The cat-and-dog duo returns fifteen years on in series time, chasing the North Star treasure across a sunny, pun-soaked pirate Caribbean while the Pirate King and a rival captain race them to it. The pirate theme could have been a gimmick, but the world sells it completely: bright pixel art, catchy pirate shanties, an archipelago that manages to feel both massive and small in a pleasing way, and a lore layer that quietly threads the series’ recurring history (the Zero Dimension, dragon blood, and cross-timeline cameos) into the quest for the eyeball-shaped macguffin. The desire-devouring truth behind the North Star gives the finale a genuinely cosmic register.
Ship-based exploration is the game’s big new hook and its central delight. Sailing between islands, firing cannons at hostile ships, boarding, chasing treasure across the open ocean, and a boost button that makes the whole thing feel fast, the naval layer transforms the series’ overworld from a walkable map into a full sandbox. The moment the helm is taken, any scepticism about the theme dissolves: sinking another ship from the deck of your own is exactly the kind of joy the series needed. Island-hopping treasure economies and ship health upgrades give the sailing real mechanical weight.
The writing stays series-defining, roughly ninety percent puns, and the density is the point: patch-notes-quality gags, wanted posters, the Milky Barrel, and Clawford’s romance-novel Interactive-tale, where choice scenes with retryable outcomes make the correct path findable through persistence. The side stories carry genuine heart, from the Pirate King’s curse and his crew’s loyalty to a father-acceptance subplot, and the dev-room thank-you speech hidden as a quest on the open ocean lands as a warm surprise. Creature-capture side quests, the triplet-key heirloom quest, mail-delivery chains and purgatory trials round out a generous package.
Combat changes draw from the series’ familiar formula with mixed results. Melee pairs with a new gun using clip-based special ammo, and four equippable spells (lightning, fire, ice, heal/shield) cover the classic bases, but enemy attack telegraphs are gone: the red aura that made the first two games readable is absent, making hits harder to avoid and combat meaningfully harder to parse. The gun trade-off adapts quickly and adds range the series lacked, and the familiar armour, weapon and trinket loot loop returns underneath it all. Wanted-poster bounties and fishing puzzles give the sandbox extra texture between main beats.
Friction persists in familiar places. There is still no equip-on-pickup option, so a new piece of gear means opening menus to swap manually, and endgame rewards sometimes underwhelm, though the upgrade menu now allows choosing a target level directly, a genuine improvement that removes most of the smithy grind. The camera sits further back than the series’ isometric norm and reads awkwardly throughout, and the missing per-area level indicator removes a reliable signal for when a region is out of depth. The level cap sits at roughly sixty for gear, meaning a maxed character comfortably clears the main campaign, and a single seven-to-eight-hour session covers nearly everything the archipelago offers.
The one true sore point is the level-200 Dragon Ball superboss. It is not difficult so much as badly tuned, a stat wall positioned so far past the player’s gear cap (around sixty) that no amount of skill matters, and the escalation makes no sense when a sensible curve would have stepped from eighty to one hundred rather than leaping to two hundred. A ten-minute attempt ends in abandonment, and it stands as the sole blocker on a full completion, an optional misstep rather than a flaw in the core game.
Overall, this is the freshest-feeling entry in the series: the ship systems, naval combat and island-hopping treasure loop give the pun-heavy formula exactly the open-world distraction joy it always hinted at, and the heart-warming side stories land as well as ever. The over-tuned superboss, the pulled-back camera and the persistent loot friction are real flaws, but none dim a charming, self-contained pirate adventure that is very fun from first sail to final reveal.
