I have to confess, despite being fairly well-rounded in all aspects of geeky culture, I'm clueless when it comes to One Piece. There's a stretchy guy and another dude who likes to eat his sword and a woman who can never seem to find her shirt and some kind of tiny moose-bear, and everybody wants this weird fruit. Or maybe treasure. Oh, and there are pirates! Whatever's actually happening in the anime, you can now relive your favorite stretchy-sword-bikini-fruity-pirate-moose moments in Namco Bandai's latest Android game, Thousand Storm.

[EMBED_YT]https://youtu.be/BsmzF8HczKU

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Cynical One Piece fans might be expecting yet another licensed card game, as that seems to be the favored format for these kinds of tie-in titles. That's not quite the case here. Though Thousand Storm is decidedly more "casual" than some of the One Piece console games that have been published, and the portrait-only, one-finger format is designed to be easy to handle without too much twitching or button-pressing, there is real-time combat in 3D environments. Players collect and power up the stars of the series (which do, to be fair, come in presentations that are kind of card-like), eventually facing off against the show's biggest antagonists. Combat is sort of like a MOBA without movement: attacks and special powers are on timers that need to be manually activated.

What fans will probably like most is the cooperative online play, where up to three players on a team can duke it out in live battles. Unfortunately, the online play seems to be the biggest problem in the game so far: the reviews posted to the new English version of the game are filled with complaints of lag and connection issues, quickly dragging the score down to a mediocre 3.4. Load times are also quite long - like, "I can't tell if the game has crashed or not" long. Thousand Storm is free, with in-app currency used for "scenes" that can unlock new characters and upgraded powers. IAP goes up to $45 - not great, but at least a little better than the usual $100 bull.

[EMBED_APP]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bandainamcoent.optsE[/EMBED_APP]