One Piece Odyssey is way more fun on autopilot

One Piece Odyssey doesn’t exactly have the most robust combat system to begin with, so cycling through characters and attacks in every battle can get a little tedious. The first few fights, it’s exciting to watch the animations for the Straw Hats’ iconic attacks. After a bit, though, the fights lose their momentum.

Thankfully, there’s an Auto Battle mechanic that lets AI take over for the fight — and there’s a Speed Up mechanic to cut down the time watching attack animations. These settings take those tedious fights down to a tight 30 seconds. The option won’t be available to you right at the start of the game, but they unlock in the first hour or so — and they’ll make your life much easier when they do. (There’s sadly no way to speed up the exploration or constantly running back and forth, though.)

Our One Piece Odyssesy Auto Battle and Speed Up guide will tell you how to turn on the settings and explain when you’ll want to turn them off.

Turn on Auto Battle and Speed Up

When a battle begins, you’ll have the three default actions for each character — Attack, Skills, and Items — along with a prompt for Tactics with the triangle/Y button. Pressing that is how you’ll access key combat options: Swap Battle Crew to change out your roster of fighters, Check Conditions to see how your crew is doing, or Run Away to flee a battle. At the top, though, is what we’re after: Switch Battle Mode.

Image: ILCA Inc./Bandai Namco via Polygon

Choosing it gives you the option to switch between Manual Battle where you choose each attack your crew makes or Auto Battle where the AI takes over. Auto Battle picks out attacks, skills, and items for you (and it does a good job of it). We’ve been using it for every fight for a few hours now and, frankly, the Auto Battle does a better job than we do — and it’s faster.

There’s also a prompt in the lower right of the screen to Speed Up with the right trigger. This just shortens all the attack animations — both for your crew and the enemies. Once you’re tired of seeing the attacks play out in full, turn this on and don’t turn it off.

When to turn off Auto Battle

Image: ILCA Inc./Bandai Namco via Polygon

One Piece Odyssey has a rock-paper-scissors-style set of weaknesses and resistances for attack types — Power (fist icon) is strong against Speed, Speed (gun icon) is strong against Technique, and Technique (sword icon) is strong against Power. Both your crew and the enemies you’ll face have these types, so certain fighters will be better against different baddies. (It’s not particularly complicated, though, so you’ll often end up falling back on the tried and true Just Punch Them approach.)

Image: ILCA Inc./Bandai Namco via Polygon

In a battle, you’ll see weakness or resistance indicated by pink up arrows (good) or blue down arrows (bad) over the enemies’ icon in the upper left.

In particularly tough fights — especially boss fights — keep an eye on these icons. If your current Battle Crew isn’t dealing enough damage, hit the triangle/Y button to stop Auto Battle and Swap Battle Crew. Drop in someone with a better attack type, and then turn Auto Battle back on.