One Piece: Romance Dawn is a role-playing game based on the One Piece manga and anime series, with the game originally being released for the PSP on December 20, 2012. Now, a little over a year later, that same game is being brought to the Nintendo 3DS in the US.

The game plays similarly to a dungeon crawler, though it has RPG elements and turn-based battle commands, and the overall visual style of the game is presented in a manga format, giving it a similar appearance to the source material.

The One Piece series is loved by many people, but is this port of the PSP game worth picking up? Lets find out.

Kevin Carter of Destructoid notes poor presentation, writing:

“If the presentation wasn’t so horrible, One Piece: Romance Dawn would be a decent way for a JRPG fan to spend an afternoon after they’ve exhausted their library of other more innovative titles.”

Mathew Diener of Pocket Gamer claims this game is a lazy port, claiming:

“A straight-up port of the PSP RPG with no efforts taken to improve the experience, Romance Dawn is not a journey many One Piece fans will want to take.”

Lastly, Grant E. Gaines states poor execution on a great concept, putting:

“One Piece: Romance Dawn is a great idea that was poorly executed. While fans and newcomers will appreciate the story, the gameplay feels like an afterthought. It becomes bland after mere hours and starts to feel like you’re going through the motions. This is not the reaction you want in an RPG, especially a long one like Romance Dawn.”

One Piece: Romance Dawn is a port of a game that came out over a year ago, and considering its low-profile and the fact that many already played it has lead to scarcity in reviews. However, in the 10 trusted reviews I found, every writer was pretty negative on the game. Thus, all of the reviews sit pretty firmly in one judgment range and I am confident that it will not waver from it.

Judgment: Condemn

The following are links to every review that was gathered for this article:

Destructoid, Cubed3, Pocket Gamer, Nintendo Life, NZ Gamer, Digital Chumps, Gaming Nexus, Hardcore Gamer, D+PAD Magazine, Nintendo World Report

There are 5 possible judgments that a game can receive and they are the following:

Condemn | (O) | (OR) | (R) | Condone