Pirate Warriors 3 vs. 4 Review
With the arrival of the fourth installment the Pirate Warrior series, Pirate Warriors 4 on all major platforms (including the Nintendo Switch!) it’s time to review.
Personally, I tend to hate hack n’ slash games, but with it being One Piece and all I simply had to give them a try. And if this is as far as you’re interested in reading, just know that I was not disappointed.
It is also worth noting that the “Warrior” part is because this is the same people who make the other Warrior games like Hyrule Warriors and Fire Emblem Warriors, so they share a lot of similarities.
Let’s start with Pirate Warriors 3 Review:
Because I don’t usually like this type of game, I expected to be a bit bored playing it given how repetitive this type of game tends to be. But, instead of a game just filled to the brim with of hordes of enemies who could never hope to defeat you, the game does a great job at directing the fights in a way that lets you strategize and pick directives.
There was still a lot of weaker hordes of enemies that basically can’t even hurt you, but they are scattered strategically amongst territories and stronger opponents, and used for taking over certain parts of the map to complete objectives.
Instead of struggling to defeat weaker enemies, it’s usually more of a race against time than whether or not you can defeat them.
Between foot soldier platoons that you can easily dominate there are stronger enemies that pose a serious challenge in return for rewards if you choose to fight them, as well as boss fights that can’t be avoided.
The real gem of the game, though, is that the fighting is almost entirely different for every character.
The attack patterns are decently easy to master because the button sequences are the same across character sets, but they’re still extremely varied and fun to combo together. Tie that in with the special attacks you unlock along the way, and you’ve got a pretty fun pirate brawling experience.
And here’s the thing about it feeling like a chaotic brawl at times — it works for One Piece. This is something I never realized was lacking in 1v1 One Piece games like Burning Blood.
For characters like Luffy or Akainu, you need to have instances where you fight wave after wave of enemies because how else could you showcase just how immensely powerful these characters really are?
Defeating thousands of grunts on their way to confront the boss-like heavy hitters of the series is something that we’ve come to expect these characters to be fully capable of. And let’s be honest, it’s just straight up fun to go Gear 3rd and take out 100+ foes in one fell swoop.
On to Pirate Warriors 4:
The Story
PW4 is basically the same concept as PW3. You start the story as the Strawhats and work your way to the New World, recreating iconic battles along the way. After completing the main story, there is far more to do in the challenges where you can play as anyone you want instead of choosing from the storyline characters.
Note: If you play online during the story mode with a friend, the person who isn’t hosting the level can choose any character they want.
Where PW3 seemed to focus on the main points of gathering the crew, 4 seems to skip around most of that and instead focus on some of the more intense fights and intimate moments. This made playing both 3 & 4 in a row fun since you aren’t repeating the exact same moments in both.
The Fighting & Gameplay
Now, there is a lot of similarities between 3 and 4, but what I can say for 4 is that almost every single aspect of the fighting is improved greatly, sometimes in ways I didn’t even know I wanted.
The combos are kept in a pattern that depends on which of the 4 types of character you choose (speed, power, sky and technique type) but each character’s actual moves for each character are very different. Once you get a feel for it, you can string together all sorts of powerful and seamless combos of your own.
As you progress, you can use coins that you’ve earned from specific levels and events to unlock more combos and special moves via the character treasure maps. This helps the levels to be replay-able because you can easily look up which coins you get as rewards for different goals in each level.
The combos are very fun to use, and unlocking movesets for your favorite characters is very rewarding.
What the 4th game improves upon the most, though, is specifically the special moves.
In PW3 you start with 1 special move per character, as well as a 2nd move for some characters that you can use when your special gauge is more full.
In PW4, not only can you use the treasure map to buy new moves, but you also get to pick 4 of them for every character and each character has about 8-10 or so to choose from once their maps are fully unlocked.
And as if that wasn’t fun enough, some of the specials that you unlock are a sort of transformation (like gear 4) that changes your move set and powers you up for a set amount of time.
Playing with Friends
On top of all of these improvements, Pirate Warriors 4 also has online capability that’s perfect for 2 players, but also has levels that can host 4 players at the same time.
One player will host a room, and another player can join in on the story or challenge mode. There are also 4 player levels available, but there’s only a handful, and 2 experienced players can easily take on these fights by themselves.
In the multiplayer, I found 2 things to be particularly cool:
First, any leveling that you do to a character also applies to whoever you’re playing with. So before I had even played as Big Mom, she was already at a level that could compete with the later and more fun challenge levels because my friends had chosen her when we played together a few times.
Secondly, if you find that the game isn’t quite challenging enough once you’ve unlocked your character maps fully, you can take on the 4 player levels either by yourself of with just 1 or 2 friends to make them more challenging.
The Final Verdict on Pirate Warriors 4
Pirate Warriors 3 & 4 are still a somewhat run of the mill hack n slash, meaning that there are times where you feel that you can still win a brawl without even looking at the screen. Levels may also feel a little repetitive at times.
But, if you’re a fan of the show I’m sure that you’ll love the thrill of leveling your favorite characters and revisiting some of the more iconic moments in the series. I also found the game to be especially fun when playing with other OP fans as opposed to playing alone.
Basically, if you’re a One Piece fan and you don’t absolutely hate games like Hyrule Warriors or Fire Emblem Warriors, this game is for you.
If PW3 goes back on sale for $10 anytime soon, it’s worth trying first. But if you are only going to get 1 of the 2, I 100% recommend getting PW4 over 3.
I bought the games on sale ($10 & $40, respectively), but I would certainly pay full price for PW4 if I had to.
