One Piece Mansion

"A unique puzzler/sim"

I've always loved playing puzzlers. Chu-Chu Rocket, Puzzle Fighter, and Puyo-Puyo have been my favourites. A large majority of them, however, have a sort of Tetris-feel to them. While I love the twitchy fun-factor of such games, a better variety of original puzzlers is sorely needed. Along comes Capcom's One Piece Mansion (OPM) then to add to the fray of puzzling fun.

OPM features Polpo, an enterprising apartment manager, who wants to build the highest, most prosperous apartment in the neighbourhood. Unfortunately, he has to deal with the conflicting personalities of his large number of tenants, saboteurs from rival apartment managers, and criminals from a crime organization, Syndicate 5.

Gameplay:4/5

The goal of the game, basically is to make as much money as you can collecting rent. If you can't manage the stress levels (represented as red meters) of your tenants, they'll blow out of their apartment, literally. You'll lose their rent and pay a penalty for losing that room. You also have to try to stress out saboteur tenants by strategically placing your stress-inducing tenants around the saboteurs, in hopes getting rid of them.

While the basic premise of the game sounds simple, there are quite a few buttons to get used to, a few management activities to do (such as shuffling tenants, chasing away thieves and pyros), and a whole pile of tenants (with different personalities) to get to know. This makes the learning curve a little bit steeper than say, Puzzle Fighter or Puyo-Puyo. However, once you get used to the technical aspects of the game, you'll find an invariably deep and addicting puzzler. Yes, you'll want to make your apartment as high as possible and yes, you'll want to make lots of money, but if you can't manage your tenants and create security in your apartment building, you're in deep trouble. And that's part of the fun of the game! :)

There is one bad thing and that is so much is happening all at once on the screen that it's sometimes hard to see what your tenants' statuses are. Some of them will gain icons, showing that they're sick or broke but it's hard to see those icons. I'll elaborate under the category ''graphics''.

Story Mode:0.4/0.5

There is a story mode in the game, but there's really nothing cerebral about it. A rival apartment manager kidnaps your sister and forces you to go through seven tasks (i.e., make a certain amount of cash, or create a certain number of rooms). I don't place too much emphasis in the story for puzzlers anyway, so as a story, it's serviceable but not inspired.

Style:0.5/0.5

I love the cute super-deformed art-style in here; it wacky, almost bordering on Tim Burton's ''Nightmare before Christmas'' look, except without a lot of its black-and-white colour contrast and its disturbing nature. Every character has a unique personality and it shows itself in the artwork and animation.

Graphics:1.5/2

When you're playing OPM, there are two zoom settings: near and far. ''Near'' gives you a closer-look at your activities and your tenant's actions in lovely and sharp 2D glory. But you'll be spending way more time on the ''far'' setting as it's just more functional with respect to gameplay. However, the ''far'' setting is a bit of an eyesore. It's hard to see icons and your tenant's stress meter. Now, mind you, it's not that bad during the first 30 minutes, but when you're playing for an hour or two, you'll be wishing that they'd made this game for the Dreamcast or the PS2. Now where's my ''Refresh Tears''.

Sound:0.8/1

Umm, serviceable. The voices are good and don't get too annoying. Puyo-Puyo Sun was more annoying especially if you only made 1-3 hit combos every single time. I still shudder at whoever made Arle's voice. Umm... but I digress.

The sound effects are fine and serviceable.

The BGM is cute and technoey and totally not memorable. ''Hello Kitty, Cube Frenzy'', Puzzle Fighter, and Puyo all have much better music than OPM.

Replayability:0.4/0.5

There is an infinite mode on this game, in which you'll play forever and ever. Even on the easy difficulty, I had a hard time managing every little factor of the game, initially. For puzzling masochists (like me):). If you succeed in story mode, you'll be able to play Polpo's sister. Yay. :/

Lean:0.5/0.5

Lean is just my way of saying whether I liked the overall playing experience of the game. Okay! I admit it, I ripped the idea off from Gamespot. Unlike Gamespot, however, I won't give part marks. Yeah, I really like this game.

So to summarize:

+ deep challenging gameplay
- high learning curve

+ cute lovely 2D graphics with a wacky attitude
- marred by the ''far'' zoom setting, which you need to use 90% of the time

+ good serviceable sound effects
- unimpressive music

Overall score: 8.1 = ''8''

Here's my interest level over a four-day period. 1 being not very interested, 10 being very interested.

day 1: 10 (learning)
day 2: 10 (still learning)
day 3: 8 (I think I've got it)
day 4: 8 (yay!)

Here's my potential interest level for the game over a 2 month period. I think I'm comfortable enough with the game to make some educated guesses. I won't do this for lengthy games like rpgs.

week 1: 9 (loving it)
week 2: 7 (it's ok)
week 3: 4 (that's all the game has!?!!) this is assuming there are no hidden secrets in the game.
week 4: 1 (got more important things to do)
week 5: 1 (like my exams)
week 6: 1 (oh look, Tales of Destiny II)
Week 7: 1 (got to work out more)
week 8: 8 (oh hey! One Piece Mansion. Let's get it on!)

Note: this is my first time posting a review. If you've got any comments or criticism about the style of my reviewing, please e-mail me. Thanks for reading.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/30/01, Updated 09/30/01