One Piece Treasure Cruise - Best crews to start off your voyage
One Piece Treasure Cruise features an extensive roster of characters built up over its almost ten-year pedigree, featuring a variety of both obscure and famous fighters from across the Grand Line and New World for you to play.
But, if you’ve been playing this far it won’t be news for you that playing random assortments of characters isn’t the way to get the most out of your collection. Instead, you should be playing your team as a complimentary crew. For newer players, this may sound a little overwhelming at first, but it’s actually pretty simple.
What is a crew?
A crew is essentially a set of complementary characters - simple right? There are wrinkles, of course, namely Tandems. Tandems are a slightly older mechanic, mainly for FTP characters. As our research found, the rumour is that these were going to be a larger part of the game but Japanese law forbids certain gacha mechanics that require multiple parts (in this case characters) to acquire greater rewards.So, tandems are really only present for FTP (free-to-play) characters. They can be useful very early on if you want to boost your team’s damage but don’t rely on them as they’re not particularly useful in the long run. But, as for how to build your crew there’s a variety of methods, with complimentary abilities, specials and more.
Now, for a basic overview of how characters work; each character has an element, which is a pretty common mechanic in most Japanese games. These represent different attributes and how they’re strong or weak against another, to start off with you’ll want to prioritise getting your commonly unlocked characters levelled up, the Strawhat Pirates. After that you'll concentrate on experimenting with new characters, it can seem a bit overwhelming at first, but we've got some sample crews to get you started, and one highly recommended deck from a few years ago that should let you breeze through the early game.
Here are some crew suggestions to get you started:
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#1 - “Straw Hat Pirates”
Image courtesy of the OPTC Database
Characters: (Captain) Luffy, Sanji, Zoro, Usopp, Nami
The Straw Hat Pirates are probably the most recognisable group from the series. And, as we noted in our tier list, they also have the greatest variety of evolutions and variants in One Piece Treasure Cruise. Since you unlock these characters throughout the main story, you’ll most likely have them, and they’re a great way to introduce yourself to how evolutions work; Luffy, Sanji, Zoro and Usopp also gain their own tandem attack, although as we noted this won’t be of much use early on, but can still be helpful if you’re mainly using FTP characters.
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#2 - “Arlong Pirates”
Image courtesy of the OPTC Database
Characters: (Captain) Arlong, Choo, Hatchan, Kuroobi, Fishman Pirates or duplicates to round out
One of the early teams who also have a tandem attack, the Fishman Pirates are another group that you’ll unlock through your adventures in the main story. They’re a good choice to expand beyond the central Straw Hat Crew, and at one point Arlong’s evolution was considered a top-tier character. Time, and updates, have neutered that potential somewhat but as you go through the vanilla story arc he’ll be more than suitable for a hard-hitting team. This is also one scenario where you may want to use generic fighting characters to round out - if you want to keep the theme that is. Otherwise, sub in a Straw Hat or anyone else who rounds out your elements.
You’ll also be able to evolve Arlong further as you go, although the other Fishmen will likely need to be subbed out in order to make space for other characters as you progress.
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#3 - “EXPLaw”
Image courtesy of the OPTC Database
Characters: Trafalgar Law Straw Hat-Heart Pirate Alliance, White Chase Smoker, Monkey D. Luffy Gum-Gum Elephant Gun, Usopp Usopp Golden Pound, Roronoa Zoro Ashura Ichibugin
This is a team you’ll frequently see cited for newer players. The bad news is you’ll need this version of Trafalgar Law and most likely Smoker to make it work, as well as a friend who has Law as well to be your ‘guest’ fighter. However, the good news is that the other three Straw Hats are all evolutions of their starting characters, so even if you’re FTP there’s only a need for about three out of six characters to be unlocked via pulls. As it stands this is one of the more detailed teams for clearing early-game content, but always bear in mind that mileage may vary with newer updates.
However, the general layout of this team speaks to the fact that - if you play your cards right - you’ll likely end up with rarer recruits early on. If you’re a lore purist this may be a little off-putting, but when you get rare team characters that you can play or want to grind and farm earlier content there’s no reason not to break out of the Straw Hat team.
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Additional Tips & Resources
Thanks to nearly ten years of development and community engagement the One Piece Treasure Cruise fandom has put together a number of resources. The One Piece Treasure Cruise wiki offers detailed breakdowns of almost half the entire cast, although it cuts off some of the newer cards, while Nakama Network is an excellent resource for seeing what teams other players are running to clear content as well as trialling your own.
As we recommend in our reroll guide for One Piece Treasure Cruise, one key thing to remember and that we see shouted from the rooftops for new players is to wait for Sugo Fests when pulling. These roughly twice-per-month events allow for much greater pull chances of rare recruits and are considered basically the only time you should spend your Rainbow Gems, or - God forbid - real money.
