One Piece: Pirate's Carnival is Namco Bandai and developer Hand's (yes, I just said Hand's) attempt at a Mario Party style spin off starring the character's from the popular manga. Up to four people can play at once via Sony's multi-tap peripheral, or they can mix it up with human and CPU controlled opponents. Either way, the experience is going to be...it's going to be what it is.

The game contains about 30 unique challenges and a decent cast of characters from the series. The first mode that I explored, dubbed Board Game, goes the Mario Party route by tasking you to reach the center of this board, and to do that you've got to take squares. It's actually kind of strange but it definitely works since its turn based. Basically, each player (during his or her turn) has the opportunity to move a cursor around the board/grid, and when you select a square/node/piece/whatever, you have to battle your opponents in some random mini game, and whoever wins moves one step closer to reaching the center.

The first mini game that I played was a battle for keys. All four players are plopped into this grid with boxes lying about, and the goal is to break the boxes, pick up the keys, and hold said keys for as long as you possibly can. But it's no easy feat, as the other players are attempting to kick the snot out the "key master" and there's some weirdo dude that can grab you, and if either of these things happen (getting your butt whipped by another player or the whacko cloud), you drop the keys and then other people can pick them up, so there's a real Power Stone vibe to it. Unfortunately, it's nowhere near as entertaining as Power Stone since there's not a bunch of crazy weapons and it's quite easy to lose your character in the carnage, but it's ok.

After that I moved onto a straight up Power Stone rip where the four characters are kicked onto a pirate ship and last man standing wins. And to top it off there's some weapons littered around the board, nothing too crazy (just a bomb, really), but at the very least it gives me something to toss. But again, it's not as enjoyable as Power Stone. However, if you've never played Capcom's Power Stone games, you can pretty much disregard all of my comparisons and nerdy "Meh it's not as good as Power Stone" sentences.

In addition to Board Game there is also Vs, which is clearly the "meat" of the Pirate's Carnival experience. Once again, the goal is to be victorious, and there are multiple games to check out that have been placed into the following categories: Members Games, Captain Game, and Normal Game. At first, only Members Games is available, and you can partake in several games such as:

Gum Gum Carnival: A battle against Luffy where you must dodge his rhythmic attacks.

Cooking Fighter: Steal food from the sear restaurant Baratie before it gets to Patty.

The Ancient Ruin Mystery: Grab treasure from the city in the sky while avoiding Robin.

Thundering Swordplay: A swordfight against Zolo. Beware the slippery ground.

As you can see from the screen shots, Hand has elected to cell shade everything and it's done a splendid job, as the environments and the character models have a nice, clean appearance. The action also moves at a brisk pace and there doesn't appear to be any slowdown, at least from what I have seen. It's definitely not the best looking game on the PlayStation 2, but it's certainly on par with lots of the other Namco Bandai anime games. There's also a pretty slick anime intro which will no doubt please you if you're a One Piece fan.

I'm going to naturally reserve judgment for the review, but thus far I'm not too into this game. It's been put together all right, but it's very clear (at least to me) that the license is the primary draw and not the gameplay, which is uneventful, to say the least. But GameDaily will have a full report once One Piece: Pirate's Carnival is released on May 23.