 Hello and welcome to the Grand Line Review, your source for everything One Piece. Today, we're just going to talk a bit about the current public state of One Piece World Seeker, which is scheduled to be released at some point. And despite that lack of guarantee, you can already apparently pay $100 AUD for nothing because yay for the pre-order economy. And I just want to be clear, I'm not here to hate on a game that isn't even out yet, I'm just here to evaluate what we have so far in terms of trailers and gameplay demos. So everybody who's going to be angrily typing, don't judge the game until it's out, bro, can just chill out. I get ya, but I also don't really care. Trailers and demos are supposed to give us a good general overview of what the game provides in order to coax us into spending our $100 AUD, so I really don't see the issue with taking a look at the value proposition offered up by Gunbarion and Bandai Namco. What we know so far is that the game will take place on a location called Jail Island, which is already a phenomenally counter-intuitive decision because nothing says open world to me more than prison. To be fair, in the trailer it seems to only refer to a portion of the island as Jail Island and the rest of it as Jewel Island. But basically this island is divided into two parts, the people who want to support the navy and long for modernization, and the people who are opposed to them and want to live traditionally. An intriguing idea if done well. However, at the moment the results of that seem to be that the player will predominantly explore two varieties of location, which are either the desolate, empty and extraordinarily boring looking forest and field places, or a very stock standard looking solar city. And rather predictably that there is my main problem with how this game is presented so far. The world is completely lifeless and stale. One of the greatest assets of One Piece is its world. More often than not, islands become entire characters of their own especially within the grand line. They work very, very hard to support the larger than life characters who inhabit the One Piece world, and without that backbone, there's really nothing for them to work with. Watching Luffy traverse this delt engine feels like his model was ripped from another much better game, and placed in a heap of crap. This means that it will fall entirely onto the shoulders of the characters to make this game worth becoming invested in, which once again is a massive problem when the selling feature is supposed to be the world. They mean it's not as if it's in the title, One Piece World Seeker. Not Character Seeker or Field Seeker or Prison Seeker. One Piece World Seeker. Alright, well then in any case we'll surely be able to play as and explore a wide variety of characters. No, no, just Luffy. It's been confirmed several times now, but I'll throw some links in the description if you're keen to see those sources yourself. But Luffy will be the only playable character in One Piece World Seeker. The rest of the straw hats will be there, but as supporters or glorified NPCs. And you know what, that does make sense. In an open world game you should probably be restricted to one entity because your focus is meant to be on the world itself. And sadly once again from what we've seen so far, that looks like a complete disappointment. So what else can we pin our hopes on? Ah right of course the enemies. So populating this world for the one and only playable character to encounter are thinly scattered generic marines. Some of them have guns, some of them have shields, and some of them even have oversized comical mallets. But they're still generic as hell. To be fair it does look like there will be some variety with the odd pacifista to be found here and there, but for the most part I sure hope you like monotonous waves of marines. Which is a further shame considering you can't play as Nami or Robin because dealing with monotonous waves of marines are about the only thing they're allowed to do anymore in the series, so I feel like we've missed a big chance here. As for the main villain we have the original character of Isaac gracing the game, and you know what, he actually looks competent. He's definitely the most one piece thing this game has to offer thus far in terms of original content. But as per usual one of the biggest selling points of the game is the promise of fighting old enemies. And doesn't that look fun from the gameplay demo? I never knew that all Luffy actually had to do was block, and Akainu's devil fruit powers would be entirely ineffectual. I mean god he's just been doing it wrong this whole time. Speaking of gameplay that is the only chance we have left of finding a big redeeming feature in Worldseeker, and thus far it's also uh disappointing. Luffy's character model is actually animated very well, but his basic pull of attacks look very repetitive thus far, so here's hoping the game will be able to introduce a lot of variety over the course of the story. But from what we've seen so far the gameplay looks pretty janky, which extends to both combat and regular exploration of the quote unquote world. And once again to be fair this is all based on a demo build so there is time to make fixes, at least in terms of gameplay. However there is no time to solve the core problems that One Piece Worldseeker presents, which is a stagnant empty world full of boring fodder enemies, and a story on par with a toey filler arc. And maybe I'm just being cynical but as it stands currently there is very little evidence to suggest that One Piece Worldseeker is going to be anything more than another in a long line of simply disappointing One Piece games. But yeah that pretty much does it for this rambling on One Piece Worldseeker. If you enjoyed this video then feel free to give it a like favorite or subscribe and if you are in any way keen on supporting this independent channel then please do check out my Patreon, Discord server or Twitter, the links to it are in the handy description below. And finally please do comment with your thoughts on One Piece Worldseeker. This has been the Grand Line Review and I'll see you next time.