One Piece Mansion
You control Polpo, the fleet-footed landlord of a bustling apartment building.
Tenants come and tenants go, and as new ones move in you have to make sure
they're not getting on the nerves of their neighbors and potentially chasing
away other paying tenants. You must also be wary of mischief-makers employed by
a rival apartment complex, intruding on your property to drive your renters
away. Successful management will lead to expansion of your apartment building,
but losing track of what's going on can leave you with an empty building, no
matter how big it is.
(Capcom, 2001 - for Sony Playstation)
In this era, where it seems like most new games fall into one of just a handful
of popular genres (fighting, driving, first-person shooter, combat sim, etc.),
it's so refreshing to get a completely off-the-wall gem like this Japanese
creation, which caught me completely off guard by (A) being translated to
the U.S. market in the first place, and (B) being hilariously fun. The One
Piece characters have a major cult following all their own in Japan, so this is
just one of a series of games in that country. Over here, it's a one-off
oddity, but its simple, strategic, addictive style warrants repeat play.
First off, language/cultural barriers or no, some things about living in an
apartment building are just universal, and One Piece Mansion nails them:
a lady with a zillion cats in her apartment, that oaf who won't turn down the
stereo, the perpetually fighting couple...I think I've lived next door to
all of these in real life, minus their bizarre, nearly-Seussian
appearance in this game's graphics. Visual indicators show how stressed out
each tenant is, and it's up to you to figure out which neighbor, or combination
of neighbors, is raising a troubled tenant's blood pressure. If you don't
figure it out and take measures to resolve the conflict, an apartment empties
with a mighty bang!
As much as I like to swap out my standard PS1 controller for something more
arcade-flavored, this is a game where you really need the shoulder buttons to be
shoulder buttons. Spending a lot of time looking for your buttons on an
alternate controller could cost you precious time in dealing with trouble
tenants. So I'm actually making a rare recommendation to stick with the
standard PS1 controller.
Four quarters - a couple of minor irritants, but mostly a compelling and
addictive game.
