I sure hope we can get it in North-America.

not surprised. the show isnt on TV anymore or the other games never came NA so why release it in a none popular country

I can't say I care about this game (I've never seen the show.  I can only take so many hundreds-of-episodes-long anime.), but good on Nintendo of Europe for once again not following NoA's lead in putting a gun to the Wii and pulling the trigger as soon as this year's E3 hit.

It's at episode 504 right now. I bet you could go through the manga a lot faster if you're inclined to read all 630 chapters.

Possibly.  It's just that IMO there's no excuse for an anime series to go beyond the 52-64 episode mark.  At that point, the writers have said all they really have to say and are just padding things out.  I've seen it with Bleach, Naruto, etc.  All the best series I've seen are between that 26-52 episode mark.

I never really got into manga, but good on you if you like it.

You mean like how did with Dragon Ball Z Kai? DBZ Kai has 98 episodes (original series was 153 episodes long). I could see that happening with Bleach, or Naruto, but with One Piece it would be impossible to compress it to such a number of episodes. Impossible.

Without having seen the series, I can't really disagree with you.  I would ask, though, if the series couldn't be compressed like that because the episodes are just so full of plot that it's impossible to condense it, or is it like that because there are so many plot-important multi-episode fight scenes that take up so much time?  That's my big problem with shows like Bleach, Naruto, DBZ, Inuyasha, etc.: events and fights that could be done quickly and with real impact in a single episode are drawn-out to 4-10 episodes, inflating the episode count and trying my patience (especially when each episode has a 5-10 minute recap of the last episode).

I've heard some really good things about One Piece.  It just doesn't look like a series that's for me.

The main plot isn't that complicated. In regards to the multi-episode fights there isn't much choice because you are following a pirate crew, so there's bound to be quite a few one to one fights.

What it comes down to is that there's a lot of details about the world to be explained and understood, it's a very rich world with history, politics, cultures, biodiversity, and geodiversity. Not to mention the huge amount of characters and their personalities. It's a series that is to be watched for its tones of a grand adventure.

Anybody who thinks a show (any show) should only go up to 64 episodes max is crazy. some of the best DBZ episodes were near the end.

BTW, Dragon Ball Z was 276 episodes long, it was Dragon Ball that was 153. Dragon Ball Z Kai (which is 97 episodes, they decided to drop one episode after the earthquake in Japan delayed production) is alright, but they cut out way too much information. It's like watching Dragon Ball Z: The Abridged Series. The only time they ever did padding on the show was when they ran out of source material and had to wait for Akira Toriyama to write more of the manga.

I like the DBZ manga much better then the show because it can abbreviate the fights without losing the context where they show really needs to give a true sense of time in an actual time way.

Perhaps some of the best episodes of DBZ were near the end.  That doesn't mean I want to sit through 275 episodes of largely filler crap to find out, which is more or less what "Drag-On Ball Z" was.  Like I said, the best and most consistent anime series I've ever seen have been in that 26-52 episode range.  That gives writers time to develop a concept, introduce and develop characters and plotlines, maintain a steady pace, and then end on a satisfying note without having the series wear out its welcome.  I've yet to see a series that goes beyond those 52 or so episodes that I would label as superlative.  The longer a series tends to go beyond that basic "2 season" (more like "4 seasons" these days since 13 episodes is becoming the new standard) framework, the more you tend to see the writers straining to keep the series interesting, the more sequences that should be brief are stretched out to points where it's hard to care anymore.

Now, that observation may just be a result of incompetent writers in anime, because I've certainly seen excellent Western Live-Action and animated series that have run far past that mark, but I've yet to see an anime series that is still exciting to watch after that 52-episode mark.  In general, keep it shorter and leave your audience wanting more, rather than making it several hundreds of episodes long and leaving your audience wondering if it'll ever end.

When I have watched animes that were that short (like Fruits Basket), I generally was left wanting more (not a good thing since it just annoys me that they didn't make more) and feeling like they were too short. I am not a huge anime fan, so I can't comment on more than a dozen or so shows though.

I stand corrected. I rechecked wiki for the number of episodes, and it seems we were both wrong. 291 according to them, and since I'm too lazy to check my collection I will accept it as true.

Ahh, you are right. I was looking at a page that was using the original Funimation dub. The Japanese original had 291, with some episodes combined for the original dub. When they released them on DVD in season sets though, they included all 291 (the DVD sets had flaws though, like the closed captioning only being of the Japanese dialog rather than the English dialogue the characters are speaking, and the "re-mastered" episodes resulting in parts of the scenes being chopped off).