One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 bounces towards PC next year
I'm like rubber, you're like.. wax?
Piratical punch 'em up One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 is headed to PC next year. For me, this is great news, as among Omega Force's dumb-but-fun Warriors games there's few I consider dumber or more fun than Pirate Warriors 3. Based on pirate adventure manga and anime series One Piece, Pirate Warriors 3 was pure catharsis - if you weren't beating up literal thousands of dudes a level, you were doing it wrong. Fingers crossed for similar levels of face-punchery in the sequel. Below, a teaser trailer that would be dramatic if the character designs weren't so silly.
Rather than go the boring route and make up a story just for the game, it appears that they're going to be telling stories straight from the manga/anime. The trailer suggests that it's even going as far as the Whole Cake Island story arc, which aired just a few months ago. The previous game covered an enormous amount of One Piece's story in abridged format, embellished with a few thousand expendable grunts getting beat up in every scene. Here's hoping that they're bold enough to try covering the entire silly pirate saga with this game, although they're excused if they don't.
I admit that I'm a few years behind on my One Piece, and probably need to spend a week binging on the manga soon, but I'm excited to see what characters they've got lined up this time. A large part of why One Piece Pirate Warriors 3 was so fun was the variety of characters. All the 'bearded guy with spear' types in Dynasty Warriors blend into one another, but you'll never mistake 'transforming miniature reindeer' for 'cubist giraffe guy', 'dude who shoots candle-wax out of his arms' or 'musical skeleton'. Wanton violence has seldom been so weird.
One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 isn't out until next year, but if you've not tried it yet, OPPW 3 is 75% off in the Steam summer sale, which ends tomorrow. It's £8/€10/$10 for the regular edition, or a couple quid more for the Gold edition with DLC. Both are published by Bandai Namco, and developed by Koei Tecmo's Omega Force team.