Taking your thread title literally, this was actually my favorite part of playing One Piece: Pirate Warriors 1. It’s a Dynasty Warriors game themed after the manga One Piece, so it plays a lot like Dynasty Warriors but has some additional mechanics. In the story mode you only played the main character and he had this special ability where you can hold down any button press to charge up your attack and it would enhance the strength of whatever combo string you did. I started the game on the hardest difficult and was severely under-leveled for the strength of the enemies, so after a certain point I straight up stopped causing hitstun on enemies unless I was doing the charged attacks (and sometimes not even then- though it still caused more damage than a regular attack). At the same time they would deal massive damage to me, killing me in only a handful of hits, so that moment of standing still charging my attacks were too dangerous. I should also mention the game has this dash button that give you a quick dodge in any direction, and you could cancel any grounded attack into a dash.
What I eventually figured out was that if you do a charged combo but dash cancel it before you finish the combo string, your character actually retains that charged attack visual effect for a few moments before you return to the neutral standing animation. And if you canceled the dash’s recovery animation into a new combo string, it actually retained the charged attack status too, letting you cancel one charged attack string into another, as long as you don’t let any of those strings naturally end.
What this meant was that halfway through the story mode it turned into this game where I had to figure out how to utilize my various combo strings to not only attack whatever enemies I was fighting but also to move myself around the map while retaining my charge. Your moveset contained a good variety in its utility, some attacks having good AOE, some doing good single point damage, and some really giving your forward movement, so it actually became really fun figuring out how to manage this to overcome an overpowered swarm of foes. You still had parts of recovery animations between attacks and dashes so you still had to plan your timing and spacing, because you could die in, like, only three hits.
I died a lot, losing half an hour of progress on a level, but I really enjoyed the challenge. It was also one of those things that didn’t feel intentional, like I figured out a way to game system and beat the odds. But I’m sure the dev did notice it and decided to keep it in, even if it wasn’t present in the following games.
