Review of One Piece: The Curse of the Sacred Sword

The fifth One Piece film centers around Roronora Zoro, which is a nice change of pace, but does it live up to the name of "One Piece"? Story: 6 The story isn't too complex, with a lot of standard tropes that we've seen before. Luffy & crew are in search of treasure as usual, but Zoro ends up going off on his own after receiving a message from an old friend in the form of a knife. This old Friend of Zoro's is known as Saga. From there, there's lots of adventure and conflict between different groups, as well as a predicament that involves a ritual sacrifice.None of this is too interesting on their own, but they all come together and are presented fairly well to make for an entertaining enough plotline, one that is enjoyable to watch, but not super impressive.

Art: 4
The art, when compared to the One Piece films that came before this, really seems to drop the ball. The iconic One Piece character design is still here in full form, as expected, and there's plenty of good-looking, well-animated shots, but there's also plenty of instances of obvious-looking limited animation, making me think the budget was decreased a bit from the previous films. However, even aside from all that, the most baffling parts are the moments where the animation becomes so low-resolution that it looks like pixel art instead of a drawing. Honestly, some shots in this film look like they came directly out of a Sega CD game. It's just entirely unacceptable, and the moments of good animation can't excuse these moments of exceedingly poor animation, making the overall animation less than average.

Sound: 7
The soundtrack is what you'd expect from One Piece, no surprises there, but it still sounds good. The audio design is loud and booming, as expected from a theatrical release. The voice acting from the Japanese cast is also just as well done as it normally is in the show, and the new characters they introduce also had solid performances from their voice actors. Overall, the audio in the movie is nicely done, but it's nothing to write home about.

Character: 8
The cast from the main show are in full form here and, for the most part, just as likable here as they are there. As for the new characters, they're a mixed bag. Maya is a pretty standard young priestess girl and isn't very interesting, and the main villain Saga is also a pretty standard bad guy, who used to be good but was turned evil by a cursed sword. However, Saga's underlings have pretty nice visual designs, and are a bit more complex than Saga himself, since even though they're the antagonists, they're not clearly on the side of good or evil. Also, the old lady from the village has some great moments.

Enjoyment: 7
Despite it's shortcomings, the movie was still pretty fun to watch. There were a lot of good moments, but also a few moments where I was bored and wondering how much more of the film I had left...
I would recommend it to fans of the characters who want to see them on another (fairly standard) adventure who can forgive a little bit of roughness from the animation side of things.

Overall: 6