All that said, when One Piece Online is on, it's on, and part of that comes from its presentation. The game is scored with a lively jazz/rock soundtrack, and while I wouldn't call it memorable, it fits the mood of the game perfectly. Similarly, the cel-shaded characters don't possess the most complex graphics, but they're appealing and well animated, translating unique character designs far better than the anime does. Little touches like the cartoony way enemy soldiers run away with their hands flailing in the air are well appreciated. Sometimes there's a slight disconnect with the background graphics, which fall between bland cel-shading and overly-detailed (yet still styled) realism, but it's nothing too jarring. Slowdown is almost unheard of, with scenes running smooth no matter how many enemies are surrounding you.
The camera can also be troublesome, primarily due to the fact that it zooms out much further than fans will be used to. While the positioning actually gives a nice overview of the immediate area, allowing you to see opponents that are creeping up behind you, it tends to get itself stuck inside of walls and around corners due to the distance at which it’s placed, potentially causing unnecessary frustration when you’re fighting a particularly deadly foe and you can’t see a thing.
The core of the game is the attacks, punchy and satisfying, even though there's little challenge in taking out a crowd of enemies. There is also a dash button for dodging attacks that can be mixed into a combo to halt counterattacks and speed up combat even further. Attacking or taking damage builds a meter for crowd-clearing special attacks, which are rarely necessary but feel quite good to mix into combat due to how snappy they feel. Some of the unlockable special moves power-up a character for a time, making you feel like a god on the battlefield.
In-between stages, you can level up characters by sacrificing unwanted ones in the classic card battle game style, and max level crew members can often be evolved into more powerful forms. A cost system prevents you from fielding a crew full of ultra super rare characters too early in the game, with the cap rising steadily as your overall pirate level increases. You’ll also progress from the small dinghy Luffy inherits at the start of his quest to bigger ships, each of which can also be leveled up to provide various bonus effects.
Maybe it doesn't matter, though, because the people who will play game One Piece are already playing it, and the people who won't play it never will; it just seems like there ought to be room for a One Piece game that captures the fun and fantasy of its source material, and the way to make it might be to spend a couple years working on a single game instead of crapping out a new version every twelve months on the dot and sandwiching it between releases of similarly generic.