective against Speed type enemies and less effectiv