Despite all it's fun and all the pirates, I can't help but wonder why I like it.
The game has a story which you can really choose whether to follow or not, said story starting off when your character, as a young boy, and his family are celebrating the coming of a fleet that will end their debt to the antagonist of the game, sadly the antagonist (Who is obviously a terrible gate crasher) bursts in with the rather suspicious news that the fleet has been lost, and that it is time for the debt to be payed and presses the family into bondage, unsurprisingly you character avoids the guards and runs off into the night. Years later (I can't remember how many, either 10 or 8) your character strides into a tavern, now looking a bit like a young Errol Flynn, asking for passage to the new world, after filling in a form (A not so cunningly disguised character creation screen), picking a nationality, and taking over a ship, you are left in your ship outside a town of your nationality in the Carribean, from here on out you can play as you like in an open world.
There are several different systems, one for ship battles, one for sword fights, one for dancing, one for exploring, and one for land battles, but they all follow a basic control system and are great fun, especially the sword fights which have to be one of my favourate systems in all of gaming. But this is where the game gets confusing for me, despite all the different things you can do, this is definatly one of the most repetetive games I've ever played, but despite this I love it, and thats just something I can't understand.