Recently, a press release announcing a new game titled One Piece Online has surfaced. The original press release describes it as a “Tower Defense ARPG”, although as I’d come to find out, basically every word of that is a lie. In fact, what I found can’t even really be described as a game. A better term might be “Freemium Clickbait Scam”.

The first warning signs appear on the website listed within the press release. The company, Joygame (not to be confused with similar free-to-play microtransaction company Joygames--notice that they removed the “s”) goes to some lengths to look legitimate

The English? Broken. The art assets? Stolen. The website’s design? Amateur. The forums? Barren. Particularly alarming is the “closed beta test” that is open to anyone who signs up, making it technically an open beta period. The site offers a couple ways to log-in: you can sign-up yourself and just give them your e-mail, or you can use a Google or Facebook account and give them access to your contacts list, too.

Once you start up the actual “game”, it’s immediately apparent what the developer’s intent is. After selecting one of three generic anime characters to play as, the ever-exciting Swordsman, the ranged Sniper who wield flintlock pistols in spite of his name, and the Perona-esque “Devil Fruit User”, you are dropped off on what is intended to be Sabaody. It’s the stock photo bubbles in the foreground that really immerse you.

You literally level up right off the boat from talking to Luffy. The first fight is with Sentomaru, and the game will actually play itself. You can do nothing but click “Accept” on a quest and you will defeat Sentomaru within the first two minutes of starting the game. But any pretense of not begging for money goes out the window as soon as you unlock crew members.

The idea, I suppose, being to help you in combat. But you unlock Usopp via a scripted slot machine interface, and it’s obvious they’re going to want you to gamble for more characters down the line. They’re handing you Berries and coupons this entire time, and while you have to purchase gold for the microtransactions, the coupons can be used instead. There are other items that are used as de facto currency. Vivre Cards are used to bet on the character slot machine, for example.

There’s a bunch of other attempts at faux-gameplay crammed in. Characters can be enhanced. Once for free, and then they start asking you to buy “Sea King Steaks”. Everywhere you look, there’s shoehorned references to One Piece that make zero sense in context. It’s actually pretty humorous, aside from the whole “trying to take your money” angle.

Actually, the way the characters are crammed in has a whole extra level of absurdity. Most of the dialogue makes no sense, and not just because it ignores the basic conventions of English speech. The “story” is a patchwork of parts taken from various places in the series and thrown together. I’d liken it to a creature from Thriller Bark, but that would be an insult to Dr. Hogback’s skills as a surgeon and an artist.

Having effectively surrendered my computer to the botnet, I decided to press on. They actually give you a chance to join a faction. Your choices are between “Strong World” and “The Worst Generation”. Take a look and see if you can find anything wrong with this picture:

Oh, and they offer a reward, but only for joining the “recommended” team. I chose Strong World out of spite. Next, I arrived in Loguetown, where I met up with Rayleigh again, this time deemed “Strong World Rayleigh”. Apparently he’s the evil clone of regular Rayleigh. He’s joined by some of the Straw Hats and Doflamingo, and you can find Garp just down the street for “training”. Like everything else, this whole segment is surreal and inexplicable. You’re given three tutorials, including two for the other classes. You know, the ones you didn’t pick? Abilities cost Berries, which are thankfully free but I have to wonder if that’s also a microtransaction down the line.

That’s basically all there is to it. The whole thing literally plays itself. You accept a quest, your character automatically routes itself to the objective and completes it, and then you talk to the next quest-giver, also automatically. You run to fights automatically. You win fights automatically. And when I say “automatically”, I don’t mean you have an auto-attack. I mean that there’s no challenge because the AI spamming the attack and running forward will win any engagement for you. I’m guessing down the road you’ll be required to use abilities on bosses, which costs Berries, but all the early encounters happen by themselves.

Which is really the most perplexing part of this title. It’s constructed to hold its hat out for cash at every opportunity, and yet the mechanics of it don’t encourage the player to do that at all. Some developers, especially on mobile platforms, will choose to create a simple & addictive game and then lock playtime behind arbitrary restrictions with purchasable items to get around them. You’re buying game time, or extra lives, or whatever else.

This game literally plays itself. You click boxes, which are highlighted, and everything else is taken care of. You have zero reason to give them money, except that they’re taking any opportunity to stick the shop in your face. I’m guessing the freebies continue to get rarer over time, but at what point would anyone be willing to pay to continue clicking dialogue boxes? Why spend real money to level up a character when combat isn’t remotely challenging nor fun?

This all got me curious about who dedicated all these resources to hosting a website, building a web interface, and hosting an actual game. A simple WhoIs lookup revealed a Chinese registrant by the name of Hao Wang. Ordinarily, a website like this would be registered by a company. He didn’t even bother hiding behind a registration proxy (a service that will act as an intermediary and place their own name on the domain), although this may be a pseudonym. The public information is pretty barebones, and it’s the bare minimum you must provide to register a domain. All of this is publicly available with a WhoIs lookup.

Some DNS records also turned up, which led me to a subdomain hosting a test version of the site. What I found here was even more intriguing. There were articles not yet live on the main site along with an even emptier clone of the forums. One of the articles is an announcement for a similar game called Bleach Online and links to yet another site, called Go Games.

Are you seeing the pattern here? Notice the sites are functionally identical, with different content. They don’t link to each other, not directly. The blog posts implies it’s the same person or team behind both sites, but they’re under different “companies” (assuming there even is a company at all) and they don’t list each other under the games section. Part of me wonders if this is a new group just starting up or if these guys have been running a scam for years and decided to try making anime “MMOs” to target a niche market. A lookup of the GoGames domain reveals an end to the chain- for now. There’s also a test domain, but it’s not even working correctly. This one is registered to a proxy company, though.

In short: run as far away from this “game” as you can.