Interview – Karen Wei (One Piece: Unlimited World Red)

Click: What’s One Piece: Unlimited World Red all about?

KW: For those who aren’t too familiar with One Piece, the story is about the charming adventures of Pirate Luffy and his friends. One of the main pillars of Unlimited World Red is to re-illustrate the boundless adventures that Luffy has, and so many of the gameplay aspects are based upon presenting the player with unlimited adventures and so there’s lots of things to do.Click: What kind of gameplay mechanics have been included to help illustrate this to the player?KW: One of the battle systems is based on this concept called ‘Strong Words’ where you can communicate with your partners using words. Because One Piece doesn’t really have equipment that you can put on the characters so instead you can equip a word or a phrase. By using these phrases, you can strengthen the teamwork of your characters and communicate with them, giving you lots of bonuses and special effects.Click: It sounds really interesting! How would you classify it, if you had to pigeonhole it into a genre?KW: It’s mostly an action-adventure game so while you’re adventuring around you will meet up with enemies and fight them in real-time. Using a combination of buttons, you can pull of some really neat combos and team-coordinated attacks.Click: You mentioned communicating with your partners; does that refer to other players?KW: So there is multiplayer but, typically speaking, in single player you play as a lead character and have two support characters. Within the gameplay, at any time, you can change who the lead character is, so you’re basically controlling a three player party – but you can play with other players. For the 3DS and the Vita you can play up to four players co-op and for the PS3 and Wii U, you can play up to two players co-op.Click: Are there any aspects of the game that are exclusive to multiplayer?KW: There are definitely some quests that are geared more towards having fun with friends rather than playing by yourself and the benefits of having friends play with you for quests is significant in my personal opinion. Trying to defeat a giant boss by strategizing with friends rather than relying on AI is a big difference.