Shonen Jump's One Piece - Grand Battle

The English release came saddled with the 4Kids dub, which means Sanji waves a lollipop instead of a cigarette and half the attack names have been sanded down for American television. It is the first thing anyone raised on the manga notices, and it colours the whole package. What it does not do is change the fighting, which is the part Ganbarion had already refined across several Japanese entries before this one crossed the Pacific.

The combat is deliberately shallow at the surface and stubborn underneath. One attack button, held or tapped or combined with a direction, covers the entire moveset; there is no quarter-circle vocabulary to memorise, no charge partitioning, nothing that punishes a kid picking up the second controller. Fighters move around small arenas on a plane that lets you sidestep and close distance rather than shuffle back and forth on a line. Meter builds, supers fire off in a burst of screen-filling animation, and support characters can be called in to interrupt. Junk scattered around the stage can be picked up and thrown. That is roughly the whole system.

What keeps it from collapsing into button-mashing is spacing and timing on guard breaks, and the fact that every character genuinely plays differently rather than sharing a skeleton with a new coat of paint. Luffy's limbs cover absurd ground. Zoro wants to be inside. Chopper switches forms. The roster runs deep into the Alabasta stretch and the films, and the chibi-proportioned models with heavy black outlines still read cleanly, because Ganbarion aimed at the anime's flat colour rather than at contemporary polygon fashion. It has aged better than a lot of 2005 cel-shading.

As a solo proposition it thins out quickly. The single-player structure is a series of bouts strung together with minimal ceremony, and the AI has a limited number of tricks to show you before you have seen them all. This was built for two people on a sofa, and outside that context it is a handsome sprint through a character select screen. Bandai's arena fighters of this period rarely aspired to anything else, and the honest ones are better company than the ones that pretended to be Tekken.

Judge it by what a nine-year-old in 2005 got out of it and it holds up fine. Judge it by the source material and the dub still stings.