YMMV / One Piece: Treasure Cruise

• Difficulty Spike:
  • Arlong Park is generally regarded as the first major speed bump, especially since the resident Disc-One Nuke, Ashura Zoro, is at a strategic disadvantage against Arlong, and the next commonly available nuke is Arlong himself.
  • Loguetown, the final island in East Blue. Smoker and Alvida both have very high defense, often necessitating that players reevaluate their team compositions to have any hope of dealing damage.
  • The two Halloween fortnight events were this in Global, as they were released much earlier in that version's lifecycle in order to coincide with the holiday, so Global players lacked a lot of the options that Japanese player had. Some of the enemies were toned down to compensate, but they still required very careful damage dealing management for players to avoid getting themselves killed when one of the Straw Hats Turns Red.
  • Colosseum on Chaos Difficulty easily outstrips any story mission, fortnight, and even several Clashes when it comes to sheer challenge, forcing players to either rely on Rare Recruit units or get very creative with their pool of usable Free-To-Play units.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Elder and Daimyo Turtles, and the evolved Jeweled Porks which give you insane amounts of EXP when used to power up enemies. The Turtles have high defenses and HP, but unlike the Crabs, they take far less time to kill.
• Fan Nickname: Since Treasure Cruise debuted in Japan about a year before it received a Global release, it is not uncommon to come across fan-made guides using different names than what the Global version officially translates or calls things.
  • For instance, the four "personality" classes introduced in later updates (Free Spirit, Cerebral, Powerhouse, Driven) are called different names based on Google Translate and community consensus (Freedom, Knowledge, Tough, Ambition). While YMMV on the name changes, "Knowledge -> Cerebral" is arguably a good instance, as some parts of the community used to use "Knowledge" as the translation for "Intelligent"-type character.
  • The 24 hour missions seems to be officially called "Clashes" by Bandai-Namco, and the 2 week missions^note on their first appearance on Extra Isle are "Training Islands". The community tends to use "Raid" and "Fortnight" as the names of those missions, respectively.
• Goddamned Bats: Giant Enemy Crab Evolvers. They don't have high attack or HP, but their defenses are incredibly high. They mostly exist to pad out levels by forcing you to waste time gradually wearing them down or using a character with a special that does fixed damage.
  • Although to be fair, high-defense enemies that allow you waste turns do give you the necessary time needed to charge up specials; as defeating minor mooks and progressing through levels too fast will mean you might reach the boss level with only half-charged special gauges.
• Junk Rare: A staggering amount of the rare story drops are badly outclassed by more easily obtained units. Players will quickly find the Double Drop Rate days for certain islands aren't worth paying attention to once they've gotten the single worthwhile unit there.
  • Fuchsia Village: The Lord of The Coast has poor starting stats, even worse stat growth, a weak Special with a hilarioously long cooldown, and, to top it all off, a very high cost, so it won't even see short-term use by beginners who are "lucky" enough get it.
  • Arlong Park: Choo and Hatchi are both stat weak and have poor Specials and Captain Abilities, even though the latter is an evolvable unit. Kuroobi is at least a mediocre in terms of stats, so he's not a terrible unit to use if he just so happens to drop, but he's not worth farming.
  • Little Garden: The Unluckies have nothing going for them at all, and while Ms. Goldenweek boasts nearly the highest Recovery in the game and a decent special, her near-rock bottom Attack and HP, which are considered far more important stats, combined with the frequency with which she's pulled during Sugofests, has led to her becoming the poster girl for Junk Rares.
  • Angel Island ~ Upper Yard: Every single boss on this island is statistically weak, and only Braham has a Special worth looking at, and even then, he's still pretty bad.