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One Piece Mansion Review
Chris Leyton
00/12/0000
Quirky, Bizarre, definitely Japanese...
One Piece Mansion, hmmā¦. Where to start. Essentially itās a puzzle game with strategy elements, and thankfully thereās not a block in sight.
As the owner of a mansion youāve got to look after the well being of your tenants, each of them have one room in your mansion and either admits stress or happy thoughts in different directions, often depending on who theyāre next to.
By switching them around you have to get the right balance and ensure they donāt stress out too much and explode. Each character has a stress bar that fills up when s/he is being stressed out, for example; Heebee ā“ an obstinate bamboo craftsman gets excited when the bamboo from his head sprouts affecting people in rooms located above his. To counteract this you could place Ope ā“ a mysterious doctor to the right of him, Ope will then periodically jab HeeBee with a relaxing hypodermic, balancing out the stress caused. Understand? Thought not!!!
The mood flows are shown in the way of arrows, blue arrows indicate positive feelings, whilst red arrows depict stress. The tenants stress level, shown on a gauge, also affects the flows of these, for example Drimimi is a dream devil whose dreams come true, everything is great when sheās having good dreams and emitting positive flows, however if she starts to get stressed sheāll have a nightmare and the blue arrows turn to red. Understand me now??
New tenants will continuously arrive at your doorstep demanding a room, so youāll have to keep adding new rooms to the mansion. In this way the game takes on that more frantic puzzle approach, as youāre trying to fit them all in and ensure theyāre all kept happy.
To win youāve got to collect enough rent money from your tenants to move onto the next level. Occasionally the game will chuck in a few wild elements, such as tenants not being able to pay their rent, or being sick and affecting all of the other tenants.
In addition to worrying about your tenants there are rival mansion members to worry about who want to take over your place. They come and invade your mansion and take home in one of your rooms, you canāt move these so the only option is to place stress givers next to him until he explodes. Occasionally they will try to wreak some havoc, so you have to switch over from Manager mode to Security Mode, which allows you to move around the mansion, locate the trouble maker and give him a good toot from your whistle.
Each of the tenants are brimming full of personality captured through the wonderful visuals. There is a distinct anime feel to them, as each goes through their often-humorous animations. Personally speaking I find the Japanese design wonderful and oozing with charm, itās very quirky and very Japanese, which might alienate some people, however in this context itās well executed and adds a certain something to the game.
There are two basic modes in the game; The Story Mode ā“ Follows the landlord Polpo and his sister Al Chan through a set of challenges each with different objectives, such as earning a set amount of money or building a certain amount of rooms. This mode is unfortunately way too short and will be cleared by most puzzle players in no time at all. However the aptly named Endless Mode keeps you going as long as youāre making a profit, funnily enough this adds immense (!) length to the game.
Unfortunately there is no multiplayer feature; a two-player mode that allowed you to both own different mansions and send troublesome tenants to each other would have been very welcome.
