Hiroyuki Kaneko & Koji Nakajima answer the burning One Piece questions

One Piece: Burning Blood, before I played it, was a total enigma to me. My only other contact with the series was a 10-minute demo of One Piece: Pirate Warriors 3 at a previous Namco event, and not to mention the shrine-like One Piece merchandise store that sits at the foot of Tokyo Tower in Japan. I’d known of its existence, sure, but only simply as “that manga that everyone in Japan is obsessed with.”

Now? Well, now I know about just as little character names and story arcs as I did before playing One Piece: Burning Blood. But I can say that after chatting to Hiroyuki Kaneko, game designer at Spike Chunsoft in Japan, as well as Koji Nakajima, producer of the game based within Bandai Namco Entertainment, I’ve come out appreciating the franchise a whole lot more — it’s not just another manga series that’s struck gold overseas, it’s a total cultural phenomenon. In Japan, at least.

Strolling through the Akihabara district of Tokyo last month, it was impossible to escape. Plethoras of figure-selling stores boasted their statue collections in hundreds of glass cases: a large percentage of which were solely dedicated to One Piece. My view of these most sought-after collectables was often obscured by an impenetrable wall of school kids pawing eagerly at the glass, desperate to get their hands on either one of the 17’ poly-resin masterpieces. Shop assistants had to regularly clean the glass after one crusade of teens moved on, wiping away their greasy fingerprints only for the next swarm to dirty it even more.

Never had I ever seen such devotion to a single series of media. One Piece is certainly one of the biggest names in Japanese popular culture— it is the biggest selling manga series that has ever existed with sales topping over 380 million, almost 150 million more than other juggernauts like Dragonball Z and Naruto. These two series, Dragonball Z especially, have found roaring success in Western markets but One Piece has never managed to fully crack Europe: at least, not to the same rate of success as DBZ. But with Burning Blood, the first fighting game in the long-running franchise, Namco hopes to please current fans as well as entice new Western players into the wacky world of One Piece.

“There are two different aspects that we’re implementing into Burning Blood. The first one is, since this is the first fighting game of the One Piece series, ideally we’d like to provide an enjoyable consumer experience for overseas players. You’re able to transform yourself into volcanoes, magma, dinosaurs using the Devil Fruit, so its provides that One Piece niche universe which people will definitely enjoy — and something we’re hoping that One Piece fans will enjoy immediately.”

“Another thing is that we’d like to show off the One Piece universe through these games: even though you don’t really know about this IP, that’s actually the point. I don’t think there’s any other fighting game that you can transform yourself into these insane forms — the fact itself is very funny. Regardless of your knowledge of the series, we’re hoping One Piece itself is good enough to get people interested and start learning about this IP.”

One Piece is already enormous in Japan — I’ve already made that part obscenely clear. Burning Blood will be an entry-level title that hopes to entice new Western players, but a fighting title has apparently been highly requested by fans outside of Japan.

“One of the reasons why we decided to develop Burning Blood is that we got a lot of feedback from the One Piece overseas fans. They said: ’Hey, if there’s actually One Piece fighting games, we would really like to play’. Nakajima-san has been really producing a lot of One Piece games, so he has a lot of chances to have direct contact with communities and also the fanbase. This has been requested by the overseas fans for a long time, so I’m really hoping that once we release this game, that the reaction coming from the overseas fans is ‘Hey, this is exactly what we want’ when the game launches.”

Japanese titles when localised usually only make it onto two or three platforms — namely PlayStation 4, PS Vita or PC. Eastern series such as Persona, Danganronpa, Shin Megami Tensei, Naruto Shippuden and Steins;Gate have all made it big on PlayStation, perhaps because of Sony’s Japanese roots. Noted localisers such as Atlus, NIS America and up until rather recently Bandai Namco Entertainment have skipped Xbox One when bringing a title to Western markets — reasoning unknown, but its not hard to take an educated guess since most of Microsoft’s focus when marketing the Xbox One is on purebred Western titles. But that’s all about to change with Burning Blood according to Nakajima-san, who stresses that this is a norm that they’d like to change.

“If we’d like to reach the old One Piece fans, we’d like to launch on most of the consoles that are currently on the market. Xbox is of course one of they key platforms for the next-gen, so that’s why we decided to implement this platform. Not only this, another big reason why we brought it to Xbox One is because we’d like to increase the fanbase in North America, because there the Xbox One is still performing really well. It’s the same in the UK. We know the Xbox One is succeeding in these regions, so it makes sense that these are our two main markets where we’d like to expand our fanbase.”

In terms of market space, One Piece: Burning Blood has shown up at a rather challenging time. With super-popular and well-established-in-the-West titles like Street Fighter V having already landed this year, I was curious to know whether there was any pressure to perform even better in the European market.

“When we developed Burning Blood, we didn’t specifically refer it to a certain title but when we see the positioning of titles, we see that our fighting style is more aligned with games such as Dragonball Xenoverse and the Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm games,” explains Nakajima. “The way we want to present the game is that although it will look similar to Naruto players or Dragonball players, both games are still quite different and those players can still enjoy One Piece: Burning Blood. That is actually something we tried to implement into this title: not directly competing, but trying to appeal to a broader audience who may overlook us initially. Also, Naruto and Goku can’t really stretch their arms like Luffy — that is exclusive to One Piece!”

Both Nakajima and Kaneko laugh hysterically, and I laugh too. They’re not wrong. After playing Burning Blood and hearing what the creators have to say, it certainly comes across as a game that is trying to break free of the similarities that fighting games can often bear — especially series as entwined as Naruto and One Piece, which attract a lot of the same fans. Not only that, it’s quite evident that there is a significant effort to expand the franchise significantly in the West — the game’s storyline provides a great entry point without feeling overwhelmed by the series’ lengthy history, according to the creators.

I don’t think there’s any shame in admitting that a game has been designed to attract new players, yet a minority of diehard fans would disagree with that statement. It’s almost as if a series, which they clearly love dearly, cannot be shared with anyone new in fear of them defiling it with their lack of knowledge. But I think a series’ growth can only be a good thing: I mean, if they love it so much, don’t they want to see it succeed?

Burning Blood, for what I’ve played, achieves what it set out to do. Jumping in with no prior knowledge or experience and coming away feeling like it is a game I could really dig, One Piece: Burning Blood looks like it’s gearing up to impress current fans and steal the hearts of uninitiated Western players across Europe and North America.