Is One Piece Online Worth Playing in 2022?

Yeah… One Piece.
So last month I covered a Naruto MMORPG… Yeah, that turned out to be about as terrible as you would’ve expected.
But this left me thinking… are there other MMOs out there that rip off popular Anime series? .. And yes, yes there are. Welcome, ladies and gentleman, to One Piece Online.
An MMORPG that takes us on a grand adventure with an incredible cast of characters, next-generation graphics, and combat that’s even faster, even more fluid than what you see in the Anime.

Now welcome to another episode of “what on earth did Stix download and play, this time?” – where we sift through every MMORPG available right now in an attempt to find the best MMORPG in 2021. Today, we’re taking a look at.. well, One Piece Online. If you watched the Anime, you might enjoy this.
If not, well.. I’m sorry for what you’re about to experience.

Now.. I’m at a loss as to where to even begin with this. I want to tackle this in as unbiased a way as I possibly can, but at the same time, this was even worse than Naruto Online. And Naruto Online was.. a questionably bad experience.
However, in Naruto Online, at the very least, you were given a certain level of freedom to explore the varied areas you were in at each point in the story.
You started off in Konoha, and got to explore the town. Got to see some of the cast, all interacting with one another. That was not the case with this.
This world was more limiting, you had less control over your character. You moved horizontally in little towns filled with a few characters from the Anime and Manga. You’d take a quest from them, and then you’d have to go to some type of Battle Map, which hosted a set number of different enemy encounters.
These were pretty simple, and your characters – one of which you chose at the beginning of the game, and the rest being comprised of characters from the series would all attack enemies automatically. You could opt to use their abilities manually if you wanted to, but with the upgrades I got simply by playing, there wasn’t even a need.

As noted, the combat was semi-auto. It featured a.. kinda turn-based combat system? That’s the closest comparison I can make. You and the enemy would take turns hitting one another, until one side was defeated.
You had the ability to customize your characters by upgrading and equipping new abilities, enhancing their gear, their levels, their stats. These all require items to do, by the way, but the items in question – at least at low levels were thrown at me in bulk.
I’m going to assume that won’t be the case later on in the game though as these upgrades, these enhancements are no doubt going to be integral to not only progression, but also remaining competitive in any sense.
And that’s likely part of where the “pay to win” comes into it, as I heard this was just as bad as Naruto Online.

This game felt like a bad mobile game. But at the very least mobile games LOOK good for the most part. And sometimes they even PLAY good. Punishing Gray Raven, Guardian Tales, Genshin Impact are all proof of that.
But One Piece Online? Man. Graphically, this is probably one of the worst, blandest looking MMOs I’ve ever seen. From the flat world, to the lack of animations. Sure, every character you would recruit had unique abilities – but it just felt so underwhelming.
There was no impact behind any of the attacks, there was no real fluidity in terms of movement overall, and the world.. consisted of a small screen with a few houses and NPCs.
I get it, at the end of the day this is a browser MMORPG. You really can’t expect too much from a game as limited as a browser MMO but at the same time, at least with Naruto Online, which is one of the only other browser games I’ve played, it provided a world to explore.
Gave some sense of control over what was going on. You didn’t feel like you were navigating a screenshot.

As for what you do in One Piece Online? You take a quest from an NPC that tells you to eliminate a guy. That’s it. Every quest over a several hour period consisted of “eliminate this one guy,” and to reach said guy you’d be required to engage several other “guys.”
There was no challenge present as you’d continue to get additional characters, and enough items that you were significantly overpowered for the content at hand.
Speaking of characters, while I did get a few via the story, I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume, much like mobile games, there’s a Gacha system present that is going to prevent you from obtaining the best characters without investing quite a bit of IRL cash.
How else would a game this bad maintain any semblance of a population?

✔️ It has a separate client so you’re not forced to play it via your web browser.

❎ If you’re a fan of One Piece, you’ll still likely hate this. The characters are so different to their Anime and Manga counterparts.

❎ The gameplay is worse than what you’d find in a mobile game.

❎ Graphics are absolutely terrible. It feels like you’re navigating a still image.

❎ The world is empty. Tiny. Pretty much non-existent. The world is a few “screens” with some NPCs scattered around on a horizontal line.

❎ The story is horrible. And the characters’ involvement in the story is completely out of place.

❎ There’s a Gacha mechanic in place, meaning players with large sums of money will likely have a much easier time recruiting the better quality characters.

❎ The game, with the exception of running to the NPCs is pretty much auto-play. And I loathe auto-play in my games – PC games especially.

I could, realistically, continue to list all of the cons to playing the game. But suffice it to say… this is unbelievably bad. I don’t typically hate MMOs I play, but I can tell you that after playing this for 2 hours, I can legitimately say that you could not pay me to play this more.
If the devs reached out to me and offered me money to play this, I’d have to turn them down. Yes, it’s truly that bad. I cannot begin to think of any way of justifying how bad this truly is.
From how bad it looks to how bad it plays. To the lack of freedom to explore, to the lack of control over the combat. The atrocious still images that comprise the background, and the characters with personalities that just feel so out of place.
At least with Naruto Online, the game felt.. kinda like an MMO? Even if only a little. And even more than that, it was retelling the events of the Anime – with cutscenes taken directly from the Anime series.
This does not, and feels like a cheap knock-off with “One Piece” in its name to bank on fans too gullible to know what this is.