What five minutes of One Piece will do to you.

One Piece: Unlimited Adventure is a Nintendo Wii exclusive action-adventure game following the exploits of the Straw Hat Pirates of the popular manga and anime series, One Piece. The overall gameplay of this lengthy journey might not be solid enough to hold its own, but fans of the manga and anime will mine a decent amount of enjoyment out of the title. Though some errant attributes keep it from being generally recommended, it plays surprisingly well for a licensed game, but that's not saying much.

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After some misdeeds on the high seas, the Straw Hat Pirates' captain and One Piece's main character, Luffy, is forced to fish aboard their ship as penance for wasting food. He hooks a mysterious orb instead of catching a meal, and this orb causes an island to emerge from under the ship. When the crew comes to, they decide to do what any pirate gang would do and see what treasure the island has to plunder. The absurdity of the plot may only resonate with series fans, but luckily the characters themselves offer some much needed levity in the form of personality, though their at times over-animated nature might put off a few people.

Down with the Navy and its 193 men.

Unlimited Adventure is set up like a traditional action adventure game in the vein of Legend of Zelda. Exploration of the island is key, and of course you'll open up more areas to investigate as you progress. Advancing to new areas is done through the use of Luffy's orb, which for some reason needs to be fed to charge up, amounting to a lot of backtracking and hassle on your part. The barriers the game sets between you and adjacent areas are almost always rock walls that mysteriously explode, so these more traditional gaming restraints need to be taken with a tongue firmly in cheek to be accepted. Unfortunately, once you do enter a new area the game offers little in direction, so you may be wandering around for a while wondering what to do next.

While wandering around, you will run into the militant and evil Navy that surely means more to One Piece fanatics than the rest of us; otherwise they suffice as a near constant fodder for your cast. Once you team up with the rest of the characters, you can change between members at any time with a press of the minus button. There actually is some variance in each character's range of combat. Luffy has the power to make his limbs act rubbery and extend like Mr. Fantastic or Street Fighter's Dhalsim, which lends him some wide-range physical attacks. Usopp can chuck throwing stars from a distance while a little talking reindeer thing called Chopper is only capable of weak short-range melee bursts, but can eventually turn into a powerful, hulking beast. With repeated use, moves become more powerful and new ones become available. Truth be told, the combat is fairly simplistic at its core, but the variety of characters can keep it from being too tedious.

Unlimited Adventure doesn't exactly take advantage of the Wii's unique control options, offering only the traditional Wii Remote and Nunchuk setup. Control is responsive overall, though the game's jumps and attacks don't exactly push the genre's envelope. Camera controls are average, as the Z button on the Nunchuk does most of the camera work. It can lock on to a nearby enemy, set the camera behind you in exploration mode, or be held down and adjusted with the directional pad. The only controls to take advantage of the Wii Remote are the useful character specific moves that are activated with a simple waggle.

One Piece serves up a standard presentation with average graphics. The character models stay true to their 2D roots, but the environments are repetitive and bland. You can at times see an expanse of land, but there's not much to see within the expanse. The sound design may disappoint in that the music, which at best is forgettable and at worst, grating, is accompanied by merely adequate sound effects. But the true crime for some may be that there is no option for Japanese voice acting. This may pain fans, but the English audio is fairly decent and, let's face it – a story about a mishmashed team of character stereotypes with rubber arms and talking reindeer sidekicks calling themselves pirates isn't exactly the stuff of high art.

One Piece does offer a passable versus multiplayer mode where you can select a team of characters from the game, hero and villain. It's passable enough to offer a decent diversion from the main narrative, though it would only keep the interest of series fans, and even then the combat isn't deep enough for it to last for long. The main game also has a few sidequests like butterfly collecting and item creation but outside a few items whose creation is necessary to progress, only the most ardent of One Piece fans will stick through to see all of either mode.

One Piece: Unlimited Adventure isn't a bad game, but that hardly makes it good. It's adequate enough for series fans, who should be able to overlook its relative mediocrity for the chance to play a rather lengthy adventure with Luffy and crew that is somewhat solidly made. For everyone else, you'll be hoping that the adventure isn't quite unlimited.