Buckle up, we’re talking about anime
When I hear that a new game is coming based on a popular shonen anime or manga, I tend to assume that we’re getting another fighting game that I’ll forget about within a week. I can only assume that everyNarutofan is a pro-level arena fighting game player at this point, given the number ofNinja Stormgames they’ve been faced with.One Piece: Burning Blood,Dragon Ball FighterZ,My Hero One’s Justice, the ill-fatedJump Force— it seems to me that when you make a game based on a hit anime, the obvious move is to go for a fighting game.
Some of them are good, some of them are not, but boy… are there a lot of them.
It makes sense; these are usually franchises with a roster of fighters boasting a variety of recognizable signature moves, and fans are always clamoring for pointless power comparisons between any two given characters. If you really want an answer to the age-old debate of “SSJ3 Goku vs. Bardock,” all you need to do is look at aFighterZtier list. But you know what genre can do all of that just a little bit better? Role-playing games.
Put your nose to the grindstone
The RPG, in its most primitive form, is a genre about getting buff. It’s about starting off as a capable fighter and slowly evolving into a formidable warrior.Dungeons & Dragons,Final Fantasy,Dragon Quest— all of these games fall under the same genre grouping primarily because they let the player grow stronger over time.
A couple months back, I went on a pretty severeDragon Ballbender. I read all 500-odd chapters of the original manga in the space of about a week before I turned my attention to the wide world ofDragon Ballvideo games, starting with 2019’s action RPGDragon Ball Z Kakarot. This is where I made a discovery that seems all too obvious in retrospect: at least since Raditz crashed in Goku’s backyard,Dragon Ballhas been the story of a guy playing an RPG.
Kakarotisn’t the first game to invite this comparison, and there have beenDragon BallRPGs in the past, but it stands true. Goku grinds his way from “unusually strong kid” to “god-battling superhero”. What areDragon Ball Z‘s frequent training montages if not level-up fanfare? This is whyKakarot, a 7/10 by most measures (see Chris Carter’s review), is a near-perfectDragon Balladaptation.
The life of the party
Recently, after running out of halfway-decentDragon Ballstuff to submerge myself in, I’ve begun tackling a more daunting task: readingOne Piecefor the first time. It’s a much larger project than readingDragon Ball, but I’m about 600 chapters in, and when I heard theelevator pitch for the upcomingOne Piece Odyssey, I was elated. The game is a party-based RPG, and I truly can’t think of a better way to adaptOne Piece.
Dragon Ball Zis somewhat unique in that its fights are usually one-on-one, and its heroes are basically all brute-force punchy-boys (aside from Bulma, who really should be playable in more games).One Pieceis the opposite. Certain characters may break off for the occasional side quest, but the Straw Hat Pirates are an RPG party if I’ve ever seen one. They’ve got a healer, a bard, a thief, a handful of specialized fighters, a rubber person — you know, the classics.
After I got over the initial excitement I felt at the idea of aOne PieceRPG (not the first one and likely not the last), I realized that a lot of shonen series feature RPG parties. Naruto might be grinding his way to Hokage-dom, but he’s doing it with a lot of buddies at his side. Those lads fromDemon Slayerare always fighting in little crews. The superheroes inMy Hero AcademiagetAvengersmoments every other chapter.Fairy Tailrecently drew this comparison for me with its own party-based RPG, although I can’t speak to the quality of that one since I haven’t watched an episode ofFairy Tailin around a decade.
But what else?
The point is, all of these massive rosters, that already make fighting games such a good template for shonen adaptations, wouldalsomake for pretty interesting RPG parties. Most of those characters are steadily upgrading their powers all the time anyways. Some of these properties already have built-in levels, likeOne Piece‘s bounties. Maybe it’s easier to drop anime characters into fighting games. I’ve never done it. But I have played those games, and I can proudly say that I’d like most of them a lot more if they were RPGs.
So in recent years, we’ve gotten RPG adaptations ofDragon Ball ZandFairy Tail, as well as someSword Art Onlinegames that I don’t feel extremely qualified to comment on. With a release scheduled for tomorrow, we’ll finally get to check outOne Piece Odysseyfor ourselves. But what other series deserve the RPG treatment? Should Denji, Power, and Aki be the new Cloud, Barret, and Tifa? You tell me.
And maybe we can chill out with all those fighting games, if you don’t mind.
Related:One Piece Odyssey suffers from a lack of difficulty that leaves the gameplay stretched thinonGamepur
