E3 06: One Piece Hands-On

LOS ANGELES--Namco Bandai is offering a Wii game based on One Piece, the popular anime series, and we got to try our hand at it inside Nintendo's fairly posh E3 booth today. The game puts you in control of Luffy and starts out by sending you through a small mountainside tutorial where you're schooled in the finer points of controlling One Piece with the Wii controller. So far, it looks like One Piece: Unlimited Adventure will be a fairly standard action adventure with a few Wii elements added in, but we'll have to make that determination after we see more of it.

During the tutorial, Luffy gains a few basic items that you'll use to interact with the environment in various ways, and you'll equip all of them by hitting the corresponding direction on the Wii remote's D pad (proving that it will in fact be used for something besides menu navigation). The first of these was a pickaxe, which you'll use to break up bits of the ground or some boulders that are marked with an X. Of course, you do this by equipping the axe and then swinging the remote in an arc. Next up was a time gem, which we could use at key points in the map to "evolve" the surrounding area, which would generally clear some sort of obstacle out of the way. A bug-catching net and a fishing rod were two other items that we obtained and could use by equipping and making similar motions with the controller.

Aside from these special items, the other functions in the game, like jumping and melee attacks, were performed with standard button presses, so One Piece felt to us more like a regular game that was retrofitted with some Wii-specific control than one designed directly for the unique new system. But then, fans of the series will probably find plenty to like here, and there may be a lot more to this unlimited adventure than we've seen yet. We'll bring you more on that as soon as we can.