One Piece: Romance Dawn is an attempt to fit a vast amount of story into a concise RPG, but the result is flimsy and underdeveloped. It’s not a terrible combat system, but it’s not outstanding either - and outstanding combat was what Romance Dawn needed to be worth it. Against them, battle became an exercise in mashing buttons to pull off a combo. It adds a needed dimension to the gameplay, but it’s not really necessary against some of the regulation baddies you encounter on your way to a boss. This helped me pace battle – rather than brute force my way through an easier boss, I had to take turns to move correctly and set up the right attacks between my party members. You can move freely in the battle area until you begin an attack, but if you move beyond a certain point, you’ll be penalized. A two-on-two fight against Fishman bosses Hatchan and Kuroobi, for instance, proved challenging and required just the right amount of skill to get the necessary critical hits.Ĭombat also involves positional tactics, though their efficacy is questionable. It takes some practice to get the timing right, which made it more engaging that it otherwise would have been. It’s pretty typical RPG fare – you control up to three of the Straw Hats on a 3D field, with the added element of chaining attack commands together for critical hits. The only real incentive to play Romance Dawn, as opposed to watching the anime, is the turn-based combat. Level after level, I failed to see the point. The extra ones especially irritated me, as the items I got hardly felt worth my time and effort.
The most frustrating thing about these levels – especially the bonus ones unrelated to the story - is that they contribute nothing to the plot or characters and feel like filler between cutscenes. There are also some strange quick-time event sections, which felt like a forced attempt to add more gameplay. Fittingly, there’s an area called the Maze Isles. I felt like a lab rat searching for the boss in every level, which became dull after I completed the first one. The dungeon-like areas (mostly islands, in this case) are built like corridors, and all you have to do is walk until you see treasure, get the treasure, and then move on - there’s no real exploration to speak of. The biggest missed opportunity is the bland level design, which is linear and completely unengaging. It has a rather static format structured around important plot points (of the typical cutscene-dungeon-boss-cutscene variety). Outside of the story, Romance Dawn feels like the bare minimum that an RPG should be. After about an hour of playing, I was really tired the dialogue scenes - they can be several minutes long, and knowing that a better-animated version of the same story exists made it seem pointless.
Character background, justification for battles, and even main story events are told this way, which leaves little time for One Piece-style goofiness and makes the dialogue a little dense. The storytelling (or retelling) in Romance Dawn is done through manga-style speech bubbles and minimally animated character portraits, with only a few oddly selected cutscenes shown in high quality.