One Piece: Unlimited Cruise 2 (Wii)

If you just watch a demo of One Piece: Unlimited Cruise 2 on a shop or while a friend is playing it, you’ll be forgiven for thinking that it’s a really great One Piece game. After all, unlike its predecessors, it captures the look of the anime and manga (as opposed to the ones that use super deformed art style), and features an updated (at the time) roster with impressive-looking super attacks.

However, if you do manage to get a hand on a copy and start playing it, you’ll see that the game looks incomplete. And we’re not talking about missing some features or characeters – we’re talking about a game that probably wasn’t play tested by anyone who knows what a playable game should be.

First things first, the game is a 3rd person 3D fighting game that picks up exactly where the previous one left off. There’s a cutscene that will keep you up to date, and then you’re free to go and visit the desert island that serves as the main hub for the various boss fights interspersed by random encounter battles.

The desert island is one of the first annoying parts of the game – even if you have a map handy, navigation is confusing, tedious, and boring as there’s not a lot of variety in the featureless scenery. The second part is the random encounters. You’re going to fight random monsters, navy, and pirates that all feel the same save for minor variations in look.

The game could have been saved by the VS mode, as there’s a really playable fighting game in there somewhere that will let you stage visually-impressive fights between notable characters in the series (up to Ace’s death, at least.) Unfortunately, it’s hampered by the controls.

Like many games on the Wii, One Piece: Unlimited Cruise 2 could have benefited from gamepad support, as it uses the wiimote and nunchuck in ways that mimic a dual shock control scheme, except for the tacked-on waggle controls. The unwieldy controls are exacerbated by the fights being too short even if you set the time limit to infinite. Just attack a couple of times, waggle, and the match is over. All that visual flair is useless if it’s over in a flash.

All in all, One Piece: Unlimited Cruise 2 feels like a wasted opportunity to use the One Piece license on a brawler and/or fighting game. There’s a hint of a really enjoyable One Piece game in there somewhere, but somehow the devs weren’t able to execute everything well, resulting in an impressive-looking but underwhelming poor excuse for an action game. If you really need your One Piece action fix, I suggest skipping this one and going straight to the newer games released on the 3DS and PS3/4.

Bleach: Versus Crusade (Wii)

Bleach: Versus Crusade is a 3D fighting game based on Tite Kubo’s long-running and extremely popular shonen franchise. It features 25 playable characters taken straight out of the Bleach manga and the anime as well as several of their alternate forms/transformations.

The game primarily uses the Wiimote and nunchuk for its controls, with the nunchuk’s joystick controlling the movement while the shoulder buttons and the wii mote buttons control the jumps, teleports (sonido and flash steps, actually), and special attacks. Normal sword attacks are handled by the wiimote’s motion controls, with the direction of the attacks corresponding with the direction of your wiimote slash.

The controls in Bleach: Versus Crusade is a significant step up from Bleach: Shattered Blade, as matches will no longer devolve into wagfests, mainly because the game now rewards strategic use of the attacks instead of being dependent on how fast you can shake the wiimote. However, being a fighting game, it’s still not as intuitive when compared to a gamepad setup, which is why it’s a good thing that the developers included support for the gamecube and the classic controller. I don’t use numbers to rate games but if I did, that move alone should be worth a point or two.

Visually, Versus Crusade had the right idea when it went with cel-shading – not just because it provided anime-like visuals, but also because it meant that the visuals aren’t hindered by the Wii’s hardware limitations. Versus Crusade looks as good as you would expect a Bleach game to look on a seventh generation console.

Bleach Shattered Blade (Wii)

If you’ve ever played Bleach GC: Tasogare ni mamieru shinigami on the Gamecube, Bleach Shattered Blade for the Wii will be very familiar. Barring a few graphical polishes and higher resolution, Shattered Blade looks like it was made on the same engine. The presentation is sleeker, and the supers no longer come in the form of crappy FMVs. In fact, they finally went ahead and added transformations (or power-ups, in the case of most of the characters). Unfortunately, all the updates and tweaks to the game are for naught because Bleach Shattered Blade for the Wii is significantly less enjoyable than its Gamecube predecessor.

The main culprit, and why it’s not even worth reviewing any other aspect of Shattered Blade, is the controls. Like many third party Wii games, Bleach Shattered Blade suffers from a forced attempt to use motion controls. There’s no option to use a classic or Gamecube controller (even though fighters tend to play better with buttons than waggle).

Dragon Ball: Revenge of King Piccolo (Wii)

Let’s get this out of the way first. Unless you’re a REALLY, REALLY big fan of the Dragon Ball series – the one with Goku as a young boy with exceptional martial arts abilities, not the one where he’s a blonde man who can punch cities into dust – you’d best stay away from this title. That’s not to say that Dragon Ball: Revenge of King Piccolo doesn’t have any redeeming value. It’s a actually a decent game, Dragon Ball fan or not, and has extra content that would put other games to shame. It’s just that even with all the polish, graphical and content-wise, it still only comes off as a mediocre game.

Adding insult to injury, the Gameboy Advance’s Dragon Ball Advanced Adventure manages to do everything that Revenge of King Piccolo aspired to do and more, for a fraction of the hardware power. Which means Revenge of King Piccolo is further demoted from being a mediocre game to being an unnecessary one.

Naruto Shippuden Gekitou Ninja Taisen Special (Wii)

Naruto Shippuden: Gekito Ninja Taisen Special is the fourth Naruto fighting game on the Nintendo Wii (7th, actually, if you consider the changes between the English and Japanese releases to warrant separate mentions). It’s a Japanese-only release, but it’s a fighting game so there’s really no need to understand the story in order to enjoy the game, especially considering that anybody who’s interested in the story of Naruto Shippuden already has the anime and the mangas.

The menus in Naruto Shippuden: Gekito Ninja Taisen Special are in Japanese, but a little bit of exploring and looking at the icons will allow anyone to memorize how to navigate the game and get into fights. So basically, if you have a Wii that can play Japanese imports (remember that the Wii is region-locked), you’ll be able to enjoy the game to its fullest.