Pirates’ Carnival features a healthy selection of 35 or so mini-games, and unlike Mario Party, these aren’t button mashers that’ll wear out your controllers. The mini-games include standard brawling, boss fights versus pirate captains, parachuting onto boats, firing canons at moving targets, a simple first-person shooter, and sports-based contests like basketball and dodgeball. A few are a bit confusing, but overall they’re easy to pick up and decent fun to play.

This is a good-looking game, too. It’s not technologically impressive but it runs smoothly and really captures the distinctive look of the “One Piece” characters, albeit in super-deformed style.There’s lots of nifty voice-acting and situation-specific dialogue, too, which fans should appreciate.

Unfortunately, load times put a bit of a damper on the action; the game is constantly pausing to load voice conversations, mini-games, and unskippable instruction screens.