Burning Blood: A Fighting Game for One Piece Fans

The Netflix adaptation of One Piece is actually pretty good, and it brings an impressive wave of attention to this anime and its heroes. Someone starts watching (or re-watching) those many original episodes. And someone looks for ways to become part of the exciting adventures — sure, I’m talking about One Piece games.

DashFight is a platform for the fighting games community, so it’s pretty logical to keep those action-adventures and JRPGs a bit aside and pay attention to our favorite genre. Is there a One Piece fighting game to enjoy on modern devices?

One Piece: Burning Blood is exactly such a title. So, let’s highlight it in this article!

One Piece Fights

The game invites players to 3D fighting matches with 3v3 teams. The parallels here are quite obvious. 

3v3 team fights? We have DBFZ and Skullgirls of the same kind. KOF XV also allows you to build teams of three characters, even if there is no actual tag-team feature.

3D fights? Tekken and Soulcalibur are among the most popular franchises of this sub-genre.

Still, no — One Piece: Burning Blood is rather unique, and these comparisons don’t work well.

We have a spicy mix of unusual mechanics and splashy over-the-top animations. It feels like something you would pretty much expect from a One Piece fighter.

There are dedicated buttons for normal, unique, and special attacks. The unique moves can be combined with movement inputs, but it’s not a complicated thing, and no Modern Controls are needed. There is a meter that can activate a boosted state and open the door to powerful supers.

The characters block with a dedicated button, and they can take dash steps while blocking. The general movement is not like in other fighting games — due to having huge 3D arenas. You hit your opponent with a special and then have to run for quite a while to reach them and land another hit.

Combining characters in a team is a very interesting part of the game, as all of them bring their unrepeatable abilities. Everything reflects the Devil Fruits magic from the anime, and the roster is big.

Paramount War

One Piece: Burning Blood has a story mode, and it’s strongly advised to start playing from there.

The events will be … weird for those who just watched the Netflix live-action episodes, as the story brings us to Marineford Arc, which starts after 457 episodes of the anime and 550 manga chapters (also known as Paramount War).

But the main role of the story mode is to gradually introduce us to all those tricky mechanics. And it does this job pretty well. Not perfectly though…

The difficulty spikes are just unfair. Instead of having a slight increase of the CPU skills to test our skills, the opponents become absolutely ruthless at some matches and then return to their low-level boredom in the next ones.

The story can be completed for a few characters, but eventually it becomes repetitive.

After beating the Luffy episode, you unlock local (split screen) and online multiplayer.

Game Modes

WANTED Versus is a single-player mode in One Piece: Burning Blood that brings a series of challenges. You need to participate in various battles and unlock Wanted posters. In the process, you level up the characters and get money (like you do in the story mode too). The mode is good for improving basic skills.

Pirate Base is a place to buy new characters for that in-game cash.

There was a multiplayer adventure of global fractions, named Pirate Flag Battle, but this service was discontinued.

Is It Worth Playing?

Like with many questions/answers, it depends…

The game is certainly fun if you enjoyed the Netflix series and want to hang out with these characters. The fights are more of the goofy, unserious style.

Sure, the skills are rewarded here, and just mashing normals or unique attacks doesn’t work too well even against CPU. But it’s not that classic fighting games competition with frame data, knowing lows and highs, right/left mixups, and literally everything else. It’s not an esports title.

One Piece: Burning Blood is just great to relax, feel the pirate life excitement, and… yeah, basically to have fun with your friends.

Single-player modes are quite satisfying, but the story is a bit complicated for newcomers to the series. It would be better to not bother too much with the attempts to understand every new character and every event. WANTED Versus is both cool and challenging. This experience is surely limited — replaying the story even for new characters may feel like a decrease in excitement. The adventure of collecting those Wanted posters never brings the same joy as playing vs another human being.

Some problems with multiplayer matches are certainly here, as the game is not new, and waiting for an opponent of your level may be a task. But isn’t this an issue for so many other fighting games, and they still have dedicated communities?

Playing One Piece: Burning Blood against other people is absolutely exciting! The anime-style moves and hilarious animations bring so many positive emotions. Try the fights out! (The game is on PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam)

And if Bandai Namco decides to make a more competitive One Piece fighting game, you'll find info on it here, on DashFight.