spiderslash- Expect nothing, and even less.

July 14th, 2022
That was the date I began reading One Piece in full since the anime premiered in America back in 2004.

One Piece is an action Shonen manga written and illustrated by Eichiro Oda. Originally published in the July 13th issue of Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997, it has gone on to be one of the longest-running manga in the magazine. It is currently the highest-selling work of fiction put out by a single author, a feat that is fairly easy to achieve when you have 103 volumes under your belt. Its crushing length is only rivaled by the quality of the work itself, having some of the most exciting action and endearing characters I have ever read in a shonen series.

When One Piece came over here to America I was instantly hooked as it came out at a perfect time for me. Anime was starting to hit its stride in the States at the time and I was watching anything and everything that I could because I was fascinated with Luffy and his group of weirdos. The manga was being published in our version of WSJ just called Shonen Jump and I marveled at how different it was from the anime, not knowing I was watching a garbage version created by Christians that had no idea how to localize it for children.

One Piece is dark man. Like I know that it’s really goofy and funny but it has some pretty grim stuff in there. Lot of starving children and blood.

When it stopped airing on Toonami sometime in 2006 or 7 (whenever Alabasta ended idk man), I didn’t have a way to keep up with it. Seeking out fan translations of the manga and anime was a completely foreign concept to me and by the time America caught up to Japan with the manga and anime the length had ballooned so much that I was just too intimidated to start it again. Then I just…did it. Took me like 2 months? I liked it, it was fun.

Binging manga is far easier than anime in my opinion because you’re allowed to take it at your own pace. It would have taken me much, MUCH longer to catch up with One Piece if I went the route of watching it, even with a guide that filters out all the filler episodes. I’m gonna be real, I read this shit on the clock at my day job. That’s the ONLY reason I’m caught up. 1,000+ chapters in two months? As a grown adult? I wouldn’t have had the time if I did it the normal way. I envy younger kids man.

I think Eichiro Oda is a horny moron.
I also think he knows his way around a pen. Guy can write a hell of an entertaining story. While simple at its core, One Piece delivers hard-hitting and emotional storytelling that instills a wide variety of emotions in the reader. I admit I don’t read a whole lot of manga outside of the Shonen genre, but I’ve never connected with a group of freaks more than the Straw Hats. AGAIN. IN SHONEN. I’m sure there’s other stuff with better writing and characters and deep narratives shut. UP!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don’t feel the need or want to fully go into my thoughts about One Piece because that would take a VERY long time and this is getting long enough as it is, I just wanted to share my personal history and journey with reading One Piece as an adult after being divorced from it for so long. It made me laugh, it made me cry, and it made me excited to read a manga again. I couldn’t cheat like I did with Naruto by playing video games because One Piece doesn’t really have any games that go super in-depth with the main canon outside of the Pirate Warriors games. I did not want to play those because I don’t care about Musou games. It was then that I saw a One Piece game for $5 on the Switch and decided “Eh, why not? I’m up for an original One Piece game!”

It was a Musou game and it was fine. I guess.

One Piece: Unlimited World Red-Deluxe Edition is an action-adventure game developed by Ganbarion and published by Bandai Namco Games for Every Fucking Console Known To Man Within The Span Of 2013-2017.

This game is…fine? It’s pretty boring if I’m being honest. Very bog-standard button-mashing gameplay and a fairly standard level of progression for your characters. Each character (notice how I didn’t say Straw Hats) plays vastly different from one another and you can tell the majority of them were designed with multiplayer in mind. Each character performs a specific purpose. Luffy focuses on pure damage, Franky can set up turrets for support. Sanji and Chopper can heal, Usopp is the best character in the game, and so on. I did not play this game in multiplayer because I did not care about trying it at all.

You mainly run around in a hub world gathering materials and taking on quests for the inhabitants, hoping to build more and more shops and areas that act as the game’s bonus features such as a sound test, model viewer, and bug museum. It..wears out its welcome very fast and I found myself not caring about it as much as the game went on. At some point, I just started seeing white noise and getting a headache. This shit is BLINDINGLY bright because it’s just a port of a 3DS game. This is made to be played on a portable system, and I did try to play it on the Switch in handheld mode but it just felt unnatural because the Joy-Cons are weird-ass controllers for ants. I honestly wonder if this game feels more natural on a 3DS or Vita.

The story is..fucking who cares. You fight a villain that isn’t canon and he turns into a vampire and then the game ends. WHATEVER! The only other thing of note is the coliseum, which is WAY more fun but also 5x as mindless. This game was released during the Dressrosa arc in One Piece, meaning that important characters such as Sabo and Rebecca were not introduced into the anime yet, so they had to play a lot of it by ear. It’s just a survival mode that also lets you play around with boss characters such as Buggy, Boa Hancock, Crocodile, and more. They all play wildly differently and hit MEGA hard.

That’s it. It’s fine.

I don’t have anything to say besides that.

Unlimited World Red is just fine. It’s serviceable. I mainly chose to review it because I wanted to talk about One Piece. That’s it. I just like One Piece. It’s a cool and fun series written by a meat-headed bozo that likes tits too much. I’m glad that I chose to get back into the series and am excited to see how it ends in 8 years. The game though? I dunno. Buy it for $5 it’s a good time waster.