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: