RUBBER FACE
Late, troubled, shaken by all sorts of delays for personal reasons-family-professional and then always dear grasshoppers, review of One Piece Romance Dawn for 3DS also forces a small outing explanatory. In fact suffer a terrible aversion to the Japanese turn-based role-playing games, and as often happens with what we disliked, it suffers a little 'charm: beautiful contexts fantasy, screenplays exciting, pixel art in its purest form and long battles the result of sophisticated strategies ... If I could be reborn as a fan of this genre I would without a doubt a better person and more satisfied, but until then, do not ask me to play one at the bottom losing myself in tons of stats, upgrades, and mana potions and incomprehensible assaults alternating . It is therefore with a mixture of curiosity and dismay that I learned not be, this Romance Dawn, nth scrolling beat em up, but an RPG, although action. And do not rule out that it has influenced me to draw on all the recent bad luck.
Incarnation nintendiana homonymous PSP version never released in the West, this chapter reveals in fact not like the classic "musou" in which take a hand with his head down, but as a kind of surrogate RPG fighting game in sauce - or vice versa, at will - that follows the exploits of one of the most popular and prolific Japanese brand of the decade, for once, starting from the beginning of the saga. Who, like me, net of idiosyncrasies, has not played the version for Sony laptop that could not straighten the antenna wire and let it grow with excitement: this is because the disrupted and irresistible adventures drawn by the pencil of Eiichiro Oda knows cause an undeniable charm for anyone who has dealt with adolescence bread and comics from Japan. Yet, as often happens, in the cold takes hold yet another doubt, that sort of psychological blackmail with such precision that involves the production under license of the world manga / anime and translated into the simplest of questions sounds more or less "what are managed to combine this time? "
Understood the hint, look at the inevitable vote obliged to respond without delay. The game divides the experience, consistent with the gender that is, alternating narrative sections, sections of exploration, combat and upgrading / crafting objects collected with a lot of leveling statistics, resulting in dramatically too often soporific and superficial in every component.
Each chapter is introduced by a series of endless dialogues in the form of balloon accompanied by clever designs "agitated" to give the illusion of movement. During the story there is no possibility of interaction and you will continue to work with bowed head through a patchwork of texture that impoverishes the work of his characteristic emotional component and caricature allowing them to disappoint the fans and confuse the neophyte.
From the first cruise Luffy / Luffy / Rubber whatever you want up to the epic battle of Marineford, are considered the most significant events and meetings / confrontations most emblematic without trace a logical path to the location for the sole purpose to make it accessible on multiple levels, but with the result of disparaging the work on the attractive original screenplay.
It's part exploratory and adventurous - the intention that the prerogative of the series, its trademark, its most compelling short - consists of an infinite peaceful stroll along the streets anonymously and without any point of reference, during which you can choose whether or not to fight against weak enemies, break boxes (mostly empty, incomprehensible but true) and continue to the face-to-face with the boss guy.
Be prepared for an infinite number of similar contexts.
This leads us to live with excessive enthusiasm the moment there is to lead hands, and although little is enough to understand how the fights are simple, circumvented, monotonous and useful only to level, you willingly ignore it and it is going back to bomb to break the soporific wandering, already in its turn illusory salvation from deadly dialogues (in) character.
And it is at this juncture that finally we can see some light: the combat system, developed in a series of clashes in turn with a party of up to three elements that we can move freely in the scenario that having clear move away from a specific area entails a penalty in term efficacy in subsequent turns. It is therefore possible to arrange themselves at will and exploit their own position to hit more than one enemy at a time, as the elements of the scenario (such as walls, visible or not), causing bonus damage and optimizing the shots. These ranges inflict manually by pressing the keys on the console, simply concatenating sequences of combos, and in the case of special shots are accompanied by animations that played in a rather discrete and faithful. Unlike the standard ones that are always executable despite their modest efficacy, to launch attacks unique to each character you need to accumulate points Tension, who once spent can be acquired for a change to the sound of slaps, while a Spartan scheme, let's call it "leafless tree", allows you to treat the strengthening of the combo instead of spending the points earned capacity. This will be useful mainly in the long-awaited battle with the aforementioned boss at the end of each chapter, the one and only chance in the game to offer a little 'challenge and finally use the techniques and objects acquired (to, a health potion).
So we are certainly not in front of a new paradigm of the genre, but this combat system comes head-on in court, representing undoubtedly the most successful of the title and offering some ideas that would be curious to find in the future in games action role. The same cannot be said for the unintuitive crafting items and skills, poverty, creative loot and cumbersome system of storage of collectibles, all from the decidedly hurried and botched.
The yellow circle on the ground indicates the area in which to move without incurring the penalty.
While wanting to settle to relive the exploits of the crew of the straw hat without too many pretensions, even the audio-visual aspect certainly does not help the dive: the game is a conversion too faithful to the original and already opaque PSP version dated 2012, thus missing the stereoscopic effect and the use of the touch screen, unable to give body and various scenarios that persist in fact propose the labyrinthine corridors dramatically equal to each other in which guided only by means of the on-screen map support. It should not be better off with the Spartans polygonal models of the characters or with the surprising variety of enemies in the negative, always equal to each other in consonance with the surrounding environment in a whirlwind of confusion and yawning while interacting with all this scenery unbelievably limits to the breaking of some crates (which I repeat to be empty) and opening chests arranged here and there without much sense. To join us in the adventure a handful of musical themes as repetitive despite their cuteness, complete the alienating work of immersion in gaming psychedelia. Luck has it that the rare footage taken by the FVO keep the sound in Japanese, stirring from time to time from numbness in the vain illusion that from that moment on, the game takes it off as its protagonists.
Modus operandi
I downloaded the digital copy of the version for Nintendo 3DS dall'eShop with a code provided by the distributor. I threw the heart beyond the obstacle devoting several hours to the adventures of Luffy and the tower through the chapters without major worries - I remember being a donkey in the genre turn-based - no jolts of special interest. During the days of the trial and throughout the following week I tried in vain to think of anything else that was not the background music.
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