One Piece Grand Battle

"A great anime game, but with some HORRIBLE voice acting."

One Piece is the hit anime show currently airing on Toonami, which is based on the manga in monthly Shonen Jump in America. When I found out about the One Piece: Grand Battle game coming to America, I was really excited about it, but realized they'd have to have the HORRIBLE voice acting from the American dub. A few months later i finally bought a copy right away, went straight home, and played it. I was very pleased with the full version, except for one minor issue: The same horrible voice acting from the American One Piece dub!!
Anyway, here's my review.

Graphics: 8/10
I'm amazed at what Bandai has done for the game's graphics. All of the character models look great with impressive detail. The stages and their backgrounds are fully 3-D designed and the people there, too, especially on the Drum Castle level when you see Chopper and the doctor in the room below. Also, you can interact with the environments and can destroy a some things,too. Overall, the graphics are great.

Sound: 5/10
The music for the game is pretty good, except on a few levels. The only thing that really annoys me, and I'll say it again and again, is the voice acting. The voice actors for the characters express no emotion at all! Even worse, a lot of the voices don't even match the characters, either! If only they could give you the option of changing the voices to Japanese, then I could've given the game a higher ranking. At least i can just mute the game and put on some rock to help me out.

Gameplay: 9/10
The game mechanics in the game is a brilliant mixture of Super Smash Bros. and Powerstone. You can move your character freely in a 3-D environment with lots of things to interact with, as I mentioned earlier. The controls are simple, but it really takes some strategy into the mix. There are many button combinations for every character as well as some air-born attacks with it. Every character has two special attacks and one secret attack, which are awesome. There are different items throughout the stages such as power ups and objects to hurl at your opponent to either drain their life, mess up their controls, etc. There's also a bunch of modes such as story modes (which is not even close to a true story mode), grand battle, grand tourney(tournament), and a few mini-games. Everything except story mode is good. The only reason you should play story mode is to unlock all of the hidden characters. The only downside to this is that there are only 16 characters and it's one-on-one, and not a four player battle royal, which would really make this game great.

Replayability: 7/10
If you're a big fan of One Piece, go buy it, period. For everyone else, I recommend renting it first. There's a lot to do in this game. If you have friends, this would be a great party game. Just get ready for some HORRIBLE voice acting that would make you wanna go postal on those voice actors' asses.

Overall: 8/10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/14/05